(clock ticks) - I wanna share with
you how I make my maps. (smooth music) Okay, I know all those
clips are super fancy, but I need to tell you it
wasn't always this way. I used to be very not good at making maps. Like, look at this first map
I ever made back in 2012. A foreign service officer in the field. It pains me to look at
that and to hear my voice, and I'm trying to sound
all cool and casual. You got to start somewhere I guess. From that time on I was 24 years old, I poured myself into
learning AfterEffects, the software that I used to make maps. I devoured tutorials and I got better and better at making maps to tell the types of
stories I wanted to tell, and that's what this video is. It's sort of the result of
many, many years of refinement. So, today what I'm gonna
do, talk a little bit about my journey in map-making and the evolution of my style. And then I'm gonna dive into
two different workflows. One is a workflow that
requires a $200 plugin, which is expensive. And I used to not be able to afford that. And so, I'm also going
to teach you the workflow that doesn't include that plugin, a workflow that I used for years. Even at Vox I used it for
a long time for map-making. I don't use it anymore
because it's less efficient but I wanna teach you both workflows, so you have both options. And using the workflow I use currently, I will show you how I make
an animation like this. (smooth music) And all this I'm going to do
on a laptop that Intel send me. So everyone's heard of
Intel, but this computer that they sent me has this Evo badge on it which is their brand
new 11th gen processor. The major highlight of this thing is that it is lightning fast, it provides an insane amount of speed. And by the way, there's
a link in my description that you can click to go learn more about the 11th gen processor
and Intel Evo overall. Go click that link, support this channel, but also teaches you a lot more
about how this stuff works. Intel sent it to me, asked me to try out one of my heavy workflows
on it, see how it works. And that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna take you along on the journey. But first, storytime. (smooth music) So after I made that
first map back in 2012, the next year I graduated from college, moved to Washington DC, and
got a job at a think tank where I made map stories for them. That's where I really started to refine my map making workflow
and learn how to use maps to tell a variety of different
stories, to show data, to show historical trends, to draw different types of borders, to use it as a creative tool. And then in 2014 Vox was born
and I got rejected from Vox, try it again, got accepted,
and then started working there. I brought this map-making workflow to Vox, continued to refine it as I
told all sorts of stories. Eventually I started
going out into the field and shooting sort of mini
documentaries using maps to help compliment those stories. The series, after all,
it was about borders and I found a need to draw
really specific borders in a really specific way to show data in a really specific way. And so, I had to upgrade my
whole map-making workflow. This all came to a head in
the last season of Borders which was Borders India,
where I had to take a bunch of physical maps from
the partition of India and translate them into the digital space to tell this really
important partition story. I tell you this whole story, number one, because I want you to know that I wasn't always good at maps. I was once very bad at maps and through a lot of practice got better. Okay, so, there's some hope in that. Number two, I want you to know that there's a lot of refinement and work that has gone into the
workflow I'm about to share. So just know that this isn't something I just sort of pulled out of my hat. This is something that I've
been polishing for years. Okay, without further ado, let's do this. (smooth music) So, what's fascinating to
me about this whole thing is that for the years that I've been developing this workflow, I have always worked on these
like big beefy computers. The fact that I'm sitting
here with this computer that is a little bigger than a tablet in terms of how light it
is and how nimble it is. And the 11th gen processor
gives you the power to take on this workflow is wild to me. It's wild, and it's sort
of proving my age here. Like I'm sort of like
the old person being like back in my day. So as I promised, I'm going
to show you two workflows. The one I did for many many years that doesn't require any plugins. It just requires AfterEffects,
the Adobe animation program which is a program that is
enhanced by this processor. Then I will move on to the one that requires the
$200 plugin called GeoLayers. If you want to just skip to
that, to the GEOlayers part, go to the time code that is here on screen and you can skip to it. But if not, let's dive in
to my original workflow. One of the cool things here
is that Intel actually works with Adobe to make sure
that their hardware works most efficiently
with their software. So they like collaborate. My original workflow is simple. It has to do with two main ingredients, AfterEffects and a file called Jenkins. This is a file that I refined for years. It's an Illustrator file
