Filmmakers Making A Social Impact: Why & How Filmmaker Joy Cheriel Brown of Third Person Omniscient Productions Is Helping To Change Our World
College is not the only path to success. I wish I had known to set out on my entrepreneurial journey much sooner. I could have started selling life insurance right out of high school or begun real estate investing as I wrote screenplays and shot short films. However, in the public school system, no one really tells you how to do this. You are trained to be a cog in the wheel. When I finally did start selling insurance and attempting to invest in real estate, I had the added pressure of having a mortgage due every month, which isn’t the best way to start a business where all of your income is based on commission. However, if I had started while I was still living with my parents, there wouldn’t have been as much pressure. But I wasn’t even familiar with those paths.
As a part of our series about “Filmmakers Making A Social Impact” I had the pleasure of interviewing Joy Cheriel Brown.
Joy Cheriel Brown is an accomplished filmmaker, author, and certified hypnotherapist. Her brand is focused on helping people recognize the powerful creators they are, and empowering them to make their dreams come true. Joy is the founder of Third Person Omniscient Productions, a production company whose mission it is to produce powerful, meaningful, thought-provoking movies, plays, and television shows that enlighten audiences about the human condition, shed light on the meaning of life, and raise the collective consciousness.
Thank you so much for doing this interview with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to get to know you a bit. Can you share your “backstory” that brought you to this career?
I started writing screenplays at the age of 10. I saw Home Alone for the first time in the theatre in 1991 and decided that I wanted to become an actress, but my parents wouldn’t let me get an agent. So, I decided, at the age of 10, that I would write my own screenplays, produce, and direct them and have them distributed by 20th Century Fox, the same company that distributed Home Alone. I wrote one or more screenplays pretty much every year from the age of 10 to 30 something, only taking a couple of years off maybe once to focus on my mental health, since I was hospitalized for psychosis, n.o.s., for the first time at age 18 and was diagnosed with Schizoaffective Disorder, bipolar type, when I had my second psychotic episode at age 24 the same day as my college graduation from Howard University, which I had already planned to skip because I had a plane ticket to Los Angeles to start my official life as a filmmaker, but after that diagnosis, I decided to stay in the Washington, DC metro area in Prince George’s County, MD, which is where I started my production company, Third Person Omniscient Productions, at age 31 in 2012. The first official project for my production company was a short called N.O.S., which is based on that first hospitalization for Schizoaffective Disorder, bipolar type, when I was 18.
Can you share the funniest or most interesting story that occurred to you in the course of your filmmaking career?
With my short film, N.O.S., I originally wrote a 10 page script for it in college as an option for my thesis script to graduate from my undergraduate film program at Howard University, but it took place in a hospital, and there was like no money to make this while I was in college, so I didn’t want to do it ifI wasn’t going to have the right location. So when I started my production company 8 years later, I was looking for a third and final short film to make before I moved on to features, and I knew it was time to make N.O.S. I had gotten more insight into the environmental causes of what happened to me, and I added 10 pages to the script, but it was still extremely challenging to find a location. SO, one of my producers got a lead for some space that was used as a simulation for nurses, but when I saw it, it was too new and pristine looking and wasn’t what I was looking for at all, but then the woman giving the tour mentioned a space that they had that some nuns had recently moved out of. This sounded intriguing to me so I asked if we could see it. She was reluctant to show it to us because it was not space that they valued at all, but when we looked at it, aesthetically it was perfect, and we got to use it for a great price because it had like no value to them AND catering was included. It took from 2012–2017 to get the financing for the short, so if we had gotten the money any sooner, that ideal space would not have been available to us, and I have no idea where we would have shot the movie. So, everything worked out in our favor.
Who are some of the most interesting people you have interacted with? What was that like? Do you have any stories?
When I was hospitalized for psychosis in 1999, the first time, there were quite a few interesting people who were hospitalized with me, and I put quite a few of them as characters in N.O.S., which is the short I made about the 5 days that I was hospitalized. While I was there, there was a woman named Mala who would walk around mumbling to herself. At the time, I was learning Spanish, and the word mala means bad in Spanish, and remember, I was out of my mind, and I was terrified of her; I thought she was out to get me. So, when I made the short many years later, I included her as a character, and I actually created a really sweet moment between her character and my character that I wish had happened in real life, but in real life I just stayed scared, and I feel like I made up for that when I made my film because I was older and wiser, and I had more understanding about mental illness in general.
