Thursday, April 3, 2014

Jeff Gomez and Starlight Runner



Jeff Gomez is one of leading experts at transmedia storytelling in the world will be talking to class today.  His childhood was spent in the housing projects on Manhattan’s Lower East Side graduating from Queens College in 1985.

Jeff is the CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment and has worked on such projects as Pirates of the Caribbean, Microsoft's Halo, Avatar, Transformers and Mattel's Hot Wheels.  Gomez’s company was launched in 2000 with partner and Vice President Mark Pensavalle. They focus on turning intellectual property/story into transmedia successes. They also work on the story and create a book of worlds for each, so when the story moves from movie to video game, the video game creators can follow the same story and learn all there is to know about the story world.

Today he will talk about his "Never Surrender" philopshy and his life in the business of transmedia storytelling.  He has given his "Never Surrender" motivational speech to more than 120,000 students in over 1,000 venues.

His bio on Starlight Runner reads, Prior to launching Starlight Runner with partner Mark Pensavalle in 2000, Jeff Gomez was a prominent figure in the adventure game and video game industries serving as a producer for Acclaim Entertainment’s comic book division. He helped create the Acclaim Comics super hero universe, in addition to adapting Valiant Comics super heroes into videogames for Nintendo and PlayStation consoles. Characters, concepts and game-play Jeff conceived, wrote and produced for Acclaim’s Turok, Dinosaur Hunter and Turok 2: Seeds of Evil helped that franchise to gross over $420 million. Turok was recently revived as a new videogame franchise from Disney Interactive and as an animated feature from Starz Entertainment.

In addition to serving as a brand extension consultant to such corporations as Disney, Microsoft, 20th Century Fox, Coca-Cola, Scholastic, Wieden+Kennedy, Mattel, Showtime, Konami and Hasbro, Jeff has also delivered his seminar, Creating Blockbuster Worlds: Developing Highly Successful Transmedia Franchises, to the MITFutures of Entertainment Conference, Game Developers Conference, International Game Developers Association, the NewTeeVee Conference, the New York State Bar Association and the Producers Guild of America.  A board member of the Producers Guild of America with over 20 years experience developing, writing and producing content, Jeff has been featured and quoted in such periodicals as Forbes, Business Week, Los Angeles Times, Variety, Investors Business Daily, Publishers Weekly, Produced By, Wizard, and Animation, and he has been profiled on MTV News and American Latino.

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