Northwest Territories Map

Mixing media, Web documentary shows how storytelling is evolving

The Web documentary "Welcome to Pine Point" offers a peek into what the future of books, documentaries and other online media can be.

Combining video, photographs, text, music and narration and then blurring the boundaries among them, the project pushes storytelling and documentary filmmaking into new territory.

"Welcome to Pine Point" is the story of a small lead and zinc mining town in Canada's Northwest Territories that physically disappeared from the map after the mines closed in 1988.

With the sole employer gone, buildings were relocated or demolished, and everyone left for greener pastures. Current photographs show empty streets with trees sprouting through them, along with painted crosswalks that haven't faded away.

"Most industry towns, after losing their purpose, attempt resurrections, reinventions, or just slowly wither away. In Pine Point, they decided to erase the town from the face of the Earth," reads a block of text, which is made more poignant by being superimposed on video of a figure skater on ice during the town's final winter carnival.

This 2011 Web documentary was produced by The National Film Board of Canada. It was created by Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons of Vancouver, a team of media designers also known as The Goggles. "Welcome To Pine Point" won two Webbys, along with several other awards.

Mr. Simons and Mr. Shoebridge were inspired by a website called Pine Point Revisited. It was created by Richard Cloutier, a former resident of the town, who gathered an amazing online photo archive of the long-gone town.

The project started out as a book "about the death of the photo album as a way to house memories," the creators say on their website. But it morphed into a living photo album -- an interactive, constantly evolving way to share those memories with a larger community.

The documentary centers on a small group of former residents who grew up there and went to high school together, and it revisits them as adults living elsewhere.

"For me it's weird to say I don't have a hometown anymore, because it's not there," one says.

Although the town is gone, the website has preserved it as an online community, and the documentary has given it a new kind of life. Hearing the voices of Pine Point's residents, seeing how they worked and played and lived, leaves the viewer with a powerful connection to an obscure and distant place.

Through skillful use of interviews and reminiscences, yearbook photos and mementoes, "Welcome to Pine Point" ultimately shows viewers the way memories are preserved and recast with the passing of time.

Map of Northwest Territories Province | Map of Canada Cities ...

Located in arctic Canada, the breadth borders Canada's two added territories, Yukon to the west and Nunavut to the east, and three provinces: British Columbia to the southwest, Alberta and Saskatchewan to the south. It has a acreage breadth of 1,140,835 aboveboard kilometres (440,000 sq mi) and a citizenry of 41,464 as of the 2006 census, an access of 11.0% from 2001. In 1967 Yellowknife became the basic as a aftereffect of recommendations by the Carrothers Commission. Geographical appearance accommodate Great Bear Lake, the better basin absolutely aural Canada, Keller Basin and Great Slave Lake, as able-bodied as the Mackenzie River and the canyons of the Nahanni Civic Esplanade Reserve, a civic esplanade and UNESCO World Heritage Site. Territorial islands in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago accommodate Banks Island, Borden Island, Prince Patrick Island, and genitalia of Victoria Island and Melville Island. The accomplished point is Mount Nirvana abreast the bound with Yukon at an acclivity of 2,773 metres (9,098 ft).

Preliminary map Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, (two sheets and descriptive notes)

Giauque Lake map-area, Northwest Territories

Northwest Territories

Academic American encyclopedia

Journal of geophysical research, Space physics