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Vantage · open source

A year over one site, in one scroll.

Vantage is an engine I built for people who watch one piece of ground change for a year. It takes a season of drone flights over the same site, locks every one of them to a single camera, and turns them into a story you scroll on a phone — with the films and an offline copy made by the same command.

Open the demo story

Simulated imagery · a made-up park, flown by a made-up drone

Last flight: the same view, finished — a beach, a round plaza, new paths and young trees, people on the sand. First flight: the site before work began — rough grass, cracked paths and old concrete beside a lake.
First flight and last, from the same spot in the sky. Drag across the picture — the demo story does this for every flight in between.

How it works

Four steps, and only the first one needs a drone.

  1. Fly the same route. Every few weeks, the same flight over the same ground. Video, stills or both — Vantage takes whatever the drone brings home.
  2. Line every visit up to one camera. It picks the best frame from each flight and registers it to the others — position, angle and colour — so the only thing that moves is the site.
  3. Write the story in a file. Chapters, captions and notes pinned to the ground live in one plain text file, and every figure the page prints has to say where it came from.
  4. Run one command. Out come the page, the time-lapse films and a copy that works with no signal, dressed in the client’s own colours and type.

What you get

One site, four ways to hand it over.

  • A page to send Scroll it on a phone, add it to the home screen, save it before the site visit with no signal.hosted · installable
  • One file The whole story in a single HTML file — double-click and it opens. A lighter edition rides along for email.single-file HTML
  • An offline copy Every image at full size in a zip that opens from a laptop, a USB stick, a meeting room with no wifi.offline zip
  • The films A 16:9 time-lapse for the big screen and a 9:16 cut for phones, from the same flights.16:9 · 9:16 MP4

Get Vantage

It’s open source. Build the demo yourself.

You need Python 3.11 or newer, uv and ffmpeg. The first line fetches the parts, the second invents a site and flies over it a dozen times, and the third serves what it made at localhost:8000.

$ uv sync
$ uv run vantage demo --fast
$ uv run vantage preview demo-lakeside
github.com/kmay89/timelapse_drone

About the pictures. Everything in the demo is simulated: the site, the park, the organisations and the people quoted are made up, and the drone is a couple of thousand lines of Python pretending to be a camera. That’s on purpose — it means the demo can be rebuilt from nothing, by anybody, every time the engine changes.