September 13, 2001

4:41 PM

Creepy Animationfrom CNN shows the disasters in 3d... its real food for thought to think about some dude in an SGI shirt tweaking colors on the explosion plugin while a project manager asks if the more pizazz can be added... For a neat trick, notice you can watch from below as the building sinks underground (use all your mouse buttons)
posted by mantid (7 comments total)

Interesting, though I would have liked it if they would have show a general idea of where the tower came to rest (coverage).
posted by tomplus2 at 4:46 PM on September 13, 2001

On a similar note, I was watching ABC news tonight, they were discussing how the terrorists might have learned how to fly an airliner. They had interviews with instructors from the flight school in Florida, and shots of people in flight simulators. Next, they showed a computer, with a copy of Microsoft Flight Simlutor lying on the table next to it. Then, they had someone fly an airplane into the WTC. As the plane apporached the buildings, they zoomed into the screen, and showed the plane enter the building. I was really shocked that they had such poor judgement to show such a thing. What could possibly be gained by showing that? I can understand mentioning the possibility, but to go ahead and actually show it, well, thats just bad taste and poor judgement.
posted by skwm at 4:49 PM on September 13, 2001

I'm with you skwm. They have already debunked the MS Flight Simulator speculation, this sounds like they are really slipping into sensationalism.

as for this animation, although crude, it is pretty amazing to have this at such an early date.
posted by hotdoughnutsnow at 5:06 PM on September 13, 2001

Creepy, dehumanising and quite useless, I thought.
posted by MiguelCardoso at 5:27 PM on September 13, 2001

Nothing crude about this Flash presentation (in Spanish) at:
http://www.elpais.es/multimedia/internacional/atentado.html (link via kottke.org). Amazing that this was done in less than 36 hours.

Miguel, there are plenty of personal accounts out there. This is purely objective, and a tremendously useful aid for understanding exactly what happened.
posted by jeffhoward at 6:38 PM on September 13, 2001

Thanks, Jeff Howard - this actually helped. Flightinformer.com's maps are probably more accurate but not as direct.
Here in Portugal(although we are not exactly in love with Spain...)we get "El Pais" every morning about eight. It's a great newspaper.A bit too left-wing but very fair and extraordinarily well written.
Check it out!
posted by MiguelCardoso at 8:19 PM on September 13, 2001

The same paper has another good animation about the structure of the buildings and why they collapsed.

Link from RRE digest.
posted by crunchburger at 6:32 AM on September 14, 2001