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BY MAKI SOMOSOT

In print | Published April 2, 2009 — Updated April 06, 2009 23:27

Correction Appended

The great unknown looms ahead for the graduating class of ’09. That which is known as the outside, the actual “real” world beyond the comfortable college bubble, awaits. So it is only reasonable that these Swarthmore veterans would want to preserve their fondest college memories and remember the best, the worst and the ugliest of times.

Enter “Swarthmore Rescripted,” the newest “Fun Fun’d” film project. Essentially a video yearbook that will serve as a remembrance for seniors about their collective Swarthmore experiences and personal journeys throughout college, “Swarthmore Rescripted” is spearheaded by Senior Class Officers Loretta Gary ’09, Martha Marrazza ’09, Armando Leon ’09, Juliana Macri ’09 and Christopher Compton ’09. The project is roughly based on the iconic Admissions video “Swarthmore Unscripted,” in which a film crew chronicles the life and daily experiences of five Swarthmore students for three days.

Like its predecessor, “Swarthmore Rescripted” will largely be built around confessional-style segments of senior students recalling their most memorable experiences, but it will also feature iconic scenes and happenings that characterize Swarthmore, such as Pub Nite and the typical daily Sharples hubbub. “It will basically be a hodgepodge of Swarthmore life,” Gary said, “but it will also provide a forum and venue for seniors to make their own memories, a space where they can remember Swarthmore and look back.”

Filming this will be organic and unplanned in the sense that it will entail going to certain hangout hubs and locations around campus, where students can feel more inclined to talk naturally in front of the camera as opposed to compelling them to give a personal confessional in an enclosed space, as was the case in “Swarthmore Unscripted.”

The nature of the project, while it will be focusing mostly on the diverse experiences of Swarthmore seniors, is also open-ended and flexible to the involvement of underclassmen who want to convey their own unique impressions of Swarthmore.

Isaac Han ’11 and Lauren Ramanathan ’11 are both currently involved in making a music video that encapsulates the quintessential Swarthmore experience, aiming to spoof T-Pain’s SNL skit “I’m On A Boat” by rewriting the lyrics to fit the more-than-idiosyncratic Swarthmore context. Han’s plans for the music video include filming a dance sequence of students atop the roof of Parrish.
Marie Rousseau ’12, who recently signed herself up for the project, reasons that she is “so happy with [her] first year and [her] discovery of wonderful people at Swarthmore that [she] wants to share that experience with other people.”

But “Swarthmore Rescripted” will not attempt to be a free-for-all and sundry video about Swarthmore. It will also provide a unique factor that defines it separately as a senior-based project. Ideally, most of the confessionals will be coming from Swarthmore seniors, and there are also plans of including a “Superlatives” segment which is visibly absent in The Halcyon, Swarthmore’s traditional yearbook publication.

The original concept for “Swarthmore Rescripted” came about after the election of Senior Class Officers, where the five officers were able to brainstorm different ways and activities of “uniting the senior class.” Thus, the project was conceived. “We just ran with it and had fun,” Gary said. Gary added that, after the preliminary interest meeting on Feb. 24, the senior officers came to the open-ended conclusion that “the students involved can choose to do whatever they want, and [that] anyone can basically produce their own segments.”

This assurance and support for improvisatory individual work will hopefully encourage campus entertainment groups and other interested students to become actively involved in the project. Of course there is ample time to foster more interest and involvement among the student community. “[Swarthmore Rescripted] is still in progress,” Marrazza said. “We’re going to do most of the filming in April and then plan to do the final editing in May.”

The senior class officers hope that the project will not only be an entertaining production, but also a long-lasting memento for posterity. “Imagine someone finding this random DVD in his or her office one day; it’ll make them remember what Swarthmore and college life used to be all about,” Gary said.

Anyone who is interested in signing up for “Swarthmore Rescripted”, please contact Loretta Gary at lgary1@swarthmore.edu.

Disclosure note: Isaac Han and Lauren Ramanathan both write for The Phoenix, but had no role in the production of this article.

Correction: April 6, 2009

Correction: This article was incorrectly edited to report that Isaac Han was a first-year. He is actually a sophomore.

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