that has all of the countries in the world that are layered out. Not all of them are layered
out, but a lot of them are. And that is very high resolution, in that you get some really nice detail in all of these countries. You can Command A and
get all of them selected and you can change the stroke if you want, if you want the borders to be
like a dark gray or something, you can do that. It takes a minute because,
well, it doesn't take a minute. It, that was very fast. This is a big file. It's
got a lot of data in it. And this is what makes
this first workflow tick. This is free for all of my patrons. I have a bunch of people
on Patreon who support me. And this is a perk that I'm
putting up right now on Patreon. So if you want this file,
go sign up on Patreon. Let's talk about how this
works in AfterEffects. I want to bring this into AfterEffects. I'll leave it open in Illustrator, and I'll show you why in
a minute, bring it in. And it's going to ask me right away, do you want this to be merged
in as one piece of footage? Or do you want to make it a composition to have all the layers editable? For now, I just want footage. If you were doing something that had a lot of different layering of countries and you needed to make all the countries different colors or whatever, then you could make it a composition because it's all layered up. But for now, it's just
a big piece of footage. Take that big piece of footage and put it into a new comp. We'll call it map the old way. This is my old style, 1920 by 1080, make sure this is like, you
know, three minutes or something and you bring it right in. Okay, this is vector. So you can zoom in as
much as you want on this. If this little thing is clicked, click, let's give this thing a
background with Control Y. I'm going to make the background
sort of like a bluish thing like that for water. I don't know. And now we've
got ourselves a background. I'll put it underneath and now let's say I want to change the color here. You could do it two ways. You could do it right here in Illustrator. You could select all and change the fill, but the easier way to do it is
just to take a hue saturation and throw it on and start
playing with the hue saturation. Okay. That's nice. And again, if I wanted
to change these borders, I could come in here,
Control A and here and here. Make these borders all white and save. This is happening way faster
than what I'm used to. Okay. Anyway, next we go back. The file is now updated. So now I've got this thing
that I could zoom in on itself or better yet. I could make a null layer, new, null and this is going to be my controller. I will Control everything so Control. Okay. And I will parent
this guy right here. Again, make sure that this
has this little thing. So it looks like a little sunshine so that it stays nice
and high res as we zoom. Okay. Next thing. I'm going to take the anchor point by holding down Y and I'm going
to put it over the country. I want to zoom into for now. And I'm going to hit S for
scale and start zooming and watch what happens. I can zoom as much as I want and boom, it's like crystal clear. So basically your animation, P and S is a matter of now putting
two little keyframes, going to where you want to go next and going over a little
bit or going this way. And you now animate and
maybe zoom out a little bit. Okay. And now you've got
yourself a little animation. Okay. You can do that anywhere in the map. It's very simple. It
is big, giant Jenkins. What if I want to color in Iraq? There is a very easy way to do this. You could either import Jenkins with all of the layers as compositions, and that's a different workflow. I'm not going to go into that but it is possible because
all the layers are layered out in Illustrator, right here you can see. Or my favorite thing to
do is to check this out. Control Y, make a new solid,
and I'm gonna call it Iraq. And this is the color of the
thing I'm going to highlight. I'm gonna make it some orangy, something and I'm just gonna put it over the top. Okay. That is Iraq, but check it out. I'm now going to go back into
Illustrator and to be safe. I'm going to hit A, to
get the direct select tool which is a tool that
really doesn't select, doesn't include any of the
groupings that could be here. None of this is, it's all
pretty cleanly pared down but I'm going to grab
that, Control C for copy, back to AfterEffects. Oh, I have to have this, select it, Control V for paste and boom. That's actually Iraq. Watch what happens if I scale
this sucker up, scale it up. And now I have a mask that is Iraq, super low res, not for long, boom. That thing makes it
nice and crystal clear. Now the trick is you want to make sure that this is parented
to the same controller. So they're all part of the same system. So now during that little move that I did, I want this to animate on. So I'm going to take T, make a keyframe and bring it out and
then start it at zero. So it goes from zero
to a hundred over time and you can see that as it
