Wellness chef and influencer Charles Chen brings his energetic approach to healthy living into the kitchen in The Charles Chen Project, an original HealthiNation series built around food, wellness and Charles's infectious personality.
Created as a vehicle specifically for Charles, the series combines approachable recipes and healthy-living ideas with the personality that had already earned him an audience in the wellness space.
Charles Chen and I had wanted to collaborate for some time, so when the opportunity finally arose at HealthiNation, I developed an original series specifically around him.
I created and produced The Charles Chen Project, designing the format to capitalize on Charles's strengths as both a wellness chef and an established digital personality. HealthiNation producer Carriane D'Alessandro directed and shot the series, while I oversaw the production and later edited and packaged the finished episodes.
As with many of our productions, the challenge was creating something polished with a limited budget. A Manhattan lifestyle location would give the show the right visual environment, but renting one would consume resources we simply didn't have.
So I found another solution: I convinced HealthiNation's CEO to let us use his Manhattan apartment. He was based in San Francisco and rarely used it, giving us an attractive New York location without adding a significant location expense to the production.
It was a small piece of production problem-solving, but representative of how I approached the series I developed at HealthiNation: put the available resources on screen rather than allowing budget limitations to define what the finished work could look like.