Watch me make the Indiana Jones Travel Map scene in Descript
A step-by-step video tutorial demonstrating how to recreate the classic Indiana Jones animated travel-map scene using Descript. The speaker captures a map screenshot (London → Berlin → Warsaw), imports and crops it, places animated red dots and lines, times animations across a 12-second sequence with scene splits, overlays semi-opaque city/airplane imagery, adds crossfades and music, and fine-tunes opacity, timing, and line styling.
My favorite movie since I was maybe 9 or 10 years old is Indiana Jones. And there's these iconic scenes in Indiana Jones where he's moving across the world. Like he's going from San Francisco to Nepal. And it shows his progress as he's traveling. It looks like this. I love those scenes so much. They're so fun. And the basic elements are the map, the red animated line showing his progress, and it goes to a city, bounces as he changes flights, and then Indy either sleeping on the plane or reading the Grail diary or something else. And slightly opaque, so it's overlaid over the map. So it's going to be several layers involved and I'm going to try to recreate it. So let's see how we can do this in Descript. First things first, we need to plan our route and we need a map. So I'm going to go from London because I've always wanted to go there to Berlin, and I'm going to end up in Warsaw, Poland for this trip. So I just use Google Maps and I had to play around with a little bit to get this flat view. But then I'm just going to take a screenshot. So I'm just going to grab the screen and I'll just get a little bit more than I think I need. So I'll capture roughly this whole area. Okay, there's my screenshot. And then I'm going to go into Canva and I'm just going to do a 1920 by 1080, which is the same dimension as my video. I'll drag that into a Canva project, make this fit the whole thing, crop it a little bit so I don't get any of that. The Google Map stuff on the sides roughly like that. With my map all set how I want, I'm going to go and download this, go to share, download, PNG download, and then I'm gonna go to Descript. So inside of Descript, I'll hit new project. I'll do a video project. And here I am inside of a new project. And now I'm just gonna take that screenshot, that thing I just made in Canva. The first thing I'm gonna do here is crop this even a little bit more. And actually, I could have skipped the entire canvas step. Honestly, that was all not even necessary because you could just crop here in Descript, and that's just as effective. So I'm just going to position it like this so that I can see all of London, all of Berlin and all of Warsaw. And for the sake of simplicity. I'm not going to do the zoomed in version, the zoomed in view that Indiana Jones has. I'm just going to focus on adding the animated shapes. So let me make this a little bit bigger. Let me go to elements. I'm going to start by adding my red dots. I'm going to hit this thing, change it to red and let's do like a darker, more subdued red. Like that. And then I need to make this dot a lot smaller. So I'm going to hold shift so that when I make this smaller, it's going to stay proportional. So I shrink the height and width at the same time. Holding shift and dragging the corner in. And I'm going to make this bigger so I can see it more. I'm going to go to canvas and I'm going to continue making it smaller and about like that. And that's still a little big because my circle is out of the screen. Okay, there we go. I can see it now and I can still read the full word London. So that is perfect. And then what I'm going to do is just copy that. So just select it. I'm going to make my timeline a little bigger here and then copy that layer and paste it twice. So I have my three dots and then I'm going to drag those. So I got my Berlin dot and I have my Warsaw dot. Okay, so we have our destination set. So the next thing I'm going to do is add my line. I'll need two lines and I'm going to match the colors. So I just click that dot to use my most recent color and I'm going to make this line thicker. Let's try 10. Yeah, that looks like it should be good. And I'm going to put this starting point over London and actually what I'm going to do is put both starting points over London and you'll see in a second what I'm going to do to animate this. But I want this whole thing to be in Indiana Jones. They're like 20 to 30 seconds. I'm going to do like 12 seconds because it's just two destinations. So I'm just going to drag out this whole thing until about the 12 second mark on my timeline. So there it is, there's my 12 second mark and I'm going to take that line and I'm going to say about halfway through my project, I want it to reach Berlin. So that's going to be the 6 second mark. So I'm going to add a scene Right there by hitting forward slash on my keyboard. And that's where I want my first animation to end up. So the way I'm going to do that is I'll go back to the start of the project. I'm going to go to layer, add an animation custom. And