MapCut
Map stories built like scenes, not slides.
Geographic stories are stuck in slide decks
Maps are one of the most powerful ways to explain the world — funding flows, travel corridors, policy impact, ecosystems. But the tools to tell stories on top of them haven't caught up. Teams still drop static screenshots into PowerPoint, or wrestle with GIS software built for analysts, not storytellers. The result: data with no narrative, narratives with no motion, and presentations that ask the audience to imagine the movement themselves.
Slides are static
PowerPoint and Keynote kill the one thing maps are good at — movement. Zooming, flying, and revealing geography over time gets lost in screenshots.
GIS is for analysts
ArcGIS and QGIS can do almost anything, but they weren't built for editorial pacing, narrative cards, or cinematic camera moves.
Video is a one-way street
Pre-rendered map videos look great but can't be updated, scrubbed, forked, or remixed. Once the map changes, the story is dead.
A cinematic studio for map storytelling
MapCut treats geographic narratives the way film treats scenes — each story is a chaptered composition with camera intent, timed annotations, route reveals, editorial cards, and replayable transitions. Authors compose in a studio, audiences watch in a player, and the whole thing runs on a single JSON schema that stays live and editable.
We designed and built the full product: a scene-based editor with a live map canvas, inspector panel, and timeline; a read-only cinematic player with chapter navigation and variable-speed scrubbing; an AI story generator that streams scenes into existence from a single prompt; and a native scene-to-MP4 export pipeline for when a story needs to live outside the runtime.
Scenes, not slides
The central design decision was treating a story as a sequence of scenes — each with its own camera, layers, annotations, media, audio, and duration — rather than a single flat map with overlays bolted on top. Every scene is a complete composition, and every transition between scenes is a first-class animation with easing, duration, and a camera path.
On the rendering side, MapCut sits on Deck.gl and MapLibre GL, which gave us real-time 3D terrain, atmosphere presets, and the ability to composite dozens of data layers — points, boundaries, routes, heat, hex — without dropping frames. Camera interpolation runs on a waypoint system with frame-accurate timing, so flying from a national overview down to a single county feels deliberate instead of mechanical.
For authoring, we built a dense studio with a scene rail, live canvas, inspector panel, and timeline — but layered in strong defaults, drag-to-reorder, and undo/redo so new users aren't facing down a GIS tool. And because storytelling shouldn't start from a blank page, we wired an AI session directly into the library: describe the story you want, and MapCut streams scenes back in real time that you can immediately edit, reorder, or regenerate.