NireBryce
@NireBryce

what

jon bois videos are animated in Google earth??


iliana
@iliana

before i spend far too many paragraphs1 being a bit of a fanenby and lamenting a dying program, first i'm going to quickly answer the question: yes (with the exception of various static overlays which are added in a standard video editor).

but it's not just to animate; jon often weaves the geography surrounding the stories he tells in with the narrative, and using the same program with the same camera motions and same jank as the rest of the video somehow keeps the whole thing cohesive. zooming into quotes from Sports Illustrated overlaid atop a random-ass gas station in the middle of montana in the middle of the night helps set the scene of Ken Griffey Jr. driving non-stop from Seattle to Orlando in The History of the Seattle Mariners, part 6:

a gas station with newspaper quotes: “'Dude, I'm here at a gas station on Interstate 90 in Montana, and I swear to God that Ken Griffey Jr. is filling up right next to me,' the friend said.” “Buhner called Griffey. 'Dude', Buhner said, 'where the f--- are you?'”

the most recent Dorktown entries are great examples of using every ounce of functionality still left in Google Earth Pro, which feels like fundamentally the same code base as the original Google Earth from 21 years ago that set the default location to an apartment complex i would regularly visit friends at during my attempt at getting a degree from KU2. here's jon using the elevation chart feature along a plotted route in “How to score 10 runs in the first inning and lose”, a story about a particularly strange baseball game:

Google Earth's view of Pennsylvania with a red route drawn through it; below, an elevation chart labeled “Elevation profile of Jim Rooker's walk”.

and here's where jon breaks out the flight simulator mode, the kind of feature that feels like it could only come out of Google's old 20% Project system, in Section 1, a video about a particularly weird football game:

Ten clippings of newspaper articles about a man named Kroner surrounding the view down a runway numbered 20.

but this is far from what i think is the most impressive feat anyone has ever done with Google Earth.

i think it's safe to say that i find 20020, a work of speculative fiction considering what college football might look like in 18,000 years if everyone alive today was effectively immortal and also satellites became sentient, quite interesting. the quick premise, if you don't want to read the first chapter, is that a satellite has pitched the idea of a football game in which teams play across a field that is 160 feet wide, but goes out in a straight line out each of their end zones until it hits the border of the US or an ocean.

Louisville's Cardinal Stadium, with a transparent red line spanning the width of their field and traveling out the end zones as far as the camera can see. Text on-screen: “I will say that I can't quite figure it out thematically. I get Georgia Tech vs. Georgia State, but what does Purdue have to do with anything?” “um, nothing really” “... oh no.” “see i've uh, i've kinda been slow rollin y'all” “How many teams are in this game? Spit it out. Just spit it out.” “in total?”

this is the kind of thing that can only exist because of Google Earth. it's really the only program out there that (just barely) lets you, for free, have a view of the entire globe to the point where you can zoom in on dozens of college football stadiums, draw a little colored box, drag it out from coast to coast, and follow the lines and see what stories they have to tell you.

A view of the United States, as portrayed in 20020, with dozens of differently-colored lines drawn across it representing the different fields in the game.

it is a goddamn miracle any of this works as well as it does. after 20020's last chapter went up, someone asked jon, “How did you create the animations and videos and such with Google Earth?”

Google Earth allows you to import image overlays and slap them over the terrain. It took me a long time to figure out how to get 111 image files to stretch all across the country without the frame rate slowing to like three frames per second. In the end, it was a matter of making the field image files just about as small as possible (20x1 pixels) and stretching them from coast to coast. Given that Google Earth was never intended to do anything like this, I’m kind of stunned by how well it worked.

in early 2021, i spent a month or so hyperfocusing on a project to map out all the fields in 20020 as accurately as possible, so that others could explore the fields in more or less the same way jon did. here are some things i learned:

  • i literally do not know how jon stretched the files from coast to coast. this is perhaps a failing of the linux version, which i used at the time, but for me it was completely impossible to accurately get the damn image overlay to do what i wanted, as it always distorted itself beyond recognition once it was about the size of colorado. i resorted to writing a program to make a KML file for me by processing lists of survey markers i drew by hand on top of crosshashes on football fields.
  • in writing that program, i learned far too much about map projections (which i've since forgotten). it turns out that the way google earth renders rectangular image overlays is very special, in that it does not correspond to any other drawing primitive in KML (either straight lines or polygons, which also render differently from each other). and even given what i learned i still couldn't figure out how to make the fields the right width in some particular edge cases.

and, on top of it all: there's signs that Google Earth Pro might be on its deathbed. google has been putting resources toward its experimental Google Earth Web, which while impressive doesn't even render image overlays in the same fucked up way as Google Earth Pro (the thinner lines are supposed to be centered over the thicker lines):

intersections of two sets of reddish lines in Google Earth's web version; the intersection of the thinner lines a hundred or so feet to the east of the thicker lines

meanwhile, Google Earth Pro is about as janky as you'd expect a 21-year-old native google application to feel, a program that should be harnessing the last major leap of moore's law to run efficiently on modern CPUs and GPUs but simply does not. and given that Google Earth Pro has to connect to google's servers to download map tiles and terrain data and whatnot, it's entirely possible that google can unilaterally kill the program, and with it kill the ability for users to use this program to make videos like this.

i've been existentially worried about this for a few years; it's the reason i started my 20020 map project hyperfocus. but as i researched more and more i realized there's no other program that's just the right amount of fucked up to render polygons like that. it's a story that can only exist in Google Earth Pro. this feels particularly strange.


  1. this post has been bouncing around in my head for nearly two years, and the words have finally spilled out thanks to cohost making me feel like i can have a lower bar for my writing than i usually expect of myself

  2. the relationship between the original authors of Google Earth and the University of Kansas led to my class being the last to be taught C++ for the first two semesters of programming courses; a gift of awful Android tablets from Google led to retooling EECS 268 for Java, yet retaining the first semester of C++, ensuring students would learn neither language completely.


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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

in reply to @iliana's post:

  1. good post

  2. see, I've already watched the videos but somehow missed they were Google earth, but somehow learning this has not dispelled the magic and instead made me even more in awe because, well, it seems the least ergonomic way to do any of this

and there are other services that provide imagery, terrain data, etc, so at least you could still make new things (but perhaps, not for free). but all the imagery is subtly different and misaligned ever so slightly

harder to replace are the 3D buildings i think

This is very cool, thank you for sharing. I remember when Google Earth came out it was like magic - my friends and I would sit around just looking places up and exploring. Then recently I tried to download Google Earth Pro to visualize a polygon and gave up because of the frame rate. Kind of sad about it but this post was a good tribute.