Generating walking tour videos for YouTube

Project

For Kunstlijn Haarlem I built a video system that turns the annual artist listing into short, cinematic walking route videos. Each piece combines a 3D map flyover of Haarlem, yellow title cards that introduce the artists, and a guided route that moves from the station into the city.

The video above is one of the station starting routes. It gives a visitor who just arrived in Haarlem a clear first path into the festival instead of a dense map full of icons.

How it works at a high level

Behind the scenes, I connect Kunstlijn's structured data about artists, locations, and images to a small set of video templates. A browser based route planner lets us pick a handful of stops on the map, check that the walk feels realistic, and then hand the selection off to the rendering pipeline.

From there the system:

• Builds a walking line on top of a Mapbox scene with terrain and 3D buildings.
• Times camera moves so the viewer always understands where they are in the city.
• Drops in artist cards and photo galleries between segments so the route feels like a curated sequence, not just a line on a map.

The goal is not to showcase the tooling. It is to make it fast for curators and producers to spin up new route videos without storyboarding every frame.

Route variants

Once the system was stable, I used it to build several different walks, each aimed at a different visitor.

One route starts at Haarlem Station and threads through the Museum Quarter, slowing down where galleries cluster and letting the camera linger over the rooftops around the river. Another focuses on the government area near the provinciehuis, where the contrast between public buildings and small exhibition spaces is sharp. A photography heavy trail pulls together studios and venues that show lens based work, so a visitor who cares about that medium can follow a single narrative through the city. A final loop in the Rozenpriel neighborhood stays close to home, linking nine artists in a tight circuit that could be walked in an afternoon.

Each route uses the same visual language, but the mood shifts with the neighborhoods and the pacing. That is the value of a programmatic approach. Once the data and templates are in place, you can spin up new stories for different audiences without rebuilding the whole artifact every time.