Your journey, as a film.

Sky İnk turns a route into a short film. Pick your stops and the film makes itself: take-off, cruise and descent over a living globe, the route drawn as it goes. Vertical, muted, ready for the feed — and yours to keep.

How it works

Pick your stops. Search airports, cities and towns — or put the crosshair on any point of the earth — and set them in order: a departure, a destination, up to six stops between. A route may come back to where it has been.
Say how each leg travels. By plane, by car, by train, by ship or on foot. Flights arc between their airports, drives and train rides cross the land, sea crossings keep to the shipping lanes, and a walk stays close to the ground.
Watch it fly. The camera lifts off from the first stop, follows the route and settles into the last, the earth turning beneath it. Nothing to key-frame, nothing to time.
Send it. Vertical for the feed, square, or wide. On iPhone the film lands in Photos; in the browser it downloads from the studio.

The films it makes

An animated travel map video of a whole trip — a flight, three sea crossings and a drive, in one film.
A flight route animation from two airport codes, or a week of flying in one route.
A road trip map animation, city to city, with a car, a camper or a bus on the road.
A train journey map video, station city to station city, the line drawn across the land.
A cruise route map video, port to port, the ship keeping to the sea lanes.

The look

Four looks for the earth: Satellite, NASA's photograph of the planet; Terrain, its relief in colour; Blueprint, the relief in two blues; and Day, a map in a day map's colours, drawn from open data. Each look has its own close-up for the start and the end of a leg; the route's colour and width are yours to set, and a look you like is kept for the next film.

Where to make it

On iPhone — the Sky İnk app, on the App Store: the film renders on the phone and is saved to Photos; nothing is uploaded. In your browser — the studio at skyink.co, on a phone or a desktop: the film renders on our server and is yours to download for a week. Building a route works without an account; keeping things — the film, a look, a favourite stop — asks you to sign in, with Apple, with Google or with an email link. There is no password.

The things people ask

What does it cost? Nothing today. There is no paid plan yet; when there is one, this page will say so.
Can I change a film after it is made? The route and its look stay in your Library. Restyle it in the studio and make another — as many as you like.
Which places can it find? Airports the world over, cities and towns, seaports — and any point you put the crosshair on.
Does it work on Android? The studio at skyink.co works in a phone's browser. There is no Android app yet.
Whose imagery is it? The earth is NASA's, in the public domain; the places and the Day and Night maps come from open data. Every source is listed below.

Acknowledgements

Sky İnk is built on work that is free to use, and these are its makers' terms.

NASA — Blue Marble and GIBS imagery. Public domain. NASA does not endorse Sky İnk.
OurAirports — the airports. Public domain.
GeoNames — cities and towns. CC BY 4.0; contains data from geonames.org.
UN/LOCODE — the seaports. Public domain, via searoute-ts (MIT).
Natural Earth — countries, states and provinces, and borders. Public domain.
ESA WorldCover — the Day and Night maps' land cover. CC BY 4.0; © ESA WorldCover project 2021, contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021) processed by the ESA WorldCover consortium.
Copernicus DEM — the Day and Night maps' relief. © DLR e.V. 2010–2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014–2018, provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA.
Eurostat — the sea-lane network. EUPL-1.2.

Make your film