Extra! Extra! Read all about it. Eastern is becoming the next Hollywood.
Over the past few weeks, senior communications major Amanda Dawson has filmed her very own version of a reality show on the St. Davids campus. The reality show is entitled Eastern Bachelor, and her rendition of it is for her senior seminar class.
“I had been doing research on reality shows for class and thought it would be a fun and fascinating project to take on,” Dawson said.
Dawson’s version of The Bachelor was similar to the television show. In the show, the bachelor searches for the woman of his dreams. He is introduced to many women with the hopes that one of them will be his special someone.
Senior Corey Copeland was the show’s bachelor, and some of the bachelorettes included sophomores Erin Taylor and Jenny Comer, juniors Rachel Schmitz and Jess Czop and seniors Karen Gelzhiser and Janice Blass.
It took Dawson’s cast and crew two full nights from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. and one morning from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. to film the necessary footage, and for payment they received nothing more than food.
According to Dawson, the hardest part of this experience was not having the proper equipment.
“Eastern was really great about letting me use locations, and my actors really let me take over their schedules, but when you have no equipment you are limited as to what you can do,” she said. “Thankfully, Kelly [Harrington] found some equipment to rent and borrow.”
Radnor Studio 21 lent the equipment to Dawson for her project, and luckily her crew, juniors Chelsea Zimmerman and Sarah Silveri and senior Kelly Harrington, had worked on past film projects together with her.
“I was blessed to have a crew on hand,” Dawson said.
The filming included a basketball date, a pizza date and a planetarium date.
Many of those involved had their own favorite aspects of the experience.
“The basketball group date was the best; it was fun to get out on the court and play basketball with the other girls and Corey; and the underlying drama made it all the more interesting,” Blass said.
“My favorite part was making the bloopers,” Copeland said.
When it came to learning experiences, The Bachelor project filming was full of them.
“I learned that there is a lot of editing and a lot of work that goes into just a short little film,” Taylor said. “We taped for a total of probably eight to ten hours, and [Amanda] has to cut it down to 15 minutes!”
“I have a new appreciation for the job of every person behind the scenes,” Comer said.
“I learned to believe in my dreams and trust myself,” Dawson said. “This was the experience of a lifetime, I was so blessed to find such a fun and enduring cast and the best crew on the East Coast! I am so happy that I got the chance to do something like this in my last semester in college.”