The National Park Service is celebrating its centennial this year, and already 2016 is on track to break records for the number of visitors at national parks in Wyoming. But if you can’t make it to a national park this summer, there’s a new way to see one right from your computer or smartphone.
More Than Just Parks is a project by brothers Will and Jim Pattiz, who have set out to document every national park with its own short film. Each video is a few minutes long and features time lapse photography of landscapes and wildlife.
Jim Pattiz said the project was partly inspired by their first visit to the American West after growing up on the East Coast.
“It was like going to another planet. Especially when you go into these national parks and you can find these just amazing landscapes that you can’t find anywhere else. And each park is unique, so that idea of that was something we wanted to share with as many people as we could,” he said.
Pattiz said the two are hoping to make the beauty of national parks accessible to everyone.
“If we make them really short anybody can watch them at basically any time, and they can get inspired to actually get out and experience these places for themselves,” he said.
Will Pattiz said visiting a national park was life changing for him, and that the name of the project honors the experience each visitor has in a national park.
“We don’t want to necessarily peg down what More Than Just Parks means. I think it means different things to different people,” he said.
So far the two have produced videos of eight different parks, including Grand Teton National Park.
https://vimeo.com/174538286">GRAND TETON 8K from https://vimeo.com/morethanjustparks">More Than Just Parks on Vimeo.
