The example stories
Five complete documents ship with the app. They are not screenshots or mock-ups — each is a real .ov file that plays here, opens in the QGIS plugin, and renders to video.
Every one of them is also readable. Open the file and you can see exactly how the effect was achieved, which is the fastest way to learn the format.
The Flight to Eleuthera
8 scenes · 8 places · 3:10A Learjet 60 left Austin for the Bahamas on 1 November 2026 and stopped 227 miles short.
Shows: Three things at once. A vehicle travelling a path in step with the narration, declared as animate.vehicle, with one waypoint per scene so the aircraft is where the sentence being spoken says it is. Circles sized in real metres doing argumentative work: the 1.3 and 3.8 mile recovery distances over the streets they actually cover, against 35,000 feet laid flat on the same ground at the same scale. And canvas-space annotations composited over the live map — Motion panels inside a GeoStory, used only in the two scenes whose subject is the vertical, which a plan view cannot draw.
Rivers of the Ocean
5 scenes · 4 places · 1:08The ocean currents that move heat around the planet.
Shows: Animated lines. Four currents drawn as paths with arrows travelling down them, each with its own speed and direction. The clearest demonstration of the animate block, and of why a still line cannot say what a current does.
Rebuilding Transbay
8 scenes · 4 places · 1:34How San Francisco rebuilt the forty acres around its bus terminal.
Shows: Annotations that do not move, and a story about one place over time rather than a journey. A walking-radius circle sized in real metres, an elevated bus ramp as a line, and a tower marker with a leader callout. Also switches between a street basemap and satellite imagery mid-story.
Iceland: A Country Still Being Built
10 scenes · 9 places · 1:51A country being built in real time, told along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
Shows: Geological time as narrative, and three basemaps in one document. The Surtsey exclusion zone is a circle with a real radius — an annotation that means a legal boundary rather than a decoration.
The History of Coffee
10 scenes · 9 places · 3:15Coffee's route out of the Ethiopian highlands and around the world.
Shows: The longest story, and one that moves across continents rather than staying put. Nine places and ten scenes, with one scene that deliberately says a line over whatever is already on screen instead of moving the camera.
Hurricane Katrina
5 scenes · 4 places · 0:55A geographic narrative of Katrina's path and impact.
Shows: The shortest and plainest of the five. No annotations at all — just places, camera, and narration, which is enough for a whole story and is the point of the core invariant.
A note on assets
Two of these documents name image files that are not shipped with them — the stories play correctly anyway, with the pictures simply absent. That is the core invariant doing its job rather than a mistake you need to work around: an external asset is never required for a story to play. If you want pictures in one of them, generate them with Illustrate in the player.