Which people in history inspire you the most? Why?
I would say Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen. I identified as a writer as a very young age in this lifetime, and I think the first time I read “A Room of One’s Own,” or at least an excerpt of it, was in elementary school, and I really resonated with that, especially since I didn’t get my own room till I was 12, but I started writing screenplays at age 10. Then later on, I think I was in my early 20s because it was when The Hours came out and I learned about Virginia Woolf’s mental health issues. I had suicidal ideations for years before I left the Jehovah’s Witness religion in 2010, and before about the law of attraction in 2012. I really identified with her, and I admired Jane Austen because she supported herself as a writer and never married during a time when that was shameful to never marry, and unheard of for a woman to financially support herself.
Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview, how are you using your success to bring goodness to the world? Can you share with us the meaningful or exciting social impact causes you are working on right now?
Oftentimes, many of my scripts deal with some type of mental health issues and/or suicide. I am producing my first feature film now — I’m looking for investors, by the way — and it’s about a young woman learning how to communicate with her father has Borderline Personality Disorder and makes her life extremely difficult. I’m also a hypnotherapist and speaker, and I’ve been speaking about how hypnotherapy helps individuals change their limiting beliefs, which helps change their reality. And I’ll also be speaking at the Maryland Chapter of National Alliance on Mental Illness’ (NAMI) 40th Annual Conference about mental health and showing N.O.S.
I am very passionate about both hypnotherapy and mental health, which helps individuals focus on making their lives better because change starts with the individual before the whole of society can be changed.
Many of us have ideas, dreams, and passions, but never manifest it. But you did. Was there an “Aha Moment” that made you decide that you were actually going to step up and take action for this cause? What was that final trigger?
I started writing screenplays when I as 10, so I’ve been pursuing my dreams for the majority of my life, but the pursuit wasn’t always a healthy one. I had suicidal ideations for a large chunk of my life, and I gave myself the goal of winning an Oscar because I figured it would take me a long time to accomplish so it would keep me around longer. But I’ve since learned, when I learned the law of attraction, that you have to get happy first and then, and only then, will everything else that you want come to you. When I learned the law of attraction, I learned, and believed, that my dream life was 100% available to me. But even before that, I’m not at all happy or satisfied if I’m not doing at least one thing towards my goals and dreams every single day. But now a lot of that involves just keeping my vibration high and looking for healthy ways and patterns of thought to feel good.
Can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
I am a huge advocate of thinking for oneself and not letting religion make decisions for you, and I wrote an article about my journey for Stage32’s blog, and a reader wrote in response to my article, “I have to digest this article. It speaks to me in ways I can’t begin to determine just yet, but you have managed to strike some chord with me. I attended a church like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but it wasn’t. I’m a diagnosed bipolar and I recently published a YA novel who main character is Schizoaffective. This law of attraction is something I have heard before, and it keeps cropping back into my life. Maybe you’re not the only one getting messages. Thanks for this.” It’s my most favorite response I’ve gotten to any of my work.
Are there three things that individuals, society or the government can do to support you in this effort?
If everyone would recognize that anything they want is available to them — their ideal lives — no matter what that is, and that there is enough abundance for all — there, in reality is no such thing as shortage, and that they deserve to have the life of their dreams, it would ultimately solve every problem that exists.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why. Please share a story or example for each.
- You don’t have to believe as everyone else around you believes. You do not have to accept conventional wisdom if it does not serve you. Most people have limiting beliefs that actually hinder them instead of helping. For example, the belief that you have to work hard to be successful. When I was 8-years-old, my mother sat me down and told me that all of our decisions were based on whatever the Bible said about it. Even as a child, I wondered why an adult would let a book make all of her decisions. However, instead of believing what I wanted to believe, I talked myself into believing what she and my father believed. Lying to yourself never goes well, and ten years later I experienced psychosis for the first time because I was not true to myself.
