A Dream Develops:
The first time I had the day-dream that led to the making of
this film was in the summer of 1997. I was 17 and at the bottom
of a latrine I’d dug in Honduras while working with a
group called Amigos
de las Americas. I could not have been happier anywhere
else. I was in a small community of no more than 500 people,
with no electricity or running water. Everything we ate was
grown within the community and I had a wonderful host family
there.
Sometimes though I would begin to miss family and friends and
would think about where they were and what they would be doing
at that time, in worlds that seemed so far away and so different.
Some of my friends were on the bustling streets of New York
and others were windsurfing on Maui. It was hard for me to imagine
all of us doing what we were doing in our respective worlds
all at once, but it was captivating to think about, and at night
I would lie there doing just that. I thought maybe one day I
would make a film called “Wednesday 3:00pm” and
film moments all around the world at that one time. I wrote
it down in a book
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Six Years Later:
Nearly six years later in March of 2003 I remember
vividly having the dream again. We were sitting on Grayton
Beach in Florida while taking a break from production on Expecting
Men, a documentary being made in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
At the beach my mind always drifts and at this time we were
just going to war in Iraq so pictures were flooding the news.
I would look out at the beautiful white sand and clear blue
water and wonder what it was like at that very moment to be
in Iraq. In my mind's eye, I saw a trooper standing beside
his truck in a sand storm and a scared family and a man strapping
explosives to his chest. It was impossible to imagine as I
rested on this beach that these things were happening somewhere
on this planet at that very moment. I could feel my mind burning
out and overloading just trying to comprehend everything that
was happening at once. I thought that the only way to really
see it would be to capture a moment on film and juxtapose
everything against everything else. I knew that one day I
had to make this project come to pass.
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The Opportunity Arises:
In the summer of 2003 I returned home to Portland,
Oregon where I founded Global Warming
Shave Ice: (“‘cause it’s only getting
hotta!”) and sold shave ice outside my old high school
to raise money for the films. Sure there are better ways to
raise money, but none that taste SO good. When winter arrived
I moved to Los Angeles where I slept in my van in my friends
garage for 2 months and worked on a television pilot for Nicky
Hilton’s manager and a Marilyn Manson Music Video. LA
was fun, but the accomodation was a bit cramped and Home was
calling me. In Portland I got what some might consider a normal
day-job and decided to try to orchestrate A Moment on
Earth at night. For the next 8 months I spent every night
developing the project and communicating with the filmmakers.
On August 5th and 6th, 2004 at 12:00pm GMT and again exactly
12 hours later just over 60
Filmmakers on all seven continents and in over 40 countries
captured the worlds first two Moments on Earth.
Watch Trailers
for both the films, explore the award-winning first Mosaic
and second Mosaic. Support the project by getting a copy of the DVDBook of the first Moment on Earth for yourself or a friend, and explore an online time-capsule of scenes from the second Moment.
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-- Jereme Axelrod |
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