Gemini Killed Drone Videographers: The Google Earth FPV Flythrough Prompt
A cinematic FPV city flythrough used to mean a licensed pilot, a weather window, and a $500 invoice. Now it is a Google Earth screenshot, a red line, and one prompt. Gemini treats your line as the flight path and renders the whole run photorealistic, golden hour and all. Three steps, one fix for when it misbehaves, done.
Step 1: Screenshot the city in 3D
Open Google Earth, find your city, and tilt into the 3D view before you screenshot. Major cities render in full 3D and give Gemini the cleanest base. If your town only shows flat satellite, it still works, the render just leans harder on Gemini's imagination. Your city, a client's listing, a venue you want to promote, all fair game. This is the same public 3D view anyone can open in a browser, so you are not capturing anything a tourist could not see.
Step 2: Draw the flight path
Mark a red line on the screenshot showing the route you want the camera to fly. Straight down the main street, a sweep past the skyline, a curve along the waterfront. Any markup tool works, even your phone's photo editor. That one line is the entire flight plan, so make it deliberate.
Step 3: Drop it into Gemini with this prompt
Attach the marked-up screenshot in Gemini, paste this exactly as written, and generate. Every clause is load-bearing. The layout-reference instruction is the whole trick: it stops Gemini from doing a flat map zoom and forces it to open already mid-flight inside the photorealistic render.
Animate this Google Earth image into an ultra-realistic, cinematic aerial flythrough that glides forward along the red line. Use the image only as a layout reference for the scene and the flight path. Do not show or hold on the flat map image; start already mid-flight in the final photorealistic render. Lifelike textures and reflections, natural depth and accurate shadows, warm golden-hour light, smooth true-to-life motion, subtle motion blur, crisp 4K, 9:16 vertical.The half-second fix
Sometimes Gemini opens on the flat map for a beat anyway. Do not re-roll, you will burn generations chasing a perfect open that an edit gives you for free. Trim the first half-second of the clip and you have a clean mid-flight start. That is the entire troubleshooting section.
What to point it at
This is not a one-off flex clip. Your own city for local reach. A real estate listing. A venue, a hotel, a travel reel for a place you have never been. Each of those is the exact shot that normally means hiring a pilot, and the prompt already asks for 9:16 vertical, so the render drops straight into Reels with zero reframing.
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