The Creator
Chelsea Nwasike, is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, storyteller, and the founder of Our Ideas Loft (OIL), a creative house dedicated to producing projects that help people feel more deeply, or simply allow themselves to. She is also the host of Me and My Imaginary Friends, a new video podcast for multi-hyphenate creatives searching for purpose, healing, and self-expression through the art of storytelling.
Chelsea holds a BA in Media Production from Bournemouth University in England and an MFA from the New York Film Academy in Los Angeles. She is a trained filmmaker whose short films have earned international recognition, including awards for Best Narrative, Best Sci-Fi, and Best Director. Her work has also brought her onto sets such as Christopher Nolan’s Academy Award–winning film, Dunkirk. Though storytelling has always been central to her craft, losing her father to cancer gave her creative work new meaning. Writing became a path to purpose and healing.
That process gave birth to THE ONES BEFORE series, a West African epic fantasy series that transports readers into a precolonial world inspired by Nigerian political drama and cultural superstition. The Ones Before has inspired an engaged community of anticipating readers and was recognized as a Second Rounder at the 2023 Austin Film Festival, placing it among the top 10 to 12 percent of submissions worldwide.
Recognized by LA Weekly as one of the Top Creative Minds Redefining the Entertainment Industry, Chelsea’s mission is to make storytelling more than entertainment. For her, living through creative expression is the truest path to finding fulfillment. She continues to embody that belief through her multifaceted lens as a filmmaker, writer, and creative entrepreneur.
www.chelseanwasike.com | insta: imthechelsea
A Message From The Creator...
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 was 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.
For constant updates and sneak peeks from us join our mailing list! One of these sneak peeks is our personality quiz, which you can take to discover what tribe you’ll be from in our mythical realm of Nanyilẹ.