goes from left to right, it animates on. Okay. Boom. Okay. So that is the basics. This is how I used to do it. I used to make so many
videos using this workflow of zooming around using
a null and a big old file and layering stuff on top of it. And there was like 50 or a hundred layers. All parented to this one controller and it was pretty nuts, but
then I discovered GEOlayers. And more importantly, I
could afford GEOlayers. It is expensive, but so incredibly useful. So let's now move on to
how we would approach this same thing with GEOlayers, which is really a much
more powerful workflow. (upbeat music) So far, candidly, 100% like honestly, the 11th gen Evo processor is killing it. It's actually kind of
frustrating because I have, I'm used to working on these big, expensive beastly machines. And in some ways this is
outpacing them like that. What it was doing in Illustrator
with the selection stuff, it's almost like, wait, what? I can get over that. I keep
going, really cool though. Really cool that this little chip has so much power to make these workflows like buttery smooth in
such a teeny little thing. So this next workflow is GEOlayers. I'm not going to go into how
GEOlayers works fundamentally. There are loads of wonderful
tutorials that GEOlayers itself has put together and you
should go watch those if you're interested in learning the fundamentals of GEOlayers. You'll pick up on some of them
by seeing what I'm doing here but I'm not going to go step-by-step. In this next workflow, I'm going to show you how to style a map to exactly how you want to style it. I'm going to show you how
to set it up with GEOlayers and to link that styling into GEOlayers, to move stuff around, and then to label and do
sort of what we did here with Iraq where you can draw a country. All of that is so much easier
in GEOlayers. Check it out. I'm going to make a new comp and I'm going to call
this comp map the new way. First things first, we're
going to pull up GEOlayers. I have it all installed, and
I'm going to go to extensions. I'm going to go to GEOlayers.
It's going to power up. So I'm going to hit the tilde key in the upper left to
make this full screen. It just makes it a lot easier
for me to see, for you to see, for everyone to see, this
is blinking right now because this is where
you need to click first, create a new map comp. A map comp is basically
a map that you can style and move around. I'm going to call this one Iraq map, okay? And it will live within
the comp we just made which was called mapping the new way. Okay, after I hit next, it's going to ask me what the style is. You can license some of
this data that they have on the GEOlayers site or you can pick one of
their default styles or you can do what I do,
which is go to Mapbox. Mapbox are the people behind
a lot of the mobile apps you use, the maps you use
for like Uber or GrubHub. I don't know, but like
those types of maps, Mapbox makes those, but
hack of the world is that you can design your own maps and not use them for an app,
but use them in GEOlayers, check it out. This is called Mapbox Studio and it is free for you to use
for non-commercial purposes. So new style coming here,
and you can choose one of these pre-baked styles that they have. Let's do outdoors. The beautiful thing about this
is you can now customize it. So outdoors is really a
nice-looking map style. So this is just like
a sort of Google Maps. And you can see that as I zoom,
different features come on. Like, as I just zoomed right
now, all of these interstates and their signs came on, all these labels. I don't want all these
things. You may, but I don't. I like to clean up my map. So I'm going to go over to Iraq, which is the place that
we are focusing on here. And I'm going to go simply
click on a place like Baghdad and say, place labels. I'm going to click it. And
I'm going to say place labels. I actually don't want to see you. So countries, nope. States
and provinces, nope. Settlements. Nope. Subdivisions. None of it. I'm also seeing these provincial borders which I don't really want to see. You may want to see those. I don't. So I'm going to hit
administrative boundaries, disputed country boundaries. I don't know if you want
those, state and province. Boom. That's what we don't want. Okay. So you can start
to see the power of this. We went from a big cluttered design to a super clean nice design that we can put our own labels on. Once this is in GEOlayers. Yes. This is going to be
in GEOlayers pretty soon. This is ready for me to
bring into AfterEffects. The way I do that is first
hit publish, publish. And then I'm going to get a special code that I'm going to use in AfterEffects. You go up to share and warning. This is going to look like
black magic what I'm about to do because it's like so
buried in these menus. You go to share, you
go over to third party. She can go here to Cardo and
you grab this API address. Copy it, okay? You take
this sucker over to here. You remember where we were here? We had made the map comp and now it's asking us what
kind of style do we want? We want to add a new style and we want to paste it into
this URI code, Command V paste. Boom. There's our map. And I'm going to hit apply.
