The Website That Caught the Police
How we faked a crime scene for the Punisher movie website and accidentally staged one too real —Dispatches from early 2000s Shoreditch
Let me tell you a story…
It began with a phone call and no plan, as these things often did.
A producer from Lionsgate Films. Breathless, direct.
“We need a website. For The Punisher.”
“Do you have any assets?”
“No,” she said. “Nothing yet. But we need something live ASAP.”
Click.
That was it.
It was 2004, and we lived and worked in a warehouse behind an old railway bridge in Plough Yard, Shoreditch. The kind of place no one passed through unless they had a reason. The bridge loomed above us, blackened with soot, creaking faintly as trains rattled. The whole area was emptied at night - deserted apart from us, and the odd fox slinking between bins. The only signs of life were the greasy spoons on wheels: burger vans parked along Shoreditch High Street, feeding clubbers and cab drivers with sausages, chips, and onions fried until their smell drifted through the night- sharp, greasy, inescapable.
We sat in our flat-studio, staring at our Macs and the blankness of the brief.
“If they don’t give us a crime scene,” I said, “we’ll make one.”
A simple idea: a chalk outline. A trail of blood.
The suggestion of a story without telling too much.
I mixed the blood in the kitchen sink with blue Fairy liquid and red food dye. The consistency was perfect: thick, glossy, sinister. We packed the chalk and the camera (a chunky DV cam we’d borrowed from a friend) and stepped out into the courtyard, where the air hung damp with onion grease and cold concrete.
The alley beside the railway bridge was precisely what we needed. Cracked pavement. Rusted walls. Peeling graffiti. No one lived there. No one came by. It was quiet, apart from the faint rattle of trains and the muffled thump of a distant nightclub beat.
Florian lay down on the ground. I knelt beside him, tracing his body in chalk. The scrape of it echoed louder than expected. Then I drizzled the blood, slow and deliberate, letting it seep into the cracks. We adjusted the angles, took photos, and shot short clips. The alley felt like it was holding its breath.
And then, out of nowhere, headlights. A car crept in, slowly following the blood trail.
A police car.
We froze.
The window rolled down.
The officer looked at us, at Florian on the ground, at the pool of blood.
“What are you doing?”
I looked up, dead serious.
“We’re making a website.”
Silence.
Just the low hum of the engine and the hiss of a passing train.
The officer blinked. Glanced at his partner. Looked back at us.
“…Right.”
They sat there for another moment. I held up the Fairy liquid bottle as proof. Then, slowly, they nodded and drove away.
We packed up quickly, trying not to laugh until we returned safely inside. Then we collapsed. Hysterical.
The photos were exactly what we needed. Rough, eerie, suggestive.
We built the teaser site in Flash5 on our old Macs, piecing it together late into the night: Minimal, cryptic, a digital whisper.
Later, when the full Punisher website project came, we went deeper: an empty room to explore, newspaper clippings scattered, secret links branching into satellite sites, a sunlit villa with something wrong in the background, and a video camera on a desk, waiting for the visitors to press play.
No hand-holding.
No instructions.
Just the invitation: look closer.
It’s all gone now -
not just the pixels and code, but the brick and mortar too.
The teaser site. The final site.
The railway bridge. The warehouse where we lived and worked.
Even the adjacent building, later flattened to make way for a new development.
Only memories remain. A few grainy images and a long-lost screengrab.
But sometimes, walking through Shoreditch late at night,
I catch the ghost-smell of fried onions drifting through the air.
And for a moment, I’m there again -
in that damp alley under the bridge, with the city holding its breath around us.
Chalk in one hand, fake blood in the other -
telling the police, without irony:
“We’re making a website.”
— Alexandra
Dispatches from the Lost Internet
Stories from my Hi-ReS! years: strange, cinematic digital folklore from the 2000s that still echoes into today’s AI age. Behind-the-scenes moments, creative experiments, and the invisible skills behind work that lingers.
Reflections on design, storytelling, and human futures by Alexandra Jugović. © 2025
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