(Added May 8, 10:15 a.m.: This is part 2 in a 5 part series about the MTV show “College Life”. Read part 1 here.)

Interviews have been edited, condensed and arranged by topic to allow a coherent story to emerge.

LOREEN STEVENS (independently contracted casting director): I think that you always want to have your archetypes. You know, everyone sort of fits into some sort of representation. But when I’m casting, I’m always looking for relatable and likeable.

JORDAN ELLERMAN (cast member): Well, I was living in Lakeshore dorms, and I got dropped in Jorn, which is like overflow housing. I was trying to get into another school, so I signed up a little late. I first moved in and there was a dude living there; his name was John. He had done a video submission over the summer and he kind of told me about it.

LOREEN STEVENS: It was doing research, reaching out, doing outreach to the students who were about to be entering their freshman year. So I did a lot of that via Facebook. … I had a cousin who went to high school in Chicago who had a lot of friends going to Wisconsin, so I kind of had an instant connection that way. She went to Glenbrook South.

We reached out to them just to see if they were interested and then asked them to send video, knowing I would come there. From what I hear, just so you know, I don’t think the University of Wisconsin ever signed off on that job. I think it was a little tricky.

DAVID WEXLER (show creator, writer, producer): There was a very small period when this kind of got online, and we were like, “Oh man, the school year is approaching.” So there was a very small window to do it. Then we, I think we sent some casting directors to Madison, and between that and the tapes we picked our cast. I really wanted to look for an eclectic group, which I think we got.

JORDAN ELLERMAN: I went to two one-on-one interviews, and then they did a trial run with 10 students and they gave us all cameras. And then they cut it down to five of us. After two weeks, one person dropped out.

LOREEN STEVENS: I can speak in general terms about what my audition process was like. You know, usually we’ll have some sort of questionnaire, and then the person comes in, somewhere. It can be – these were self-made videos, and then there are callbacks.

ANDREA ENDRIES (cast member): When I did get involved … I was walking toward the union and they just came outside and stopped me and were like, “Are you a freshman? Would you like to audition for this show we’re doing”? And I had not heard about it; I had no idea what was going on.

LOREEN STEVENS: You could ask the most general questions, and it’s really like people shine on camera or they don’t. Even if they had the most interesting story the world has ever known – “The Lord himself walked the earth” – if they don’t have a personality that kind of, you know, pops, for lack of a better word, people can’t tune in. There’s just this certain magic that certain people have, and generally speaking people that are good for reality TV have performace in their background.

ANDREA ENDRIES (cast member): When they brought me in, it was literally like the president of that show, or whatever, came in and he’s like, “We want you to do this for us.” And it was really last minute, and I did not know it was through MTV until I left.

DAVID WEXLER: It was hard, because we were asking them to open up their lives to this. And they were really wonderful about it.

ANDREA ENDRIES: [Josh] was kind of an add-on because obviously he was, you know, in my videos and they [MTV] were like “We want Josh! We want to hear his side of the story.” So, that became kind of entertaining, you know, both being from the same home town and stuff.

JOSH HICKSON (cast member): Andrea was the one who auditioned for the show and like, got on it, and since I was around her so much … they wanted to hear my side of the story, so then they gave me a camera.

DAVID WEXLER (show creator, writer, producer): It was a lot of footage. We would shoot on mini DV tape. These new cameras had come out – I think they were Panasonic cameras – they were HD cameras but they still shot on mini DV tape. We gave each person a mini camera package. It had a nice lens, a camera, a microphone that would just kind of clip onto the camera and as much tape as they wanted.

JOSH HICKSON: They edited to make a lot more drama than really was happening. Obviously it’s MTV, and that’s what they were going for. But it wasn’t that bad.

DAVID WEXLER: Two hours of doing your math homework isn’t really beneficial to anyone. But if you meet with a teacher and do this and this and this, it’s beneficial. So, right, we taught them not to just roll camera and talk with their friends for two hours. They got better – by the end it was old hat for them.

JORDAN ELLERMAN: I saw every episode before it aired, and I got to OK all of the footage. We did do that; we’d shoot footage, we’d turn it in and we’d kind of sift through all this footage and kind of explain what was going on to the producer. And they’d just give us pointers, like, “Oh, when you go to talk to this person about this, you should tell them this.” Or, “Maybe you should film that.”

DAVID WEXLER: I think more at the beginning there was a little more hands-on, “How do you do this.” But no, I remember, you’d meet with students and they’d have a whole stack of waivers and camera footage and we’d have to clear it all, stuff like that.

JORDAN ELLERMAN: They stopped pretty early on – at least for me – trying to get me to do things, trying to tell me, like, “Oh, well you should do this.” They stopped that after a couple weeks because I would just not do it on purpose because I didn’t want to do something just because they said.

DAVID WEXLER: And then we’d, I think, actually mail the tapes to New York where we were cutting the whole thing. We had a whole team in New York working on it, and we had some producers working on it in New York. So that was it – you’d just kind of edit the stories together for the half hour and see how it played out, and then you’d screen episodes. That was the situation.

JORDAN ELLERMAN: That one episode where I’m really drunk and on the floor, I was iffy about it when the guy showed me, and I told him, “I don’t know about this, I gotta talk to my parents and think about it for a night.” And he was like, “Yeah, OK, get back to me before the end of the week, you know, and if you’re not okay with it we’ll change it.” And then I called him a couple days later, and he was like “We already sent the tapes, blah, blah, blah.” He kind of pulled a fast one on me. I wasn’t very happy about that, but, you know. Oh well.

JOSH HICKSON: We kind of just would turn in footage, and they would edit it whatever the way they wanted. And then we would preview it a couple weeks before the show came out – we previewed like four at a time. And then like we would make suggestions on real minor edits, but besides that they kind of decided the way it would go.