Here Be Animated Monsters

One of the most underused features in Maplibre and MapBox is the video overlay, which enables developers to display a video on top of a base map layer.

The Hailou AI Video Generator currently has a trial that allows you to create unlimited videos from a starting and finishing image. I decided to make use of this offer to create an animated sea monster. First I asked Gemini to create two images of the same kraken monster with its tentacles in different positions.

I then asked Hailuo to create an animated Kraken sea monster starting from one image and ending with the other. The result is a short video of a kraken waving its tentacles.

 

You can see this sea monster on my Animated Seamonster map. To place the kraken video on the map, MapLibre uses a video source and a matching raster layer. You supply the video file (for example, kraken.mp4) and define four geographic coordinates that mark its corners on the globe. MapLibre stretches the video between those points so it appears as part of the map, following the same panning and zooming behavior as other layers. By adjusting the bounding box, you can position the animation anywhere - in this case, above the ocean.

Observant users might notice that the background color of the video does not quite match the color of the ocean. I attempted to change the background color of the OpenFreeMap base layer in Maputnik. As you can see I seem to have given Maputnik the wrong color.