So now I've got this new map. Well, I'm gonna actually
rename it to outdoor map. Okay? I've got that big API
code. I'm gonna hit apply. And here it is, outdoor,
beautiful and create. And now it's doing its magic and it is creating a comp that allows me to see this map comp, but in AfterEffects. Here's the deal, though. You won't see it in high res right away. At first, you'll see it sort of like this. These are temporary tiles,
that it just downloads for you to block out your
animation and start moving. Eventually when you're
done, you'll hit finalize and it will download
all these high res tiles as good as you want them. So let's talk about what
is going on in here. You have two layers down here. You have the map, which
that's the baseline thing. You're never going to animate the position or scale of this. I'll show you what you do animate. And then you have this anchor. This anchor is the thing
that you anchor anything you want to stick on the map you parent it to this and it will stick. And we'll get to that in a minute. But first let's just figure
out how to move around. The easiest way to move
around is just with this thing over here, zoom out, and
the map comp zooms out, zoom in and the map comp zooms in, drag and then outcome drags, and get ready for the best part. Right click and drag
up. And you get a tilt. Look at that. Okay. You're starting to see
how I make my videos now. This is like, you're probably like seeing
how the sausage is made. You're like, oh, that's how he does it. So let's, let's do some keyframes. I'm going to start here, way back here and I'm going to zoom out. I want it to start up here and I'm going to hit this big old, oops, I'm gonna hit this big, old
keyframe button right here. I'm going to go forward to, you know, seven seconds and I'm
going to zoom in to Iraq. So I'm just going to zoom
in by scrolling, okay. Zooms in. This isn't finalized. So it'll look better when it's finalized. Let's say I want it to
start wide, zoom into Iraq, wait there for a minute and then zoom in to a little village in the South of Iraq. So I'm going to have it wait there for maybe, I dunno, four seconds. And then I am going to
look at all of these. These are the keyframes
that run GEOlayers, latitude, which makes it go up and down, longitude, which makes
it go left and right, zoom, which makes it zoom, bearing, which watch, makes it spin, and pitch, which makes it go down. Okay, you can, if you're
more comfortable down here with these, you can just
keyframe everything down here. Instead of using this UI. I'm
going to get rid of these. So we zoom in and I tend
to always go right onto the keyframes and make sure
there's a keyframe everywhere. It's going to sit for a little bit and maybe during, while it's sitting I'm going to have it pitch
down, just a titch like this. Okay. Everything else
I'm going to have sit. And now I want it to zoom
into a little village in Southern Iraq called Basra. It's not a village, it's a city. It's one of the big cities in Iraq. I could either go find
it and try to zoom in, but here's where GEOlayers
becomes truly magical. You can search on the internet
for addresses, for cities, for even latitude and longitude. And in fact, again, you can
always take this guy tilde and get the full screen here. I'm going to hit Basra,
B-A-S-R-A, okay, Basra. And there it is, this is Basra in Iraq. It says it right there. This is data scraped from the internet. You can do several things here. You can make a label which
we'll do in a little bit. You can fit view, which means it will take where your camera is
or where you're zoomed. And it will zoom you in to Basra. I'm going to hit that, boom. And now watch what happens when I go back, hit tilde and I'm in Basra. And because I was back here, it did all of the latitude
and longitude for me to the point where I'm now in Basra. So now I have a zoom from
here all the way into Basra. I'm going to put myself
over those keyframes and maybe pitch down just a little bit. Maybe do this bearing a little bit. And maybe what I'll do
is I'll take this bearing and I'll bring it out a
little bit so it orbits. So this bearing is sort of coming down and orbiting like this. It's a little bit delayed. The more you delay it, the
more sort of orbiting happens. This is cool. This is looking really, really cool in a matter of a few minutes, okay. Let's say I want to
highlight Iraq, label it, and then zoom into Basra. So first things first, I am going to try to find a shape of Iraq. Now you remember how we did
that with the Illustrator file and all of that, that was very
clunky and sort of handmade. This is a lot smoother.
