Hallease Narvaez describes her journey to become a professional video producer and digital storyteller as “pretty traditional.” She attended UT Austin’s film school, earning a degree in Radio, Television, and Film, spent some time in LA, and came back to Texas to work for a boutique production company, making marketing and promotional videos. Now, she gets to tell stories that are less traditional and mean more to her, through both her personal YouTube channel and her own production company, HalleaseBeast.
Through her production company, she’s currently working on producing a show for PBS’ Digital Studios arm. The show, called Say It Loud, “discusses African American history, culture, and context through comedy and interviews and stuff like that,” she explains.
Last year, she received a grant from YouTube through a program called Creators for Change that was started to combat hate speech and xenophobia online. “With that, I created two short documentaries covering a topic – why people of different faiths, cultures, backgrounds cover their hair. I tried to tie it to my personal experience and also people outside my experience to sort of juxtapose the two ideas.”
While the project was stressful, it was also incredibly rewarding. “It was really fun to do, and I learned so much, and I met so many great people, which is why I loved doing the program,” she says. It also gave her the opportunity to travel, to London twice to shoot and around the country as an ambassador for YouTube.
Even with the excitement of the program, 2018 brought challenges. Problems with her house led her to live with her parents for the year. “I was working in my parents’ kitchen, and I was dying. Emotionally, mentally, I was dying,” she laughs now.
She decided she needed a place to work that wasn’t a kitchen table. A fellow business owner, Jordan Maney, told her about The Impact Guild.
“This was the last place I came to on the day I was driving around looking for a spot, and I lucked out because one of the desks was open… There’s a waitlist for desks now, so I’m stuck! In a good way. In a lucky way,” she jokes.
The Impact Guild is now homebase for both HalleaseBeast and Hallease’s personal channel. Portions of her Creators for Change documentaries and of her personal vlogs feature The Impact Guild’s signature navy walls. “This space gave me a consistent space to film a lot last year, which I didn’t have before… It’s been a really great physical space for me, and that’s the thing that’s brought me a lot of joy with it,” she says.
If she had unlimited startup capital, Hallease says, “I would really love to help [The Impact Guild] expand… I definitely understand that vibe of like you just want to help as many people, you want to say yes to everybody. It’s really hard to say no to people, especially if what they’re doing is neat, and a lot of people here are doing really neat things.”