A love letter to Key West, one frame at a time

About TimeFlies

TimeFlies started by accident, in the strangest spring the island has ever known. When the pandemic closed Key West in 2020, Chris Sloan went out with his cameras and filmed the empty streets. The result was a film called 66 Days: Paradise Interrupted, a record of a world famous town gone completely quiet. He called it a beautiful zombie apocalypse. He also realized he did not want to stop filming.

What was supposed to take a week took five years. Chris earned his FAA drone certification, worked through the clearances that come with one of the most regulated airspaces in America, and set cameras all over the island. Some days that meant five of them running at once on the roof of the La Concha hotel, watching a single day pass from sunrise to sunset. The series grew into thirteen films organized by neighborhood, covering Key West from the air, the sea, and the streets, from Mallory Square to the salt ponds, from Bahama Village to Stock Island. Editing took another year and a half, with John MacDonald and Jesus Martinez cutting thousands of hours of footage into films you can watch over a cup of Cuban coffee.

The whole series is free. It is not for sale, and it never will be. Chris donated the films to the Florida Keys tourism council so anyone can watch them, and he has talked about one day building a permanent installation: a giant interactive map of the island with the films playing in the neighborhoods where they were made. This site is that idea, built for the web. The films are a snapshot of today and a permanent record for tomorrow, because so much of what they show will someday be gone.

The series is dedicated to the memory of Cheryl and Crystal Cates.

About Chris Sloan

Chris Sloan first drove to Key West on an impulse over Memorial Day weekend in 1990, fresh from Oklahoma by way of Miami, with no reservations and no plan. He bought a bicycle, had lunch at Pepe’s, could not find a room anywhere, and drove home at four in the morning completely hooked. He has said the island left him wanting a lot more. Thirty five years later he splits his time between Miami and a home in Old Town, and after visiting fifty countries and all fifty states he still says he would trade all of it for everything south of the county line.

Professionally, Chris is an Emmy winning television producer and the founder of 2C Media, a Miami production company that makes content and marketing campaigns for major networks, studios, and streaming services. Before that he held senior roles at NBC, CBS, Discovery Networks, TLC, and USA Network. He is also a longtime aviation journalist and the curator of TheAirchive.net, the largest online museum of commercial aviation.

With his wife Carla and son Caleb, Chris runs Caleb and Calder Sloan’s Awesome Foundation, a nonprofit named for his late son Calder that responds to natural disasters, helps families in need, and supports grief programs for children. In Key West the foundation backs local organizations and mentors student filmmakers at Key West High School. His advice for visiting the island is simple: do not bring a car, do not bring a plan, just walk outside and turn right or turn left.