In 1998, I found my self on the verge of a frightening reality. I was about to graduate with a near 6-figure debt and a piece of paper certifying me as a ‘Sculptor’. And that is why I started working with computers.
I was slowly teaching myself Photoshop and Flash 3. I found the textbooks for learning these programs to be horribly boring. I recall very vividly one of the chapters in the Photoshop book directing me to draw a fuzzy selection around the fisherman in the image they provided. It was a misty vignette for a River-Runs-Through-It-inspired sentimentality, and I was bored.
Not surprisingly, I found that I was more driven and interested by the prospect of swapping heads in photos of people I knew. Eventually, swapping heads turned into adding penises. I was inspired by a friend’s personal art project. He would take a GAP or J-Crew catalogue and for a single one of the models, he would paste in a photo of the tip of a penis just peeking out the top of some smart khakis. He would then return these modified catalogues to the store and leave them in the stack for others to take.
After a few dozen heads and a few hundred penises, I decided I should start working on portfolio pieces. The work I had been doing wasn’t quite appropriate. I needed something else. I decided on creating a fake corporation and I would do some logo options and create different styles for business cards and potential websites. I played around with some fake pharmaceutical product names like “Pill-ex” and “Labrosine” and “Engorgetech”. Nothing quite felt right. Until shift-9. The ‘(’ character of the Zapf Dingbats font. The airplane icon.
The airplane changed everything. This little four-engine wonder was perfect. It would be the seed from which my fake company would grow but I still needed a name. Something related to airplanes and the internet and perhaps it should have a number in the name and hmm… What should it be?
I had always loved flying. It might be related to my father being a navigator for the U.S.Air Force and us growing up next to an Army/Air Force base. Flying was this strange thing that made my insides feel funny and my ears pop and I could finally see what the tops of clouds looked like and then we would land and I would be someplace new and exciting. Flying was fun. Until I grew to be 6′5″. Then it stopped being fun but that is a gripe for another day.
My fake company would be an airline. It would be both an airline and a specific flight, or maybe just a store that sells flight-related stuff. I recall my first logo attempts looked a lot like this.
Never content to blindly follow a fad, I chose to tweak the Helvetica ultra-light meets Helvetica black logotype formula with the addition of some Din Mittelschrift digits and the super awesome Dingbats airplane. And drop shadow! I never thought far enough ahead to understand why I had chosen ‘404′, aside from the fact that it was a number associated with a file not being found. I think the number was just in my mind so I went with it.
Skip a couple years ahead to the summer of 2001. I was thinking about making version 5 of my Flash experiments portfolio site. All of the previous versions were related to the airline theme somehow. The first couple versions of my portfolio showcased some movement experiments that were based on the visuals seen on the control tower radar screens. By the third version, I had switched to a navigation structure that was based on the seating arrangement on commercial jets. Each new project was represented by a taken seat, which unfortunately made it seem like I had nothing to show because there were a couple hundred empty seats and only a small handful of taken ones. After version 4 had been online for a long while, I decided I wanted things to take a slightly darker turn.
It was around that time I started to become fascinated by the idea of dying in a plane crash. Not to say I wanted to experience it personally. I was interested in death by flying because unlike gunshot wounds or car crashes or cancer or AIDS, the time that elapses between finding out you are likely about to die and actually dying is sickeningly long and horrifically short at the same time. Assuming the plane doesn’t run blindly into a mountainside, you are looking at a couple minutes of having to ponder just how much fire you will have to endure before the sweet release.
With a gunshot or car crash, the worst part is over before you even have a chance to think about how horrible it might be. I am generalizing of course. This little musing doesn’t take into account someone who is being held at gunpoint, or more topically, someone in a Prius. ZING!
With a degenerative disease, you have a prolonged misery but even with a worst case scenarios, you usually have at least a few days to be able to mend some relationships and say your goodbyes. In the plane about to to crash into the Pacific, you don’t even have the luxury of being able to make a phone-call. Maybe a few might get through on their cell phones but most will die with full awareness of how horrible it is going to be for relatives and loved ones to not be able to hear some final words. On a side note, I think planes should come with personal recorders in each seat so in the event of an impending crash, the passengers have a chance to save their parting message into the black box.
