2019 Web-Series Immersive – Coaches
Yulin Kuang
Yulin Kuang is an L.A.-based screenwriter and director. She is currently writing the comedy feature Jade Palace for New Line Cinema and was most recently the creator and showrunner of I Ship It, an original musical rom-com series on The CW this summer.
She was nominated for a 2019 WGA Award for her work on Love Daily, a romance anthology series for AwesomenessTV (now streaming on Hulu). Previously Yulin created two YouTube channels – YulinisWorking and Shipwrecked Comedy – that have each amassed over 2 million views per channel, for original scripted web-series (Kissing in the Rain, A Tell Tale Vlog) and short films (The Perils of Growing Up Flat-Chested, Angie + Zahra). Her work has been featured on Nerdist, Huffington Post, IndieWire and Buzzfeed.
Bernie Su
Bernie Su is a two-time Primetime Emmy Award-winning interactive storyteller, creator, and showrunner.
His previous works include The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a ground-breaking interactive adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The series spawned 70 million views across 160 videos and 35 social media accounts. The series won the first Primetime Emmy Award for a YouTube distributed series and was adopted into a novel, thus becoming the first novel based on a web-series based on a novel.
He won his second Emmy for Emma Approved, an interactive re-imagination of another Austen novel, Emma. This grand series spanned five social media platforms, featuring a video series, fashion blog, music experience, and social media interactivity. The series also featured partnerships with Samsung, Modcloth, and Nordstrom. The franchise has recently released an interactive mobile gaming experience through the Moment: Stories app, where players can be a part of Emma’s world.
He is currently the creator and showrunner of Artificial, the first live science fiction series to debut on Twitch. This Peabody Award-winning audience-interactive series is a fully scripted serialized story about an Artificial Intelligence being that is trying to become human with the help of the audience. The series recently debuted its second season on Twitch.
Tony Valenzuela
Tony E. Valenzuela is an award-winning filmmaker and the founder of BlackBoxTV, a genre entertainment studio and YouTube channel dedicated to original series, short films, and immersive VR/360° experiences.
In 2008, Tony wrote and directed 2009: A True Story, a dystopian drama that was nominated for Best Dramatic Web Series at the first-annual Streamy Awards and was featured by legendary horror director Wes Craven during his Halloween 2008 YouTube Takeover. By 2010, Tony had directed three high-profile web series and in August of that year, he launched his own YouTube channel, BlackBoxTV, along with its signature horror anthology, BlackBoxTV Presents. In 2012, he partnered with YouTube Originals to create and produce a slate of programming for BlackBoxTV that included a collaboration with C.S.I. creator Anthony E. Zuiker, and the anthology series Silverwood, which Tony co-produced with Wes Craven’s long-time producing protégée, Carly Feingold.
In 2014, Tony directed and co-wrote the supernatural drama Versions of Elloise in collaboration with Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro, Legendary Entertainment and YouTube Space L.A. His next project was directing the pilot episode of the YouTube Red reality competition series Fight of the Living Dead, which Valenzuela executive produced and distributed through BlackBoxTV from 2015-2016. Later that year, Valenzuela was recruited by New Form, the digital studio co-founded by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, to create, write, and direct The Fourth Door, starring Joey Graceffa and High School Musical star Monique Coleman.
In early 2016, BlackBoxTV launched the virtual reality series BlackBoxTV Presents: 360 | Horror. Tony directed nine episodes of the series’ first season, which included collaborations with IFC, Warner Bros., and New Line Cinema. The next year, Tony’s work in VR and 360° filmmaking earned him the inaugural Streamy Award for Best Immersive Storyteller (which he would win again in 2018). Tony’s feature-length directorial debut, The Axe Murders of Villisca, premiered at the L.A. Film Festival in June 2016 and was acquired for both theatrical and V.O.D. distribution by IFC Midnight and then Netflix in 2017.
In 2018, Serial Box acquired the rights to produce Silverwood: The Door, a scripted audio series, an eBook based on Tony’s 2012 Silverwood web series. Tony’s second feature film as a director will be released in 2019.