- College is not the only path to success. I wish I had known to set out on my entrepreneurial journey much sooner. I could have started selling life insurance right out of high school or begun real estate investing as I wrote screenplays and shot short films. However, in the public school system, no one really tells you how to do this. You are trained to be a cog in the wheel. When I finally did start selling insurance and attempting to invest in real estate, I had the added pressure of having a mortgage due every month, which isn’t the best way to start a business where all of your income is based on commission. However, if I had started while I was still living with my parents, there wouldn’t have been as much pressure. But I wasn’t even familiar with those paths.
- If you don’t know how to do something, you can ask for help. When I was a senior in high school, I was editor of the school’s literary magazine. It wasn’t something that I had gone after; it was simply my turn because I was next in line for the honor. However, when it came to laying out the format for the magazine, I didn’t know how to use the computer program that facilitated this, and instead of asking for help, I pretty much gave up and we didn’t have an issue for the literary magazine that year. The same thing happened when I tried to produce a cartoon with my sixth grade class — at the point where I got over my head, I quit instead of asking for help. I always thought that I had to figure it out by myself. Ask for help. There will always be people willing to assist you, or at least give you advice.
- When you take action and move in the direction towards a goal, the universe will step in and send you the people, events, and circumstances to get it done. I got out of college and attempted to produce my next short film (I had made one in my undergraduate program), but the people who were supposed to help me got interested in other things. Instead of trying to figure out a way to get it done, I simply gave up on it. However, years later when I actually did make my second short, everything I needed eventually came to me because I was determined to get it done and didn’t give up. The universe only steps in and helps you when you believe that it will. Otherwise, you are flying blind, and you don’t understand why things don’t work out for you.
- An intention is the most powerful thing. Setting an intention and having a clear vision for what you want is enough to make it happen. When I discovered Law of Attraction Magazine, I decided that I wanted to write for it one day. However, I didn’t think this would be possible because the magazine eventually went out of print. Little did I know that someone revised the magazine, and when I wrote my book, someone from the publication reached out to me out of the blue to write an article for it and to be interviewed. A similar thing happened with selling my short film, as I mentioned earlier. When you set an intention with the belief that it will happen, it will eventually manifest if you let go of the outcome while knowing that you will still get what you want.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
Learn how to identify your intuition and listen to it. It is connected to your higher self, and it will never steer you wrong.
We are very blessed that many other Social Impact Heroes read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, whom you would like to collaborate with, and why? He or she might see this. 🙂
Funny story, I had never seen a complete episode of Oprah Winfrey’s talk show. So, I didn’t know firsthand, so to speak, why she was such a big deal. However, after I learned the law of attraction, I knew she was a believer in the concept because of her story of how she got cast in “The Color Purple” and that the author of “The Secret,” Rhonda Byrne, had appeared on her show. This piqued my interest and eventually, I believe it was Jack Canfield, whose email updates I received, was a guest on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday. So I watched the show for the first time and immediately understood why everyone loves Oprah. After watching Super Soul Sunday, I set the intention that I would be a guest on the show one day because I really want to talk to Oprah about God, the law of attraction, spirituality, and what it all means.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
My favorite life lesson quote is one of my own: “Everything happens for my highest good and in my favor.” Many years ago I received an observation that when things don’t go my way, I fall apart. But after learning the law of attraction, and adopting the aforementioned quote, I realized that when things don’t go the way I had originally hoped they would, it is always for my best. Examples of this can be seen during the production of my short, N.O.S. The film took several years to get made. By the time we were ready to go, however, the original actress was no longer interested so we had to recast the part, which ended up being a great thing because we found an even better lead. Another example is that we ended up finding the absolute perfect location for the film, as I mention above, but if it had happened any sooner, that location would not have been available because nuns would have been living there. What initially seemed like inconvenient derailments ended up working out for my highest good and in my favor. The universe really does have each of our backs.
How can our readers follow you online?
I’m on Twitter and Instagram @joycheriel
This was great, thank you so much for sharing your story and doing this with us. We wish you continued success!
Filmmakers Making A Social Impact: Why & How Filmmaker Joy Cheriel Brown of Third Person Omniscient… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.