Draw a Line on Google Earth, Get a Drone Video: The Higgsfield FPV Prompt
A real FPV drone shoot needs a pilot, permits, and a few thousand dollars. This needs a screenshot and a red line. You draw the flight path on a map, hand the image to AI, and get back cinematic 9:16 drone footage that flies your exact route.
How this works
Three pieces. A satellite screenshot of your location with a flight path drawn over it, a prompt that describes the flight shot by shot, and Higgsfield's image-to-video generation.
The trick that makes it feel like magic: you use the annotated map as the video's start frame. The clip opens on your map, the camera dives into it, the satellite image resolves into the real world, and the drone flies the line you drew. The drawing literally comes to life.
Step 1: Draw your flight path
- Open Google Earth or Google Maps in satellite view and frame your location
- Screenshot it (portrait crop works best for 9:16)
- Draw a line over your route in any annotation tool, your phone's markup, Paint, anything. Red, thick, with a clear start and end
Routes with recognizable landmarks along the way generate dramatically better than empty terrain. Pick a path that passes 2 or 3 things the AI can name.
Step 2: The Coney Island prompt
This is the exact prompt from my video. Paste it into Higgsfield with your annotated map as the start image, 9:16, 8 to 10 seconds:
FPV drone flythrough of Coney Island, New York, 9:16 vertical, photorealistic. The video begins on the exact reference image: a top-down Google Earth satellite view of Coney Island with a red flight path line drawn across it. The camera dives INTO the map, the satellite image resolves into the real world, and the drone flies the exact route of the red line.
Shot structure: 0-1.5s the top-down map view rushes upward toward camera and dissolves into real aerial footage at the line's starting point over the Atlantic surf. 1.5-4s the drone drops to 3 meters above the waves, racing toward the beach at high speed, spray kicking up, then skims over sunbathers and umbrellas onto the sand. 4-6s it banks hard right along the Riegelmann Boardwalk, wooden planks blurring below, then rolls left around the red steel lattice of the Parachute Jump tower, structure passing within meters of the lens. 6-8s it threads between Luna Park rides, orbits the Wonder Wheel's rotating gondolas, then pulls up steeply alongside the white wooden Cyclone coaster into a rising reveal of the full shoreline, matching the map's end point.
Style: aggressive cinematic FPV, fast banking turns with camera roll, subtle speed ramps, motion blur on near objects, golden hour sunlight, sun glare flashing off the ocean, seagulls scattering, dense summer crowds, hyper-detailed, stabilized action-cam look. No text, no watermarks, no UI elements, no propellers visible.Step 3: Generate it
In Higgsfield: image-to-video, upload your annotated map as the start image, paste the prompt, set 9:16 and 8 to 10 seconds, audio off (add sound in your edit).
Two things that will happen:
It suggests a preset instead of generating. Decline it and run your literal prompt. A preset restyles your map image, what you want is for it to animate INTO the flight.
The first render is close but not perfect. Two knobs. If the map-dive transition looks muddy, cut the first sentence of the shot structure and generate from the water-level shot instead, using the map as a plain reference. If the landmarks come out generic, make the two most famous ones more prominent in the prompt, they are what sells the location.
The meta prompt: any city on earth
You do not live at Coney Island. Give Claude your own annotated screenshot with this, and it writes the comprehensive prompt for your route:
Here is a satellite screenshot with a red flight path line drawn on it. Identify the location and the real landmarks along the route. Then write a comprehensive FPV drone video prompt for an AI video generator: 9:16 vertical, photorealistic, 8 to 10 seconds. Start the video ON this map image, dive into it, and resolve into real aerial footage that flies the exact red line. Include a timed shot structure (0-1.5s, 1.5-4s, 4-6s, 6-8s) that names the actual landmarks the line passes, concrete altitudes and banking moves, and a style block: aggressive cinematic FPV, camera roll in turns, speed ramps, motion blur, golden hour light, no text, no watermarks, no propellers visible.Where to use this
Openers and b-roll for reels, travel content for places you have not been yet, real estate and venue flyovers, music video shots.
One honest note. This is AI footage, not aerial photography. Using it as creative is fair game, selling it to a client as a real drone survey of their property is not. Label it AI where a platform asks, and never present generated footage as documentary fact.
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Frequently asked questions
You get free credits at signup, enough to test a couple of renders. Video generation runs on credits after that. Start at higgsfield.ai, the image-to-video mode is what you want.
Any place with recognizable features. Cities, coastlines, stadiums, and campuses work great. Empty fields and suburbs come out generic because the AI has nothing to anchor to. The meta prompt in this guide makes Claude name the landmarks on your specific route, which is what keeps it looking real.
Image-to-video with your annotated map as the start frame, 9:16 vertical, 8 to 10 seconds, audio off. If the tool recommends a preset, decline it and run the literal prompt.
No, that is the point. No drone, no permits, no pilot. If you want the original Google Earth Studio version of this trick, the first drone guide covers it.
As ad creative or content, yes. Do not sell it as real aerial photography or a site survey, and label it as AI-generated where the platform requires it.