Canton High School Graduates Look to Document Journey, Landscapes

Last year Evan Camporeale inspired local residents with  a film that showed some of the areas most beautiful landscapes through a series of time-lapse images.

Now Camporeale and a group of fellow Canton High School graduates are setting their sites on a broader goal — to document the both the destinations and the journey during an eight-week cross-country trip dubbed the Motherland Expedition.

The students' goal is to use time-lapse and sequence imagery as they travel to places like Rocky Mountain National Park, Arches National Park, Moab, UT and Acadia National Park. 

To help with the project, the students have started a kickstarter fundraising campaign. The hope is to raise $3,600 for camera and related film equipment. Each participant has raised approximately $2,000 to cover his or her own expenses, such as food, gas and national park passes.

Camporeale, a film major at University of Rhode Island and Zoë Miller, who is pursuing environmental studies at Ithaca College, came up with the concept and originally planned the trip for last summer. But funding and other issues arose. Since then they expanded the goal and several friends decided to join the journey. Planning to take the trip and/or help are David Shahverdian, a Spanish and Linguistics major at the University of Maryland; Jeremy Stanhope, a criminal justice major at Tunxis Community College and Deanna Nappi, a geology major at Hamilton College. 

"This is about going outside our comfort zones and living in the now," Miller said in a trailer created for the project. "For us it is much more than a vacation or adventure. It's a soul searching journey." 

Camporeale said the story would be one written by "the experience we have, the people we meet and everything that life has to teach us."

"Our fears, struggles triumphs and epiphanies will be put into a feature to share with whoever wants to come on a journey with us," he added.

As with all kickstarter projects, various gifting levels do come with perks. Find out more about the project at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1637461650/motherland-expedition