Over the years we’ve seen some great files come from Steven Ho, such as his panorama from the top of Mount Everest, his tribute to Steve Jobs and his Trip View Bowl visualization. He’s back with another one, which follows the path of a blue magpie as it flies along the Xindieng River, to promote eco-friendly tea farms.
The unique part of this is the way he controls the camera during the flight. Steven says it was quite challenging to control the perspective like a movie scene. If you just keep the bird in the same position on the screen the results are inferior. So he has the camera move around the bird to get different perspectives, with the bird even going off camera for brief periods. Also, to get the bird to appear properly in Google Earth he enlarged it several hundred times, which has the added benefit of making it easier to control the perspective.
You can try it for yourself by loading this KML file, or read the full write-up on his blog.
Great work, Steven!