Mission:
To document the entire reconstruction of the World Trade Center site.

Background:
Project Rebirth is a nonprofit organization dedicated to documenting with time-lapse photography the day-by-day rebuilding of the World Trade Center site in New York City. It was conceived and is directed by Jim Whitaker, a documentary filmmaker and president of Imagine Entertainment, the production company founded by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. For the project, six motion-picture cameras are set at different heights, from ground level to the forty-seventh floor of an office building, surrounding the sixteen acres that comprise Ground Zero. Each camera exposes a frame of film every five minutes twenty-four hours a day, and will continue to do so until reconstruction is completed; this may take ten years. The result will be a twenty-minute time-lapse movie that will show the rebuilding of the site through the seasons and the years. The final film is intended for a future museum memorial installation and a feature-length documentary. Whitaker calls the film-in-the-making "a meditation on resilience, optimism, and hope." Project Rebirth's founding sponsor, Aon Corporation, has committed long-term support in memory of 175 of its employees whose lives were lost on 9/11. Web site sponsors are the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, America Online, and WeatherBug.

Outstanding Features:
A highlight of the Web site is a preliminary trailer of the movie, shown on a very small screen. An amalgam of images from all six cameras is accessible from the home page, which also features a live Web cam shot that changes every five minutes, and a timeline from March 11, 2002, the six-month anniversary of 9/11, to the present that contains time-lapse photography from the vantage point of each camera.