Nosh 404

Video

The tech community has always treated the 404 page like a sort of talent show. As its content is rarely seen, the error page presents an opportunity to do something unique and slightly daring. It’s the place where startups can reveal their creative side, take a few risks, and maybe even gain some acclaim.

We collaborated with the folks at Nosh to create a video that is loud, strange, and extravagant, and put it front and center on their site’s 404 error page.

The idea behind our video is that the page you are looking for is lost—a 404 error means “page not found”. For our 404 messaging, we took this concept literally and imagined the page as a physical being, a fugitive link on the run in the badlands.

Obviously, the most effective way to find a rogue page would be to hire a Special Forces unit, so that’s what we imagined Nosh would do.

We wanted to keep the video short, so we join the Spec-Ops mission in media res. Without any setup or context, we trusted viewers to get the joke and come along for the ride. Thankfully, they did.

The video immediately went viral, amassing over 1 million views, inspiring dozens of articles, and even receiving the award of “Best 404 Page in Internet History” from Time Magazine. For a few short days in 2012, the Nosh 404 error page won the internet, and our band of digital mercenaries-for-hire were the talk of the tech community.

In fact, the video was such a success that we thought we should give the Spec-Ops team a chance to market their skills to future clients…

Nosh 404 II

One year after their thrilling 404 mission, the Digital Special Forces unit were back at it again. This new video was framed as a promotional spot—a highlight reel of all the skills and tactics they can offer prospective clients in the web services sector.

We picked their five most marketable maneuvers and showed video footage of examples of each. I decided the names for these operations should include technical jargon that has a military feel or texture:

  1. Firewall Removal and Circumnavigation

  2. Virus Removal and Selective Page Deletion

  3. Popup Blocking

  4. Hard Drive Defragmentation and Cleanup

  5. Competitive Website Sabotage and Impairment

We were excited to join forces again and expand on the weird universe we had built in 2012, where webpages are giant, crudely designed cardboard signs, and our small design team is essentially a Spec-Ops military unit.

That team consisted of Alex Cornell (director), Phil Mills, Tobie Windham, Michael Chang, Josh Vekhter, and myself. The experience was shot using 5DMKII with a 24-105mm lens, with all post work being done by Alex in Final Cut 7 and After Effects 5.5.