So I'm gonna hit back. It's really important that you hit back. Cause right now, when you're
searching the internet, you're in this sort of second
layer of the interface. You wanna hit back to
get back to your home. You have your search internet up here, but then you have this hub. This is like your data hub down here. Again, I'm going to go
tilde and make it big. Your data hub is where
you can put geo data sets, which are like, GOJSONs,
that's a little advanced if you're new to this,
but more importantly, an example of a dataset is a country, like how a country's shape is. You can go here and add a
feature to this data browser. And I want to download features and I want to download countries. So now it's downloading, I
now have natural earth data for every single country in the world. What I'm going to do is
I'm going to find Iraq or I can just filter out
right here, Iraq boom. There it is. And I'm going
to hit the draw feature. Which may be cut off a little bit if your interface is a little bit, you need to sort of scroll to get to it. Now, if I do that, you can
either have an animate on, which I don't ever really use,
I like to just have it drawn and then I can animate it myself and boom. There it is. What I love about this is
it comes already anchored and like ready to roll, here it is, Iraq, it's anchored to this anchor null, which is really important. And so now anything I
do, it will go with it. Now let's make a label for Iraq generally, you can use the label maker in here, which I'll explore in a minute but I also just want to show
you how I do it with text. So I'm going to hit
Control T to get my text. I'm going to type in Iraq. Now, remember this
thing has to be anchored to the Iraq map anchor,
or it won't scale with us. It'll just stay in the middle like that. Whereas if I do this and I bring it here, everything, everything,
everything that you want to stick to that needs to be anchored. I also need to make it 3D if I want it to respond to some of these. Yeah. Like that. Okay. You see now it's
totally stuck to it. Next let's zoom in to
Basra and label Basra. We're going to zoom in. I'll probably want this
orange to sort of fade away while we zoom. So I'm going to hit T for
transparency or opacity. And we're now in Basra. I could either do the
text thing that I just did or a really cool feature is I'm going to search
Basra again, B-A-S-R-A. And instead of having it fit
view, like I did the first time I'm going to hit make label or add label. Boom. And there it is, Basra. And that Basra right there is responsive. So I could have it as it, as
we zoom out, look at that. It scales with the map comp in
this really cool dynamic way. You can come here. There's all sorts of
things you can do here to make it react a little bit differently. That is labeling. So this next step is the most important in terms of time management. It takes time and in
terms of making sure that your map looks beautiful. So I'm going to hit finalize. What that's going to do
is it's going to connect to the server of that Mapbox
studio profile that we made. And it's going to download little JPEGs from the internet onto this machine. And then it's going to
arrange them perfectly and put expressions in the
middle, do all this stuff so that it looks really
natural to what we animated. It's a really magical process and it requires good
internet or decent internet. And it requires good processing power because it's a lot of
calculations happening at once. This machine has a new wifi chip that should work great for this. It also has the 11th gen Evo processor that hopefully will make
this a much smoother process. So I'm going to hit finalize
and we'll see what happens. Okay. You can see it
downloading all these images. It goes on to a part of your hard drive that you can specify,
and it is placing them into the right space in the
map comp for it to work. It's honestly really amazing. Oh, are we done? We're done. Wow. That was insanely quick. Again, this video is sponsored by Intel. I know like, I've done this so many times. That was very fast.
