The camera flyover. Chosen 28 Aug 2026; the fixed-frame variant and both watercolour treatments were dropped. Geometry is Natural Earth 110m land — public domain: no tile server, no API key, no monthly ceiling and nothing fetched while a frame renders. Everything is a pure function of one clock; ?t=N freezes a moment. Shown on SKY.

Why ours and not Remotion's. Their flyover wants MapLibre GL under --gl=angle --concurrency=1 — WebGL, one frame at a time, on a laptop with no GPU. Their watercolour template draws Stadia Maps tiles, and the listing says a business licence is needed for commercial use. Same shape as the Apple photographs: the useful-looking part is the part carved out.

Pushed in on the start, pulled back to clear the ocean, settled on the end. The zoom is a raised cosine over the journey, so the two ends match exactly and the loop never jumps.

Two real AWS regions and their real coordinates: us‑west‑2, Boardman, Oregon and eu‑west‑1, Dublin. The arc bows north because that is what a great circle does at these latitudes — a straight line on a flat map would be the wrong route drawn confidently.

Labels sit outside the camera transform. A label that scales with the map is a label nobody can read, and one whose pin has left the frame is hidden rather than parked on the edge.

What this cannot do that MapLibre can. There are no roads, no place names, no zoom past country outlines and no terrain — 110m land is a world‑scale outline and nothing else. It is right for “these two regions, this route” and wrong for “this street”. If we ever need a city, that is the conversation about a tile licence, and it should be had then rather than assumed now.

Data: Natural Earth 110m land, public domain, 117 rings, simplified to 53 KB. Coordinates: us‑west‑2 45.84°N 119.70°W · eu‑west‑1 53.35°N 6.26°W.