Filmmaker Offers Time-Lapse View of Ground Zero Rebuild
In the fall of 2001 when the dust and ash from the World Trade Center were still in the air, a documentary filmmaker decided to photograph everything happening at ground zero.
In the fall of 2001 when the dust and ash from the World Trade Center were still in the air, a documentary filmmaker decided to photograph everything happening at ground zero. By the spring of 2002 three cameras were pointed at the pit, each taking one shot every five minutes, round the clock. Months later, three more cameras were added.
That was the beginning of Project Rebirth, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating a historical record of the rebuilding.
Today www.projectrebirth.org, a Web site produced with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and AOL , opens for public viewing. The site includes links to the architects who are building at ground zero; profiles of 10 people whose lives were altered by Sept. 11; an interview with Kevin Rampe, the president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation; the view from a live Web camera at the site; and a timeline that you can click on to watch short movies of milestone events there.
But the main attraction is the time-lapse photography, showing (on a very tiny screen, 31&Mac218;2 inches by 21&Mac218;2 inches) what the six cameras have been seeing all along. Each camera has a distinctive view and a different reason for being there.
Originally, Jim Whitaker, the documentary filmmaker, said he planned to photograph ground zero for seven years, but now he thinks he will keep the cameras running for at least 10, at a cost of some $8 million (and this is with the film being donated by Kodak and the processing by Deluxe). He said he was hoping that Project Rebirth would be one of the institutions represented at the World Trade Center site. If it is, he wants to install six screens in one room so that viewers can see the whole building process from all six angles over the course of 20 minutes.
If not, though, no shot will be lost. Whitaker, the president of Imagine Entertainment, the movie production company founded by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, plans to make a documentary with the time-lapse footage. (You can watch a trailer of the movie at the Web site.) And eventually everything that the six cameras have seen, millions of feet of film, he said, will go to the Library of Congress.
At first Whitaker approached ground zero with dread and anxiety, he said. But when he saw the pile of rubble visibly diminish in a matter of days, he started feeling more optimistic. He wanted to capture that feeling, he said, and the speed with which the cleanup was taking place. Time-lapse photography was the ticket.
What is most striking now from the time-lapse view, though, is just how slow the rebuilding has been. The days, the weeks, the snow, the rain, the shadows, the day, the night, the traffic, the seasons all pass. Meanwhile the pit remains. It is the most stable thing in the pictures. And that is the view that has been edited for the Web site.
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