How I Make My Maps

i want to share with you how i make my [Music] maps 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 after effects the software that i use to make maps i devour 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 going to do talk a little bit about my journey in map making and the evolution of my style and then i'm going to dive into two different workflows one is a workflow that requires a 200 plug-in 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 plug-in 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 want to 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 and all of this i'm going to do on a laptop that intel sent 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 supports 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 going to do and i'm going to take you along on the journey but first story time 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 tried again got accepted and then started working there i brought this map making workflow to vox continue 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 complement those stories the series after all 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 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 is wild and it's it's sort of proving my age here like i'm sort of like the old person being like back background monitor 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 after effects 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 geo layers if you want to just skip to that to the geo layers 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

after effects 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 uh that was very fast this is a big file it's got a lot of data in it and um this is what makes this first workflow tick this file 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 after effects i want to bring this into

after effects i'll leave it open in illustrator 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 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 1920x1080 make sure this is like you know like 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 gonna 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 saturations 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 um 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 a 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 uh 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 uh go putting two little keyframes going to where you want to go next and going over a little bit or going this way and you can 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 uh illustrator right here you can see um or my favorite thing to do is to

check this out control y make a new solid and i'm gonna call it a rock and this is the color of the thing i'm going to highlight i'm going to make it some orangey something and i'm just going to put it over the top okay that is a rock 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 paired down but i'm going to grab that control c for copy back to after effects oh i have to have this selected ctrl v for paste and boom that's actually rock watch what happens if i scale this sucker up scale it up and now i have a mask that is a rock 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 100 layers all parented to this one controller and it was pretty nuts but then i discovered geo layers and more importantly i could afford shield layers it is expensive but so incredibly useful so let's now move on to how we would approach this same thing with geo layers which is really a much more powerful workflow so far candidly 100 like honestly the 11th gen evo processor is killing it it's actually kind of frustrating because i have like i'm used to working on these big expensive beastly machines and in

some ways this is um 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 uh keep going really cool though really cool that this little chip has so much power to make these workflows like buttery smooth uh in such a teeny little thing so this next workflow is geo layers i'm not going to go into how geo layers 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 geo-layers 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 geo layers and to link that styling into jailers to move stuff around and then to label and do sort of what we did here with a rock where you can draw a country all of that is so much easier

in jail there's 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 geo layers i have it all installed i'm going to go to extensions i'm going to go to geo layers 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 rock map okay and it will live within the comp we just made which was called mapping the new way okay after 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 come in 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 geo layers yes this is going to be in geolayers pretty soon this is ready for me to bring into after effects 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 after effects you go up to share and warning this is gonna 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 you 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 here i'm going to actually

rename it to a 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 after effects 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 if 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 not 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 the map comp 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 the sausage is made you're like oh that's how he does it so let's let's do some key frames 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 going to 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 in to a rock wait there for a minute and then

zoom in to a little village in the south of a rock so i'm gonna have it wait there for maybe i don't know four seconds and then i am going to look at all of these these are the key frames that run geo layers 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 gonna 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 gonna have sit and now i wanted to zoom into a little village in 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 jewelers 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 hit tilde and get the full screen here i'm gonna hit basra b-a-s-r-a okay basra and there it is this is uh 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 tilda 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 a rock label it and then zoom into basra so first things first i am going to try to find a shape of a rock now you remember how we

did that with um the illustrator file and all of that that was very clunky and sort of handmade this is a lot smoother so i'm going to hit back you really it's really important that you hit back because right now when you're searching the internet you're in this sort of second layer of the interface you want to hit back so you're 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 to make it big your

data hub is where you can put geo data sets which are like geojsons that's a little advanced if you're new to this but more importantly an example of a data set 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 a rock 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 a rock 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 a rock 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 ctrl 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 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 the map needs to be anchored i also need to make a 3d if i want it to respond to some of these yeah like that okay 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's 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 it's going to arrange them perfectly and put expressions in them and 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 wi-fi 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 am 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 i 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 why have i been like relying on these insanely beefy expensive machines when i pitch this idea of like i'm gonna 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 luts 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 after effects 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 encoding time 6 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 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 are someone who's 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've 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 um thank you all for being here and i hope it's a happy holiday season for those celebrating holidays and happy new year and uh i'll see you soon