then I have my starting keyframe, which is over the dot over London. And then by the end, it's going to be extended to reach Berlin. And I'm going to go just a little bit into the second scene so that this line will stay visible on my map once I've already added it. So with lines, you have two X and Y coordinates for the starting point and the ending point. And I'm just going to drag the ending point. You can see on my screen that line getting longer. I'm just going to drag that number until it's roughly below Berlin. And then I'll adjust the Y coordinate so that it touches Berlin like that. And that's my animation. So if I go back to the start, here's how it looks. Boom. Cool. All right, so there is our first leg of the journey. And then I'm going to do the same thing in scene two, I'll add a another line. So go to elements. And actually, you know what? I'm going to copy this line. That way I keep my same color and everything. So I grab this top layer. That's the duplicate line that I just made. In order to move it, I'd have to delete this animation. So I'm just going to hit that minus sign. It defaulted back to just that dot, the original view of how I had it just over London. So I'm going to need to move that dot to be over Berlin. So let me just grab that line. I just made it a little bit bigger in order to see it. Now it's over Berlin and I'm going to resize it so it's just a dot again. It's not. It's not started its progression, its line yet. And so now I have my dot over Berlin. It's time to animate this so that it goes to Warsaw. So I'll hit Animation plus custom. And then I have my keyframes and I'm going to drag it until it reaches the end of my 12 second mark. And then same thing here with the ending X and Y coordinate. I'm just going to extend this until it's roughly over Warsaw. Then I'll adjust the Y axis so that I lower it a little bit, like so. And now let's see how this Whole thing looks. There's my London leg. There's Berlin to Warsaw. Cool, I like it. And now what we could do is overlay a image. So in Indiana Jones, he's always got, like I said, he's either like sleeping on the plane or reading the Grail diary or it's showing the plane itself flying through the clouds. So what I could do to recreate that is go to more media. And then I could type in airplane. And let's do. Let's do this first one. So I'll click on it and it's importing it into my project. It's just going to fill this first scene. So the London to Berlin leg. And now it's taking up my whole video. So what I want to do is play with the opacity. So I'm going to make it so that I can see my map behind it. Like, like 50% or so. That looks Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones. Ish. And then I'm going to start with a fade in so you see the map completely for the first, like second and a half. I'm going to make this a very slow fade in. Grabbing this white dot, dragging to about a second and a half. And let's look at this. There we go. And then I'm going to have it fade out same way that it came in. And I'm going to add a different video for the second part. So Berlin to Warsaw. I'm going to add something related to one of those cities. So let me just type in Warsaw and let's see what comes up. I'm assuming that's Warsaw. So I'll go ahead and add that. There it is. Same thing. I'm going to just dial the opacity down so that I can see the map behind it. And let's do like 35% on this one. And I'm gonna do the fade in a second and a half and the fade out. Okay. And let's go back to the beginning and see how this. Look, I don't think I like the fade in and out between scenes. I think what would be better here is a crossfade. So I'm going to get rid of those fades, dragging those dots back to zero. And then in scene one, go to the scene thing on the right side transitions out. And I'm going to do crossfade. Let's see how this looks. So it goes from the opaque wing of the airplane. Hmm, something's a little weird there. I don't love it. There's a couple frames where it cuts back to the map. But I'm just going for the 80% solution here. So I'm going to stick with that. Very cool. And then the final touch to all of this is to add our music. So let's go to more music. And I'm going to type in Adventure and Inspiring heroes Epic Rise. Without even playing it. I'm just going to add it. Hitting the plus button and there it is. Okay. And let's see how our final product looks. Excellent. And I'm just going to add a fade out on this final leg to Warsaw. Actually, I'm going to fade the whole scene. So I'm going to do scene transition out fade. And let's see how this looks. And I'm gonna get rid of this fade of the city because I want the whole thing to fade together. There we go. And then it could fade in. And then you could cut back to your action hero arriving on the ground in Warsaw and conducting whatever adventures need to happen there. You could play with the timing of everything. You could play with the colors of the line. And you know, the Indiana Jones one has kind of a little glow around it.
