195 Lewis, a web series directed by Chanelle Aponte Pearson and created by Rae Leone Allen, premieres tomorrow night at 8:00 PM at the show’s website. Last year, when the series was in production, we interviewed Pearson, and she discussed her own motivation for joining the project: At the time of joining the project as director, I used to watch The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl and The Couple, so I largely understood the format to work best for comedies with episodes ranging from two to five minutes. Despite knowing this, I still entered the writing process not focusing on […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 15, 2017So you’ve made a film. Congrats, but you’re not out of the woodwork yet. You may never be. The four filmmakers and one producer who appeared on the IFP Week panel called “On Working (and Staying) in Indie Film Today” had vastly different stories to tell about how they turned movie-making into an actual job. The biggest name on the panel was Gillian Robespierre. Having directed and co-written the indie hits Obvious Child and this summer’s Landline, she has more stability than most in her field, having parlayed those successes into TV work on top of a future making her […]
by Matt Prigge on Sep 21, 2017On April 27 at the Made in New York Media Center, IFP hosted a panel on serialized content moderated by Kuye Youngblood, Head of Development and Production at BRIC TV, a public access station in Brooklyn. BRIC’s mission is to present and incubate work by artists and mediamakers who reflect the diversity of its borough, and it presents numerous shows via its cable and digital network. At the event, Youngblood was joined onstage by two web series creators, Rae Leone Allen and Christopher Poindexter, who shared the challenges and opportunities they each encountered while making the first season of their […]
by Audrey Ewell on May 9, 2017Appearing today only on this “Now This” section of Snapchat is The Way it Should Be, a short (naturally) doc about love and friendship between queer women of color by Chanelle Aponte Pearson and Terence Nance. The second entry in POV Snapchat Films, The Way It Should Be can be watched in less than five minutes, and it’s perfectly conceived for Snapchat’s vertical video format. Swiping left takes you to an image page with a chapter heading graphic. Swiping up takes you to a minute or so of video content that ranges from talking head interviews to short, music-video style […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 30, 2016Winner of the euphoria Calvin Klein-sponsored “Live the Dream” grant at the 2015 IFP Gotham Awards, filmmaker Chanelle Aponte Pearson is the director of the upcoming web series, 195 Lewis, as well as the head of operations at the Brooklyn-based production company MVMT. In other words, she’s a consummate juggler, working on the business side of film while evolving her own film and web practice. With an excerpt of 195 Lewis, Pearson’s Brooklyn-set, queer polyamorous love story, having screened at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, we decided to check in with Pearson for a status update on the larger […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 26, 2016