What problem it solves

Creating Jet Lag-style animated travel route videos requires stitching together several non-trivial pieces: fetching real road or rail geometry, rendering a progressive drawing animation over a map basemap, and encoding the result to MP4. There is no single tool that does this end-to-end from the command line. travel-map-animator wraps all of it into one script callable from a Claude Code skill.

Who uses this workflow

Anyone producing travel content — YouTube travel vloggers, trip-recap slide decks, Jet Lag: The Game fans, or anyone who wants a clean animated map to go with a journey story. The skill lets Claude Code invoke the renderer directly with coordinates the user supplies.

What the skill does

• Fetches real road/walking routes from OSRM
• Fetches real rail track geometry from OpenStreetMap via Overpass API (including named rail relations so the line follows the actual track, not a parallel road)
• Renders a 1920×1080 MP4 where the route draws itself progressively over a desaturated OSM tile basemap
• Encodes locally with ffmpeg (no cloud dependency)
• Supports multi-stop journeys and multiple transport modes (driving, walking, rail)

Attribution

Original tool by @B0LLEX — https://github.com/B0LLEX/travel-map-animator

The skill/SKILL.md in that repo follows the standard Claude Code skill format and is the canonical skill definition.

Example

python3 make_map_animation.py \
  --start "10.7531,59.9110,Oslo" \
  --end   "5.3242,60.3929,Bergen" \
  --title "Oslo - Bergen" --subtitle "~460 km" \
  --output oslo_bergen.mp4 \
  --zoom 7 --duration 5 --hold 2 --mode driving