The Young Directors Series, a first time collaboration between Pace University’s Media, Communications, and Visual Arts (MCVA) department and Pleasantville Community Television (PCTV), held its inaugural event last Thursday, Feb. 16, in the Wilcox Hall Multipurpose Room, showcasing three of junior Wes Brown’s films.

The PCTV website describes the series as one “that aims to highlight talented student filmmakers and to share their creations with about 55,000 households in the area.”

“It’s going to be a monthly program that gives a voice to young directors on the Pace campus,” said Brown. “Any student who has work they want to share can participate.”

Brown has worked on the three films since the summer of 2021 up to last semester.

The first film screened, Make Your Own Adventure, is a five-minute documentary short about a 1,400-mile bike trip Brown embarked on from Seattle, Washington, to Los Angeles, California.

Human Error is a five-minute animated picture about two robots trying to make it in a human world, who come across each other on the subway and catch up about how their lives are going. Brown described it as a “short, sweet, very dry bar comedy.” Brown personally hand-drew the characters and backgrounds in Photoshop, then manipulated the drawings in Adobe Premiere Pro to create the animations.

Finally, The Sam and Wes Internet Experience is a 15-minute talk/variety show, shot in the streets of L.A., wherein Brown and his brother interview strangers about random topics. “We spoke to a lot of interesting characters about fun and silly subjects,” said Brown. “A big inspiration was definitely Eric Andre and his show and street material.”

The event was especially pleasing to Brown because it gave the director a first-time opportunity to receive feedback from a live audience.

“I had only shown my films to small groups of like three people, so to have a large crowd in attendance was awesome. People gut belly-laughed at some of the jokes that I had never heard people laugh at before. That was pretty cool.

“It was just exciting to get the chance to show my work to over 40 people in one room. My films were received pretty well, people came up to me afterwards telling me which parts were funniest or their favorites,” said Brown, before smiling and concluding, “Honestly, it was a really special night for me.”

The first episode of The Young Director Series, featuring the films of Wes Brown, can be seen in its entirety on Pleasantville Community Television

Next month’s screening will feature the work of Pace alum Cory Kinchla. If you live in the area and have cable you can watch from home. Optimum users should turn to channel 76 and channel 36 for Verizon.