These videos are given specific placement within the linear narrative on the story’s dedicated website, but they can be viewed individually and in any order on Bois’ YouTube channel.

The narrative takes the form of scrollable text messages, fake future-history documentation, Google Earth imagery, and intermittent YouTube videos which combine all of the previous media objects. His multimedia project 17776 depicts conversations between sentient deep-space satellites in a distant future where humanity has long been unable to reproduce, be injured, or die. Newspaper clippings and Google Earth images in The History of the Atlanta Falconsīois has also used YouTube itself as a tool in his forays into fiction storytelling. This creates a deliberately crude impression of what Walters must have seen and, by extension, must have felt during his ascent. He used Google Earth images to track Walters’ flight not just laterally, but through the “zoom out” function, vertically as well. In his 2015 video “Larry Walters has a flying lawn chair and a BB gun”, he told the story of a California man who attached giant weather balloons to his lawn chair and inadvertently floated nearly into outer space. As a YouTube non-fiction filmmaker, he gained a following for his unique use of imagery from Google Earth as an aesthetic backdrop to real-world narratives.

The History of the Atlanta Falcons comes with precedent from Bois’ work. It’s a film about real historical events which takes place entirely in a constructed virtual space, populated with graphs and figures, photos and newspaper clippings, building out something like a virtual investigation board. The entire documentary, which runs six hours and 53 minutes, is composed of virtual tracking shots across a single massive chart, which fills in with data points as the film’s narrative progresses chronologically through the titular team’s history. His 2021 film The History of the Atlanta Falcons features no talking head interviews, no archival footage of football games, almost no pre-existing moving images at all. While the subjects of his work are hardly revolutionary - his two most recent films cover the histories of individual American sports teams - they are radical departures from typical non-fiction cinema form. The contrast between the documentaries of filmmaker and journalist Jon Bois and more traditional entries in the medium becomes apparent almost immediately after beginning to watch one. Image from “Larry Walters has a flying lawn chair and a BB gun”

17776 by Jon Bois