A train journey map video, city to city.
Put the cities of your rail trip in order and Sky İnk draws the line across the land and rides it: a train on the map, the camera following — a short vertical film for sharing.
How it works
- Pick the cities. Cities and towns by name, in the order of the journey; a station is a point you can put the crosshair on. Up to eight.
- Set the legs to train. Where the trip began with a flight or ended with a drive, those legs travel their own way.
- Watch it ride, then send it. The camera follows the line low and tilted, north always up. Vertical for the feed, square, or wide.
What the film shows
The line drawn across the land between your cities, a train riding it, each city named as it arrives, and at the end the whole journey in one pull-back to the globe. The film above rides from Paris across Europe and Siberia to Lake Baikal, then down through Mongolia to Beijing, in the Satellite look.
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
- Does it know the stations? It knows cities and towns; a station is a point you put the crosshair on, and the film names the place.
- Can one trip mix train and plane? Yes. The flight in, the train between cities, the drive out — each leg its own way.
- Which look suits a rail map? Any of the four — Satellite, as above, or Blueprint, which draws the land in two blues. The route's colour is yours to set.
- Is the line the real railway? It is a drawn line across the land between your stops, not the track itself. Add a town on the way and the line goes through it.