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Did Air Force One get tagged? |
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Written by ASAP
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Wednesday, 26 April 2006 |
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Did they or didn’t they?
The grainy, two-minute Web video — showing hooded graffiti artists who climb barbed-wire fences and sneak past guards with dogs to spray graffiti on President Bush’s jet — was so convincing the Air Force wasn’t immediately certain whether the president’s plane had been targeted. In fact, Bush’s plane was safe.
The pranksters behind the video revealed the biggest ingredient for their hoax: a rented 747 in California painted to look almost exactly like Air Force One.
The video, available at stillfree.com, was elaborately produced for New York-based Marc Ecko Enterprises, a fashion and lifestyles company whose products are aimed at urban youths.
In an exclusive behind-the-scenes interview Friday, Ecko acknowledged his company rented a 747 cargo jet at San Bernadino’s airport and covertly painted one side to look like Air Force One. Employees signed secrecy agreements and worked clandestinely inside a giant hangar until the night the video was made.
“I wanted to do something culturally significant, wanted to create a real pop-culture moment,” Ecko says. “It’s this completely irreverent, over-the-top thing that could really never happen: this five-dollar can of paint putting a pimple on this Goliath.”
Special attention was paid to details: The graffiti artists race in darkness across a golf course, similar to the one located near Andrews Air Force Base. In “Blair Witch” style cinema, the camera jostles and occasionally loses focus. The plane, brightly lit on the runway, is protected by roaming emergency vehicles and behind barbed-wire fences. Filmmakers added an image of Air Force One’s actual hangar, the only element that was digitally manipulated.
“That’s such a throw-away moment that we just put in there to give the bloggers and people really studying this a bit more to be confused about,” said Patrick Milling Smith of Smuggler, a Los Angeles production company that worked on the video.
The video -- accompanied by incredulous sentiments -- spread quickly across the Internet via blogs, instant-messages and e-mails. Ecko’s company says the video was downloaded more than 1 million times and now can be found on more than 200 other Web sites. CNN and other television news networks have aired portions.
“It’s just completely taken on a life in such a short period of time,” says David Droga, chief of Droga 5, the advertising company Ecko hired for the project.
Ecko won’t say how much he spent on the video.
“It’s a pretty expensive thing,” Droga admits. “That’s one of the reasons why it feels authentic. You look at this and it’s like, it’s really shot like it’s some kids who are not filmmakers; they’re graffiti artists and they’re doing something (and) they might get shot any minute.”
Some mainstream Web sites treated the stunt as authentic. One pronounced the video footage “did not permit denial” and added, “These lunatics scaled the fence and applied a custom paint job to the big chariot.” But the pranksters said there were clues all along this was never intended to be taken seriously.
A legal disclaimer on another part of the Web site warned viewers the video “does not depict a real event.” Early in the clip, one of the graffiti artists mutters, “This never happened.”
Outsiders pointed to other telltale inconsistencies. Aviation buffs noted the jet engines in the video were slightly different than those on Air Force One, and the cargo jet is missing antennas mounted on the top of the president’s actual plane.
Still, it hasn’t slowed downloads.
“The more you deny something, the more people believe it’s real,” Droga said. “The conspiracy theorists think the disclaimer is fake. Someone told me that because the Pentagon denied it, it must be real.”
ON THE NET
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