Radio broadcast features new production team
A new radio show is coming to WZLY, created by Celina Reynes ’16. This will be Reynes’ second show for WZLY. Her first radio show, “The Eye,” was a series about an apocalyptic Wellesley, complete with a gigantic alien eye at the bottom of Lake Waban, ravenous squirrels, and crazy townies wreaking havoc on campus.
The show did not have much help by way of production; the writing and production team was a two-person team of that consisted of Reynes and Camille Bond ’17. Reynes and Bond struggled to air the 20 minute episodes on time.
“We kept promising episodes, and these episodes would be a week or two late. We also canceled the show after episode three due to how crazy it got. We had a 10-episode season planned, complete with a parallel-universe time twist that to this day I regret not being able to incorporate,” Reynes said.
Bond remembers how tough it was to work on “The Eye” with just the two of them.
“I remember both of us running around campus like lunatics the day before the first episode aired trying to post our flyers up everywhere. Still, it seemed to catch on after the first episode, especially within the WZLY circle,” Bond said.
Reynes said that despite not having that much publicity, the people who did listen to the show enjoyed the it. Reynes said a student at the Hoop even approached her to tell her she got high while listening to “The Eye,” which Reynes took as a compliment.
This year, Reynes is doing things differently. With Bond abroad this semester, she has learned from last year and has assembled a group of writers and voice actors to work on her second show, also called “The Eye.”
Reynes calls the style of writing “television for the radio.” The production of the show is much the same as the production of a television show: they have writers’ meetings, cast the show and work with a multiple-act script. Reynes says the writers also write as if the show were the radio-version of a television episode.
“I never really gave up on the first season of The Eye. I loved writing and producing TV for the radio. But when I started up the second season this year, I wasn’t going to do it without a team. I have a lot of great writers working with me on this project, now. They’re funny, they’re productive and together we’ve churned out an hour-long pilot to kick off our season,” Reynes said.
“The Eye” will not follow the episode-by-episode story arc that the first installment had, but will be an anthology of stories in which every episode will stand on its own.
Every two weeks a new episode will air. Reynes said the premise of “The Eye” this time around will be that WZLY has the ability to broadcast to other universes and report back to this universe.
The second installment of “The Eye” will be different from last year’s in more than just its story: the writers include more than just Celina and Camille.
“It’s been created by almost a dozen Wellesley students, and each one of us brought something new to the episode and the structure of the season as a whole,” Reynes said.
Shannon Mewes ’19 is a writer working on the second season of “The Eye.” Though she’s never written for a show for broadcast before, she has had a fantastic experience thus far.
“It’s been amazing to work on a team with such talented writers—I write so much better when I have a whole team to ask for advice and bounce ideas around. I feel like we’re all able to work really well together to produce great writing, and I hope ‘The Eye’ appeals to people as much as it appealed to me when I read Celina’s original description of the show,” Mewes said.
Ilana Meeker ’18 is also working on the show.
“As someone who is interested in creative writing, science fiction and potentially working in television, this has been a great experience for me. We write in a format which is used for episodes of both podcasts and TV, so this gives me some great practical experience. Our team is fantastic, and it is really cool to develop creative ideas with people who might think differently from you,” Meeker said.
“The Eye” premieres Thursday October 22 at 11:00 PM on WZLY.
