The film gives an eagle's view of the 9/11 memorial project guardian.co.uk

On Saturday the world marks nine years since 9/11 and the countdown begins to the 10th anniversary of the terror attacks. With just a year to go, New York City is desperate to have something to show for it.

The first part of the World Trade Centre site to be finished and open to the public from 12 September 2011 will be the memorial gardens, a sombre place dominated by waterfalls and shaded by oak trees.

The 9/11 memorial committee has produced an animation of the project that shows how the site should look when it is finished. The film begins with the camera sweeping across the water and over lower Manhattan.

Then it rises to give an eagle's view of the World Trade Centre site, flying over the diamonds atop Lord Foster's second tower and the roof of the third tower designed by Lord Rogers (neither of which will be completed for several years) to look down on the memorial garden itself.

The garden has at its heart the footprints of the twin towers that collapsed on 11 September 2001 after being struck by planes hijacked by al-Qaida suicide bombers. The square holes will, by next September, have been turned into giant waterfalls lined with black granite and bearing the names of the almost 3,000 people who died in the attacks.

In between the two footprints will be the entrance to the memorial museum that will act as both a historical account of the attacks and a commemoration of the victims. Their names and photographs will be seen below ground level in the place once occupied by the south tower, with mementos donated by relatives.

Artefacts from the original twin towers have been placed in the museum's foyer. These include the so-called "survivors' staircase" down which many people made their escape and the last column – the last steel girder removed from the massive pile of rubble – which bears the names of several of those who died.