<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"If a bunch of musicians get filmed in a national park and no one is around to hear them, can they make an impact? That's the pseudo-question asked by the National Parks Project, a collaborative film, music, television and new media project aimed at raising awareness and drumming up support for Canada's national parks.\nFrom May to October of last year, the project sent out groups of three musicians and one filmmaker to 13 national parks (one in each province and territory) to capture their experiences in a short film and soundtrack. Those clips are set to be distributed in four ways on March 19: as a making-of television documentary airing on Discovery World HD, a set of short films shown at film festivals, a soundtrack collection of the best music, and an online, interactive portal to each of the 13 parks visited.\n\n\n\n\nThe National Parks Project is a collaboration between FilmCAN and Primitive Entertainment in conjunction with Parks Canada and Discover World HD. The site is part of the centennial of Parks Canada, the world's first ever parks service.\nMore than 50 artists took part, including members of Broken Social Scene, the Smashing Pumpkins, Sam Roberts and both established and greenhorn directors. The oddball pairings resulted in unique collaborations inspired by the wilderness. Each quartet (three musicians, one director) was selected with the aim of putting together people that have never worked together before, in the spirit of exploring unfamiliar ground.\nThat sense of exploration is key to the project's philanthropic goal. \"One of the things we really hoped this would be was to connect to the environmental angle but without the didacticism,\" said Joel McConvey, one of the producers behind the project. \"You don't have to explain to people why [the parks] are important when you can show people how magnificent they are. When you have a beautiful shot of an old growth forest, we're showing these people why these are worth protecting in a different way. It's a way to use art as awareness.\"\n\n\nNational Parks Project - Trailer from Ryan J. Noth on Vimeo.\n\n\nTo help, McConvey said the web portal was launched as a way for people to continue exploring the parks. Each week, project producers will add content from a new park, including extra footage, music recordings, artist diaries and lyric notebooks. Those 13 trips created a huge amount of musical collaborations, which the Parks team has whittled down to an EP and LP. All profits from those sales will go to the Nature Conservancy, a non-profit dedicated to protecting the parks.\nLest you think the trips were all sunshine and roses, the crew skipped posh hotels to experience the wilderness first-hand. \"It was camping, it was full on - they were outside for the full time,\" McConvey said. \"It was pretty extreme, we wanted to give them a genuine wilderness experience.\" McConvey said one group of artists took a five-day trek back to humanity after being dropped off by plane at the Nahanni River in the North West Territories. Another trip to Sirmilik in Nunavut had the artists camping out on an actual ice flow.\n\n\n\n\nStrangers to the wilderness, the artists act as a kind of proxy for users at home as they click through the site and follow along each week. The real question is whether seeing these parks with fresh eyes will then make the audience care about them.\nWhat do you think? Are virtual tours enough to make you care about conservation issues? Does social good work even without a direct ask?"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/03/18/national-parks-project/>