Platform: PC/Mobile Web Series

Downtown Browns is a three part interactive web series highlighting the variety decisions faced by women of color in Los Angeles and their not-so-simple. In the series, we wanted to design interactive decisions and perspective shifts that bring layered understandings of the dynamics at play in city life where not everything is up to you.

FEATURES

• Assist with day-in-the-life decisions and see how they are run their course in a society that plays by its own rules
• Ep 1:
  • Latch-key kid life and decisions
  • Explore belongings to get to know a family
• Ep 2:
  • Switch perspectives to access the inner thoughts of bystanders
• Ep 3:
  • Decide emotional responses to offhand microaggressions in the workplace as a woman in tech

We all worked hard to create and bring to life characters that are not merely caricatures of people of color, which is what we feel most depictions of people of color in mainstream media are like. We also made an active decision to try and build an all-women-of-color-crew, knowing that our collective sensibilities and experiences would strengthen the diversity of perspectives represented in the series.

The original pilot was created in Jeff Watson’s Documentary and Activist Games class and submitted for The Diversity Challenge put on my Interlude. When we learned about the Diversity Challenge, we were intrigued by proposed prompt to consider people from various backgrounds navigating the same space. We won the grant and I wrote the Design Document planning the direction for all three episodes as my final for Maureen McHugh’s class. We shot the actual series over the summer.

TEAM

Tonia Beglari – Director/Producer
Allison Comrie – Director/Editor Ep 3
Lishan Amde – Preproduction
Emilia Yang (IMAP) Producer on Set & Interlude Post Production
Michelle Denise Jackson (Writing Divison) Writing Ep 3
Aaron Reihs (Composing Division) – Composer

Learn more at Downtownbrowns.weebly.com!