By the time I got around to thinking about version 5, I decided to take down version 4 and leave nothing at flight404.com until I could figure out the next steps. By now, I had established a minor reputation for doing some interesting things with Macromedia’s Flash. Upon finding a 404:file not found page at my site, numerous people asked via email what had happened to the site. “Where has flight404 gone?” and “What happened to flight404?”.
That is when I decided to base my next site on the idea of a plane catastrophe. Flight404 was going to disappear and a lot of people were going to die. The story was this:
Flight404, carrying 218 passengers and crew, has experienced what seems to be a supernatural event. At approximately 4:48 pm EST on September 6, while on route from Boston’s Logan Airport to Gatwick Airport outside London, Flight404 vanished into a clear blue sky approximately 40 miles off the coast of Newfoundland.
At a press conference held at Logan Airport, a visibly shaken member of the NTSB offered the following statement.
“As far as we can determine, the entirety of the Boeing 777, along with the seats, luggage, clothing on the passengers… basically, anything not biological, disappeared at around 27,000 feet, dropping the passengers and crew into the Atlantic.”
This new version of Flight404 was going to be a narrative. I would still post Flash experiments, but it would be intertwined with my personal search to try and find out why and how this event transpired. I began to research. I looked on eBay for people that were selling flight data recorders. Surprisingly, there were several. I ended up buying one from an ex pilot for American Airlines. He was very nice and gave me a bunch of airport maps. I asked him very odd questions like, “So… if a plane were to disappear over the Atlantic, how would Flight Control find out about it and what protocol do they follow to deal with this event,” and “If you were flying a plane nearby a plane that suddenly disappears, would you be required to divert your course and investigate?”. He didn’t give me very good answers.
Flight Recorder with water-activated sonar beacon.
Maps and approach vectors for most major airports around the world.
I had the first few bits of the story written. I would say that I was contacted by some of the family of people lost on Flight404 asking that I look into the events and try to find out what happened and if there was a government coverup. I created a few Flash sketches to add to the portfolio section of the site. These projects were also navigated to using an airplane floor-plan. I also had projects to represent the position of the pilot and first officer. I gave everyone names. I even wrote out the transcript for the cockpit voice recorder for when the black box would eventually be found, oddly not at the bottom of the Atlantic but in a field 10 miles north of Boston.
I had the homepage animation all set. After everything loaded, white dots would begin to fell from the top of the screen and when they hit the bottom of the screen, they would turn into gravestone markers. I had the first bit of the narrative written. I had a handful of projects in the portfolio section. I was ready to launch but there was a bug in my navigation that I could not figure out. I had some weird sorting issue for the projects so if I clicked on project 15D, 14D would try to load but I just couldn’t find this simple indexing error. I decided to postpone the launch. I would go to sleep and figure out the bug the next day. That was September 10th, 2001.
Two weeks later, President Bush raised the White House flag back to full mast so I decided to launch the site. I put a lot of work into this site and I wasn’t going to scrap it just because some terrorists decided to crash some planes. I put a notice on the home page indicating my feelings on the subject. I explained that I had been working on the site concept for over three months and that I had intended to launch on the 10th. I didn’t want to throw away all that hard work and start from scratch. I wanted to get on with my life.
Fairly quickly, the site made the rounds on the usual Flash forums and the comments were somewhat scathing. I was told that I was sick and that I was trying to profit from an act of terrorism. I was accused of taking advantage of an American tragedy. I was eventually interviewed by the New York Times. I got a $3000 server bill in the first month and eventually my site was shut down until I could pay off the debt.
It lasted for a few months. The storyline got more and more convoluted and I wrote myself into a decent sized hole. I quit updating after cops escorted me off a parking garage roof in downtown Boston. I had been shooting video of the planes taking off from Logan airport, which is a couple miles away. Some people on the upper floor of a nearby hotel saw me and decided I looked suspicious enough to warrant calling the police. I got annoyed. Version 6 arrived soon after.
