A dizzying tour at top speed that takes you through art galleries, underground stations and historic monuments. Sports stadiums, the arctic circle, the Faroe islands: they are all here on this whistlestop music video created entirely from Google Street View.
Adam Chitayat began the project whilst confined by the Covid-19 pandemic. He says he was “desperate for the outside world beyond my doorstep, city, state and country” and so started using Google Maps Street View images as a means to explore and escape.
“I viewed and downloaded the world from my desk, finding amazing spaces, altering, hand tracking and creating time-lapses and shots,” Adam writes on Vimeo. Of course, the footage was kept on his hard drive for quite some time before he knew what to do with it. At this stage, it was still a bit of an experiment.
That is until he heard the latest album by Swedish electronic DJ Axel Boman, and more specifically the track Out Sailing which features Man Tear and Inre Frid.
“I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the material. Until I heard the latest album from Axel Boman,” Adam says. “Here was a song from one of my favourite artists with such a propulsive and idealistic reaching out towards the wider world. Letting the wind take us, with love as the sail, a blur of adventure across the planet.”
The result is a mesmerizing first-person view that takes the viewer on quite literally a journey around the world. Adam lists the locations used, many of which are world-famous, but some less so well-known. Locations range from the Uffizi museum in Florence to the Grand Canyon, the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona to the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.
Scenes through the foothills of Nepal recede to views of the Taj Mahal. The next moment you are sailing through the arctic ocean, then dog sledding across the ice.
It’s a marvellously clever way to create a timelapse video and it fits the music perfectly. Axel Boman thinks so too, as he shared Adam’s video on his Instagram feed, stating that “Out Sailing from my album LUZ has been visualized!!! Adam Chitayat has created a mind-blowing trip around the globe…Thank you so much”
More of Adam’s work can be found on his Instagram and website.
