The Creators
Chelsea Nwasike, an award-winning Nigerian filmmaker in Los Angeles with a B.A in Media Production and a Master’s degree in Filmmaking, has worked on films, TV, and commercials, winning awards at various film festivals including an AAF award for her global Talia brand campaign and Shorty Awards for Bosch "All You Need In A Bag" Campaign. She joined the judging committee for Top Shorts Film Festival’s 7th Annual Competition. While Oluwaseun Olowo-Ake is a Nigerian writer and arts lover with a B.A in Media Production and an M.A in the same field. She explores stories’ impact on culture, as seen on her website and thesis on cultural hybridity, which led to publishing her first fictional two-part book.
We like to think that our dynamic blend of the unexpected and the calculated, where Chelsea is the ‘spontaneous visionary’, and Oluwaseun is the ‘methodical maestro’, helps us bring order to the creative chaos and build a world that is both imaginative and coherent.
Image description;
Chelsea Nwasike (on the left) & Oluwaseun Olowo-Ake (on the right)
A Message From The Creators...
Thank you for being here at this early stage of our creative journey and watching it grow with us!
Seriously, all your support so far has been incredible and we are very grateful for it. If you follow us on social media, you’ll have heard the news that we’re pivoting from making a TV series and are now working on creating a The Ones Before (TOB) book series. We definitely did not make that decision lightly and we thought we’d give you more insight into our process.
Pivot is definitely our word for 2023. Last year was exciting for us. After months of creating our world, characters and their stories, we decided to write the pilot episode. The process of writing the episode was much smoother and went by much faster than we had thought. It was a lot of fun, and we genuinely loved what we had created.
So we decided to share it.
Our friends and family were the first to see it, and through sharing it with them, we noticed mistakes, or things that we thought could be clearer, and were given pages of notes from some of them. So we revised the script… and revised it again… and revised it again. As of right now, we’re at 24 versions of the pilot episode of The Ones Before.
Something that was common with all of them though, was how much they loved the story. We all knew we had something amazing on our hands. So we cast a wider net.
We submitted the script to competitions, shared with the few contacts we had in the industry (or our industry adjacent contacts) and even had pitch meetings. This went on for months and months, and every time, we were met with the same answer: ‘not selected’ or ‘not quite,’ even though feedback we received would also state that this was the kind of story that audiences needed. It was posed to us by one person that they probably were not ready for it, and by another that fantasy tv series with existing fan bases through intellectual properties such as graphic novels and books would help our pitches.
But we’re resilient women. We (and by that, we mean Chelsea) turned to TikTok to share our idea with the community there and the response was AMAZING. We were so blown away by how much support it gathered! With the support, we also received lots of advice - and the word ‘book’ wouldn’t leave us alone. Honestly, at first, we were opposed to it; we spent so much time drafting episodes, creating TV pitch documents and writing a script. We even pivoted and started playing with the idea of creating an immersive website for the story as a way to draw people in, which was exciting to plan and would have been a lot of work. Then the writer’s strike hit (it’s been interesting following that as writers) and in solidarity with the Writer’s Guild of America, we also ceased all pitching. This new quiet gave us time to reflect on what was best for our story. We reconsidered the comments and the feedback, and realized creating a book series was worth the time and effort if it meant getting the story out there. So again, we pivoted. This book series will allow us to share this story with you much sooner, while allowing us to still have the long term goal of creating a TV series.
So, if you like your TV series like we do, don’t be dismayed! The TOB TV series is still on its way! It’s just going to take a bit longer. While you wait, and if you love reading like we do, you’re going to love immersing yourself in this new fantasy world.
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