Greenwich hits YouTube with CC alum’s Web series

When it comes to the NYU-Columbia contest for collegiate supremacy, Columbia students’ violet counterparts are never shy to extol the downtown chic of Greenwich Village as a point in their favor. And in bringing some aspects of this rivalry to his YouTube series The Hayley Project, filmmaker Andrew Y. Park, CC’ 99, gladly gave that point to our downtown brethren.

Park, alongside fellow Columbians David Evans, SEAS ’99, and Paolo De Dios, SEAS ’00, produces The Hayley Project—a Streamy Award-nominated Web series now entirely available on YouTube after the release of its finale last Thursday.

Set primarily in Greenwich Village but also on Columbia’s campus, the series follows Hayley Winters (Rachel Risen), a fiercely independent college student at the fictional University of New York, or UNY, who is trying to solve the mystery surrounding her best friend’s death. Along the way, Hayley butts heads with Herman (Phillip Andre Botello), a King’s College student affectionately nicknamed “Stalker Boy” by the series’ snarky protagonist.

It’s not hard to wipe away the thin veil of the colleges’ names. In a phone interview, Park confirmed that King’s College, referred to by Hayley as “the preppy Ivy League institution they say is in Morningside Heights when really it’s in Harlem,” is a disguised moniker for his alma mater, just as NYU shares more in common with UNY than just the letters of its abbreviation.

But any intercollegiate rivalry that arises serves mostly to set the mood, furthering the depiction of Hayley as an outcast in a world already full of tension. “She’s edgy—a little bit alternative,” Park said, explaining that Hayley’s swipes at Columbia are the “type of thing you’d expect” from a bold spirit like her, but also conceding that they dually serve as an in-joke for the Columbians involved behind the camera.

While at Columbia, Park spent most of his free time exploring the Upper West Side. But he admitted that some of Columbia’s more adventurous souls would choose Greenwich for their escapades because, as a neighborhood, it’s “a little hipper and a little more cool”—a vibe that fit his college-centric series.

“It’s [the Village] very beautiful; it’s very New York,” he said. Visually, he felt that its distinctive landmarks like Washington Square Park help familiarize viewers with the environment fairly quickly.

But that wasn’t all that made the Village a run and gun filmmaker’s paradise: Park and co-creator Jato Smith, who took graduate classes at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, found it easy to blend in with NYU’s many film students and avoid any red tape.

The Village may have been an easy call for Park and the cast and crew of The Hayley Project, but Columbians don’t need to fret—the creators are currently in talks about the possibility of a second season, which may give Columbia and Morningside Heights a chance to tie up the score.