BoomGen Studios

Did You Know We’re More Popular Than Twin Peaks?

Greg Greenberger — Tue, 21 May 2013 19:45:49 +0000

It’s true! We Are! Let me explain: It’s something that’s been a bit overlooked in comparison to the monumental success of the show, but when Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me premiered at Cannes in 1992 it was wildly unpopular. So unpopular in fact, that Vincent Canby of The New York Times said “Its 134 minutes induce a state of simulated brain death, an effect as easily attained in half the time by staring at the blinking lights on a Christmas tree”. According to this article from The Quietus audiences were constantly booing the film throughout the entire premiere, and Quentin Tarantino even walked out on the film vowing to never see another David Lynch film ever again.

We here at BoomGen Studios haven’t been booed at Cannes, in fact our CEO Mahyad Tousi is going to be part of a highly anticipated roundtable at Cannes tomorrow as part of the “Cross Media Corner” section to talk about our award winning app iPad Operation Ajax and the future of transmedia. If you happen to be one of those lucky few living it up in the French Riviera this week you should definitely check it out. If you aren’t lucky enough to be there in person, you can be sure to check up with us on our blog as we’ll be covering the event.

So yes, it is a bit of a nuanced claim, but we are in fact more popular than Twin Peaks (in a way). Just please don’t boo us tomorrow at Cannes just to prove a point.

Middle East Acting School

Greg Greenberger — Tue, 07 May 2013 19:23:10 +0000

Our good friend Maz Jobrani’s hilarious video teaches Middle Eastern actors all the essential skills to playing the wide variety of diverse roles available to them in today’s Hollywood films. The video includes workshops on honing some of the most quintessential acting skills such as: ”How to get shot by the white protagonist”, “How to slap, the white female protagonist”, and “How to properly annunciate Allah-O-Akbar“.

TEDxLBS: A Storify

Greg Greenberger — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:28:14 +0000

Taboor

Greg Greenberger — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 21:02:38 +0000

Being located in New York, we have the great privilege of having the Tribeca Film Festival going on in our own backyard. While its tempting for us to just spend hours writing about the magic that is Before Midnight, we’d instead like to take this opportunity to inform you of a unique and fascinating film that caught us totally off-guard at this year’s festival: Taboor. Iranian director Vahid Vakilifar’s 2nd feature takes place on the future streets of Tehran, and is honestly one of the newest films we’ve seen in ages. What the film lacks in budget, plot, and dialogue it more than makes up for in breathtaking imagery, and probably the most creative uses of tin foil we’ve ever seen on screen. The film, as of now, has no distributor or release date, but if anyone was half as impressed as we were it shouldn’t be too long before this film comes to a theater near you… or maybe at least DVD… we hope.

Watch Transmedia Hollywood 4 Online

Greg Greenberger — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 15:57:29 +0000

Did you miss attending this year’s Transmedia Hollywood conference? Or maybe you got a chance to listen to the live audio stream online but you’ve been eagerly anticipating the video feed? Or maybe you even attended the conference in person, but it was just so freakin’ good you wanna relive the whole thing again. Well now you can! Check out the video of Panel 2: “Transmedia for a Change” featuring our CEO Mahyad Tousi, and follow these links to Panel 1, Panel 3, and Panel 4 as well.

Spreadable Media

Greg Greenberger — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 17:24:18 +0000

Henry Jenkins seems to be a busy man. When he’s not teaching at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, running the Transmedia Hollywood conference, or writing for publications like Salon or the Huffington Post, he appears to be taking up a rather prolific career as an author. His latest book, Spreadable Media, seems to reflect the mind of a man who truly gets to analyze media from every single perspective. Spreadable Media is a fascinating exploration of how media today is becoming a two-way street; a constant interaction between creator and consumer by examining everything from Film, to games, to transmedia, to memes. Publishers Weekly describes Jenkins’s analyzation of modern content as one that ”can travel not only from the top down but also from the inside out. It is a remarkably different terrain than what we have been used to, one they effectively and stridently analyze”. Don’t be alarmed if the intellectualization of memes sounds daunting, the book as actually a fascinating read. We highly recommend it, and you can check it out here.

Was “Cat and the Coup” Not Hard Enough for You?

Greg Greenberger — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 19:55:20 +0000

So if any of you checked out The Cat and the Coup you may have noticed it was a bit on the shorter side, and maybe even a bit easy. If you’re the kind of person who’s looking for a real challenge, somewhere between Contra and budgeting the national deficit, you may want to try solving the Israeli-Palistiean conflict. Well, not actually. But we found the game Peacemaker where you can at least give it a try. So if you feel like simulating one of the most difficult geo-political struggles in history, you should hit up the link.

Transmedia Hollywood 4: a Storify Recap

Greg Greenberger — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 21:52:56 +0000

Mahyad Tousi is a Junkie… A Story Junkie

Greg Greenberger — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:57:01 +0000

Mahyad Tousi is in fact a self proclaimed junkie; he is a true addict of stories. Mahyad is one of those people who gets totally consumed within stories, and can’t simply come to grips that at some point they all seem to end. Here, at BoomGen, we’re trying to discover a way to solve that problem; to find a way to circumvent these stories from ever having to end. We adapt our stories to become franchises spanned across multiple releases across multiple transmedia platforms, and we do so in a way that aims to use these stories for social good.

Mahyad is a true junkie of these stories, and that’s why he’s been asked to speak on a pannel at the Transmedia Hollywood 4 Conference on April 12 in Los Angeles. Mahyad will be there using all of his expertise that comes with being a junkie to as a member of the “Transmedia for a Change” Panel. He’ll be there along with Katerina Cizek, Katie Elmore Mota, Sam Haren, and Moderator Henry Jenkins discussing how modern technology is being utilized to transform stories into a shape capable of changing the world for the better. If you happen to be in Los Angeles on the 12th, you should definitely check out the conference, being held at the UCLA Department of Film (tics and other info here). Don’t miss this rare opportunity to see a junkie do what he does best; talk about his addiction with other junkies… story junkies, that is.

The Cat and the Coup

Greg Greenberger — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 20:12:00 +0000

So as you can see we just started our Blog. But if it had been around in 2011, we would have definitely talked about this game when it came out:

We’ve been playing this really interesting interactive take on Mohammed Mossadegh’s life. Oh, and did we mention you play as a cat. C’mon who doesn’t love free cat games? But, more importantly, its an engaging visceral tale about one of the most prominent figures in Iranian history, and a radical reinterpretation of narrative storytelling. If you have a few minutes, we definitely recommend giving it a play-through.

BoomGen Studios has a Blog Now!

Greg Greenberger — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 20:28:12 +0000

So who are we? BoomGen Studios is a transmedia storytelling factory. We tell big stories across multiple media platforms. Our stories can be experienced at the cinema, on TV, on your mobile phone or tablet. They can be played in an online gaming environment, or simply read as a graphic novel. But that’s not all we do. We are also the industry go-to source for entertainment content about the peoples and cultures of South/West/Central Asia. We’re using our Blog as a source to bring these stories together and discover what’s new and exciting in the world of transmedia and its intersection with education and social good. We’re taking transmedia transnational.