Once We Get There, alienating yet familiar

The film Once We Get There introduces an alienating yet familiar landscape of satellite images, tracks and sounds. We follow the minute by minute movements of animals, machines and people in Philadelphia. Although we constantly hear reality, we experience the movements within an abstract, two dimensional world of satellite photography.

Despite its meditative approach Once We Get There intensively questions our contemporary techno-society, where social connectivity and eavesdropping coexist and balances between empathic co-traveling and voyeurism.

The entire movie can be seen at the bottom of this web page.

Origins
The film Once We Get There originates from the project 250 Miles Crossing Philadelphia, produced during a seven months residency in Philadelphia (USA) by PolakVanBekkum.  
Without any crew present, protagonists (people, animals and vehicles in Philadelphia) recorded their own trajectories, sounds and private readings of the streets, allowing the filmmakers to get acquainted with their experiences only afterwards. The camera movements and positions were decided on in the studio. The editing is very modest: the audience gets the opportunity to travel with the protagonists, minutes on end (and might even afterwards continue their travels as all the recorded trajectories are also available, in actual time, via the website) The resulting film, or documentary, if you prefer, positions the audience as unwitting but emphatic voyeurs.

Multi Media
The project was completed in May 2016 with the cartographic interactive website 250 Miles Crossing Philadelphia that contains all recordings, walks, trajectories (in actual time) of all participants, even those not used in the film itself.

Recording method
The artists developed a new recording method and visualisation. Traditional film arises from a sound recording synchronized with 24 photos per second. Within Once We Get There the synchronization happens between a sound recording and a GPS track (one location per second). A wearable-technology bag that they named The Beagle was created to make the recordings. A special software plugin was developed to realise the synchronisation and to decide on the camera movements and camera positioning in the 3D world of Google Earth. This way a poetic gap between image and sound emerges and continues to work throughout the film.