Ty Morin is Trying To Meet All His Facebook Friends in Person

Ty Morin is embarking on a 4-year voyage around the world, meeting new people, trying new foods, and filming the whole thing as he — wait for it — meets all 788 of his Facebook friends.

While the average Facebook user has 229 friends and hasn't met 7% in person (that's about 16), Morin said there's a good chance that "at least half of those 788 people, I've never even spoken to."

A photographer and recent college graduate from the state of Connecticut, Morin recently launched a Kickstarter page for online donations to fund his journey.

With each new "friend" he meets, he will take their portrait for a photography exhibition and record their meeting on video for a documentary called Friend Request: Accepted.

"The goal of this project is to reconnect with people," he explained on his Kickstarter page. "No more hiding behind the screen of social media. Stop looking down at your phone and pretending you're texting your BFF when you walk by an old friend from high school. Lets [sic] get out there and remind people what it's like to have a face to face conversation with someone."

With three days to go to raise money on the page, Morin has raised over $13,000. His original goal was only $5,000 to purchase film, materials to develop the pictures, and gas.

So far, he has photographed about 25 friends, including a tattoo artist, a weightlifter, a modern dancer, and a firefighter.

"Everyone has something that’s interesting about them," Morin said. "I'm trying to capture everybody doing what they love. The idea here isn't to get everyone in a room and fire off hundreds of pictures one after another. I want to sit down with everyone and witness what gets their blood pumping."

He expects it will take three or four years to connect with everyone.

While several other people have hit the road to try to meet all of their Facebook friends, none have quite reached their total. Another photographer started a project in 2010 to try to photograph all of her friends, a road tripper met 300 of his 1,200 friends in one month, and a Chicago-area woman set out to meet all of her Facebook friends in order to combat her social anxiety in 2011 — she ended up meeting 292 out of 325.

"I'll roll with the punches, making this my number one priority until it's Sundance material," Morin promised.

While Ty obviously isn't accepting any new friend requests, you can still subscribe to his updates on his Facebook profile. You can also "like" his photography page, where he also provides updates on the project.

Look out for Ty again in 2017, when his movie debuts — or maybe even in your hometown, visiting your friends.