That was buttery smooth. Again, I sort of feel like,
why have I been relying on these insanely beefy
expensive machines? When I pitched this idea of like, I'm going to do my map workflow that usually I do on
a big monster machine, I was sort of like, can this
little laptop handle that? And it 100% can. It can handle
it better than I thought. So I'm very impressed with the 11th gen Evo
processor from Intel. And again, that's a totally
candid thing to say right now. Like I'm actually reacting
to how well it's doing. You can do all sorts of
stuff to style this up, color correct, Lutz, whatever you want. But this is the basic heart
of my mapping workflow. Let's get this thing rendered out and see what it finally looks like. Now, render times are really important for video people because they
can make or break your day. If you have really long render
times with these animations, you don't want to render very often. And so you end up just guessing
and sort of doing everything in the AfterEffects and
then doing one big render and just like hoping that it works. When you have faster render times, it allows you to output sort
of a draft and say like, I think this is pretty close to good. You bring it in to Premiere. You time it up. And then if it's wrong
or if there's mistakes, like there always are, you
just go back and you fix them and you render out a new
one and it's like, no drama. It's not like you're committing
to three hours of waiting. Instead, it happens very quickly. So here's the remaining time. As it digests this it's going
from what was 57 minutes. And it is just tanking by the second. This is real time right
now what you're seeing. It turns out if I go into
the log that that took, in coding time six minutes and 33 seconds to render that big beast. That's awesome. So this
was a real experiment. I hadn't actually used this
laptop to do this workflow until right here in front of you all. And I'm incredibly impressed
with the performance. This is a small little laptop. It fits in something that is
a little bigger than a tablet. I mean, look at this. And yet I was able to do my
start to finish map workflow which is fairly processor
intensive on this thing. And it held up just fine while I had multiple applications open I had the screen recording software open, all at the same time. The thing that makes this whole process run so smoothly is the 11th
gen Evo processor from Intel. This chip is a huge leap forward for Intel and for all processors on the market. It uses AI to actually reduce
noise in a really smart way. So you don't have to worry
about background noise when you're on an important call. The chip also helps enhance audio to make it sound richer and better. It helps display for gaming
and for video editing. No matter how you look at
it, whether it's streaming or being productive in the
office or editing maps, this chip is a powerhouse and it enables for much faster workflows, as I just saw right before your eyes. There's a link in my description
where you can learn more about the devices that have
the Intel 11th gen processor and you can learn more about
just Intel Evo overall. click that link and help
support this channel. But it's also a great
place to go learn more about this really cool,
fast, amazing processor. The first batch of these amazing
processors inside laptops are hitting the shelves
this holiday season. And if you're someone who
is looking for an upgrade in your workflows, this
is a fantastic option. Thank you, Intel, for
supporting this channel and supporting this video and allowing me to make a video I've wanted to make for a long time. I wanted to share this
workflow with you all for a long time. A lot more behind the scenes
is shared on my Patreon. If you want to go over and check that out, thank you all for being here. And I hope it's a happy holiday season for those celebrating
holidays and happy New Year. And I'll see you soon. (upbeat music)
That GeoLayers add-in looks pretty nifty
I watched this recently! I will say you have to watch for a bit to hear him talk about using GIS data. I did find it awesome seeing how he uses After Effects with illustrator and mapbox. He does some great work, and it’s neat to hear about this side of the field (closer to data reporter/journalism than GIS analyst).
As someone with zero artistic "sense", the hardest part really is the presentation....somehow when I use AE and illustrator it looks worse than it did in qgis :(
Nice Graphics with Maps, not GIS. Long time ago I watched a Houdini tutorial about taking open street map data and dump them into Houdini to make a 3d view of Manhattan. I was waiting to see the same here, svg or XML data from GIS exported to After effects. That said, and appart of Intel evo ad, It is a nice video.
his dedication and the sheer work he puts into his work and this video are amazing, and just wow, awesome, but... This video and his whole process kind of melt my brain and it's just... How can you make an introductory 30min video to a map making workflow and not mention anything about GIS? I understand doing something like this to an audience who understands the complexities and GIS work of map making, but, this video is aimed at the general public who don't have a geo/gis background. Melting my brain, who are the couple hundred thousand viewers here? what is going on
Looks really nice, could the vector file or the plugin be substituted by an arcGIS protect and/or layer??
oh wow, a 30 minute intel ad... cool!
Amazing job, friend.
Is it just me, or does anyone feel like he's reinventing a wheel that was already well honed by ArcGIS Pro?