WillyLive is a new club at Williston that will bring to you raw, unedited, and live conversation between students.

WillyLive comes out every other Sunday, and consists of topics relevant the Williston community.

The club was started at the beginning of the year by seniors Vishnu Sekar, Insoo Kang, and Artur Lysyuk. Currently, they have almost 200 followers on Instagram, and 250 views on YouTube.

The club is a combination of ideas from Insoo and Artur. Artur’s original idea was to create “Williston TV,” which would be a channel made specifically for Williston students. Insoo wanted to talk about issues on campus; both decided to combine their ideas to create WillyLive.

“The reason we wanted to create a club was because of the students themselves,” said Artur. “Everyone has something that they might be good and might want to share with others.”

Vishnu agreed with Artur.

“The most important aspect we want to convey from our club is for everyone to be interested in the people around them because we are all very different!” Vishnu said.

During the process of creating the club, the team faced many challenges including: who to interview, the best location to interview and film the podcast, the format of the podcast, and other roadblocks.

Insoo said that they had to prepare for three weeks in order to get the club approved. Their original idea was to do a live stream on social media to keep the conversation as unfiltered and as real as possible, but they didn’t get approval for the idea. So they had to be flexible about changing their club format to filming it and posting it on YouTube. However, they still try to keep their conversation unedited.

The content of the podcast changes every time. For the first podcast, they talked to Mr. Rivers about his knee injury and whether social media influences people. And the most recent one, it talked about Williston from the perspective of two new international students: sophomores Mazin Hussein, and Alejandro Ruiz.

Sharing about the process of creating a 20-minute podcast, Artur told The Willistonian:

“We created a survey that helps us to determine person’s things that he is interested in,” said Artur. “We do not have a specific script that we follow on the podcast as it is better to have a natural conversation with guests.”

He also gave praised his fellow clubmates for their talents:

“It may seem easy for somebody to talk straight for about 20 min, but it is not!,” he said. “That’s why I’m very glad that Insoo and Vishnu took such an big responsibility to lead the conversation in episodes.”

Artur and Insoo expressed their wishes to expand the club even further. Besides from their YouTube, the club also use other social media platforms, such as Instagram, to promote videos and interact with students. In addition, they are planning to use some time during the assemblies to talk about the club.

“Everything that we have done up until now is only a start,” said Artur. “Our main goal until the end of the year is to expand into other areas of entertainment which, at the same time, will help us to bring our community closer through the stories of students/faculty.”

Even though the club just started this year, they already have had a lot of memories together.

“My most memorable moment associated with uploading the second episode of WillyLive on Sunday in the dinning hall.” said Artur. “After hitting the button ‘Publish’ on YouTube, we noticed that two students who sat right in front of us started watching our released video. They were watching it very carefully, however, what has really touched us is when they started laughing about the jokes that we made in the video. It feels good. Creating something that other people enjoy watching.”

Artur, Insoo, and Vishnu said that the work of the club is much less than they expected it to be.

“It was quite a bit for the first few weeks when planning everything out, but we got everything working well for us now and it isn’t much work as a senior,” said Vishnu.

Senior Graham Allardyce expressed his enjoyment towards watching the podcasts. He is impressed by the club leader’s talent to continuously making the podcast not only interesting but very relevant to the student’s life, which creates attraction for people to look forward to the next episode to come out.

“I think the club can influence Williston students by encouraging people to step out of their shell,” he said. “This is done through the hosts, Insoo and Vishnu,  as they display their guests stepping out of their comfort zones to tell an embarrassing story, participate in a funny game, or by commenting a fictional event. Whether you are on the set or watching their video, their content is contagious.”