Sam Raimi's dream of a 1,000-year camera

Director wants to capture urban history on film

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updated 3:05 p.m. ET June 25, 2004

CULVER CITY, Calif. - Sam Raimi hopes to remain in film a long time after he’s through making “Spider-Man” movies. For about 1,000 years.

Raimi wants to build the “Century Cam,” a network of cameras that would document the United States’ urban landscape for a millennium.

The proposal: Position cameras above all major American cities and shoot one frame — a 24th of a second of film — each day at noon. The frames would be strung together gradually to create a continuous chronicle of each city’s development.

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“It’s the same idea of all time-lapse photography, but over an outrageous amount of time,” Raimi told The Associated Press in an interview to promote “Spider-Man 2.” “So you could watch the city of Los Angeles rise, and maybe an earthquake might come in 300 years or a tidal wave.”

Along with natural disasters, the cameras would capture human rebuilding and demolition. Viewers could watch decades of change in minutes, much like the hero in George Pal’s “The Time Machine,” who saw landscapes radically altered as he shot forward in time.

At a frame a day, a year’s worth of shots over a particular city would add up to 15 seconds of film, a decade would blow by in two and a half minutes and a century would run 25 minutes. A full 1,000 years of film would last just over four hours.