Robert Baldinger was somewhere in England, tracing a motorcycle route from Leeds up through the Lake District and across to the Isle of Man by ferry, when he realized the animated map he was building to tell that story was taking longer to make than the trip itself had taken to plan. Eight years of adventure travel videos had given him a high tolerance for tedious post-production work. But animated maps kept breaking that tolerance. So he stopped making them the old way and built his own tool instead.
No account, no software, no waiting on a slow render farm
The tool lives at mapanimator.baldinger.se and runs entirely inside a browser. There is nothing to install, no account to create, and no personal information required. A traveler opens the site, names a project, and starts drawing a route directly onto the map with a cursor. Baldinger demonstrated the absolute minimum version: draw an arrow, press play, head to the export screen, hit render, and save the file. From blank canvas to finished animated map took roughly five seconds.
For anyone who wants to go deeper, the customization layer is substantial. The map itself can be styled in several modes, including a dark theme, a regional view that highlights states and borders, and a treasure map aesthetic that Baldinger settled on for his Isle of Man demo, complete with optional 3D mountain relief. Route lines can be colored, thickened, dashed, or given a glowing outline. Because his trip mixed motorcycling with two ferry crossings, he set a single continuous track and assigned different transport modes to different segments, making the boat legs render in a deeper blue that matched the surrounding water on the map.
Signs and landmarks can be dropped anywhere along the route, including location plaques, a ferry marker, and even a flat-tire icon for the breakdown he had on the road. Each marker can be set to appear only when the animated line reaches it, so the map builds itself in real time as the journey unfolds. Camera behavior is equally flexible: a fixed overhead view, a start-to-end pan that zooms between two chosen points, a follow-the-line mode that trails directly behind the route, or a direction-of-travel mode that rotates the entire map to face the way the traveler is moving.
Longer trips are handled through scenes. Baldinger showed a second scene picking up where the first left off, with the ferry leaving the Isle of Man for Blackpool and the motorcycle continuing north from there. Colors and style settings carry over automatically between scenes, which he noted was the specific feature that meaningfully sped up his own workflow.
Built for one person, shared with everyone
Rendering happens on the user’s own machine, which means speed scales with hardware. Resolution and frame rate are adjustable before export. The tool works across most major browsers.
Baldinger was characteristically direct about the scope of the project: ‘I made it for myself, but why not just share it with you guys?’ He added that he has no intention of pushing it toward complex 3D cartography. The goal was always a practical tool that gets a travel creator from raw GPS memory to a finished animated sequence without the frustration that drove him to build the thing in the first place.
The flat tire icon sitting on a road in the Isle of Man
On the demo map, a small flat-tire marker sits along the motorcycle track somewhere on the island, pausing the animation for a beat before the line continues. Baldinger placed it there and moved on.
The Isle of Man route that started the whole build is still saved inside the tool, ferry crossings, flat tire, and all, as a working example of exactly what eight years of travel videos and one sufficiently frustrated creator eventually produce.
