Spectacular Google Earth video shows off the most photogenic places on the planet
For those who don’t have 80 days to travel around the world, it’s now possible to do so in less than two minutes.
Using more than 4,000 images from Google Earth, Adnaan Jiwa created a whirlwind tour of the planet, focusing on both “environmental innovation and degradation” around the world.
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In Jiwa’s short video, viewers leap from New York to Namibia to Denmark to Saudi Arabia, just to name a few stops. To source his locations, Jiwa said that he “literally scoured the globe.”
“I wanted to find locations that demonstrated how people have shaped their environments, creating urban geometries in unsuspecting places, which can only be seen from above,” Jiwa told Travel + Leisure. “Google Earth offered me the opportunity to see the world from a unique viewpoint and I wanted to make the most of that.”
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Jiwa said he spent close to 100 hours “looking for locations, capturing and sequencing the imagery, editing and synchronising each frame, colour correcting” and rendering the video.
Jiwa’s video juxtaposes the strict grids of American residential areas with the circular neighborhoods of Denmark and the “abstract circular crop fields scattered across the most arid places on earth.”
And in the final moments of the video, Jiwa uses historical footage to show viewers just how constantly and rapidly the planet is changing.
