He was hooked. “Science fiction is kind of like my church,” said Smith, who is now 47 and lives in Philadelphia. “It’s spiritual and very connected to who I am as a queer black person.” However, the problem with his church is that there is not a lot of black (or queer) representation.

Mainstream science fiction features black characters such as Morpheus from matrixMace Windu from star Warsand Lieutenant Commander LaForge and Nyota Uhura from Star Trek. But in general, black characters are not given the same prominence and screen time as their white counterparts. And when blacks are present, they tend to presumptuously and traditionally appeal. Fat and black bodies are rare.

Smith said, pointing to a figure Baron Vladimir Harkonnen V.I Dune.UndefinedUndefinedHe added, “I was doing a weird sci-fi reading series called Laser Life, and when I was looking for guest readers, the first story I got portrayed a fat villain. The character’s obesity was described in hateful terms and taken as a clear indication of their vice. It’s really disappointing.”

So when accessible AI art generators came out last year, Smith, already an established visual artist, adopted these tools to get creative. Many black, fat, and queer characters From a more inclusive futuristic world. Among them was Marcus, whom Smith brought to life using Midjourney and an act, which is an artificial intelligence platform that creates talking avatars. Marcus heads a department at the Afro Electrosciences Institute, which Smith has called “an independent, superhero-led African future organization working in biomechanics, cosmic engineering, nanotechnology, and medicinal chemistry.”

An eccentric, Smith described Marcus as “a kind of smart alcoholic. A big, likable geek who thinks he’s a bit of a gangster. He likes to study moths and ants and tries to see what about insect life can be replicated in human life.” In one gif of Marcus, which Smith posted to his Instagram, the character asks, “Who here is going to draw me?”

Whether it’s a hit TV show like “The Last of Us” on HBO or an interactive theme park like Universal Studios’s Super Nintendo World, video games are ready for adaptation and reinterpretation.

But what if the game was not created with an IP address? What if the game has not been released yet?

With “Ashfall,” CEO and Founder of Liithos, Michael Mumbauer and Vice President of Creator John Garvin (who wrote and created the game) build on their characters and immersive world strong enough to draw fans in before any game. First, with a five-episode TikTok show that ends on Sunday, and then with a comic book that will start in March. All of this comes years before the game was completed.

Ashfall explores a post-apocalyptic world set in the Pacific Northwest, where Seattle has been submerged in the ocean for hundreds of years. Climate catastrophe has changed the world and civilization has turned into factions and enclaves. At the foot of the erupting Mount Rainier, Ash Naranjo was taken in by the Order of Life Sciences, who gave him prosthetic arms and other implants.

“For my last game, I literally wrote about 12,000 pages of script,” says Garvin. “That’s like the equivalent of 10 two-hour movies, and that’s really what you need to fill out the game. You need a lot of the same things you need in any medium — plot, character development, theme. You have to have something important to say.”

Through themes of climate change, ideological and political infighting, mistreatment of people with disabilities, and the general erosion of society, Ashfall touches on contemporary themes that may not surface.

“What I really want to do with ‘Ashfall’ is explore the important things that are happening right now. It’s set a thousand years in the future so we can have some distance from the things I see tearing us apart in the world today. They fight through every possible thing that people can disagree about.” Ideological foundations, religious reasons. I see that may be in our future – which terrifies me.”

Mompower says he’s invested in exploring new platforms for storytelling. A veteran of the video game and film industry, he and his team have brought on famous characters like Nathan Drake from “Uncharted” and Joel and Ellie from The Last of Us. After working at PlayStation for 13 years, he knows the game world and how to get players to communicate. Now, the challenge is how to achieve this without having an actual game to play.

The first episode of the TikTok series “Ashfall” starring Michael Le.

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“I look at the challenges and say, ‘TikTok is a huge platform and it seems like a platform of opportunity for storytelling,’” says Mombauer. “What if there was a way to do what Quibi tried to do, which is tell short stories, on a platform that already had an audience ready for it? And what if we did it with an influencer who actually understood how to do it? “

Mombaur enlisted Michael Le (who goes by the handle @justmaiko), a social media influencer, dancer, and storyteller with over 52 million followers on TikTok, to help create, with Garvin, a five-episode narrative series that airs weekly on Le’s channel. Liithos exec was already a TikToker fan whose posts generated millions of views, be it through his dance videos that used high-quality special effects or anime-inspired content.

“I think it was experimental and we were really writing the comic book,” Mombauer says. It just felt like a natural way to put comics next to this because the game would take years. So I felt like, “What if we try to build this IP a little bit backwards. Even though we have a gaming background, what if we don’t start playing, but get to it? “

The experimental maneuver appears to have worked. The series has racked up more than 10 million views so far, before dropping its final chapter on Sunday. When creating TikTok, Mumbauer toned down his traditional film and video game influences and Garvin pared down his concepts to come up with one-and-a-half page scripts for the episodes.

“My thought process was to give them all the meat and cut out every bit of the fat. It’s 15 seconds. It’s quick, fast. Getting straight to the point,” he tells me. “It was really how I fit myself into the story. It kind of mixes what I usually do on TikTok with the world of “Ashfall.” I turn into him … I learn to use these powers that Ash has, and then I try to find my brother.

The TikTok series “Ashfall” has garnered more than 10 million views so far, before its final chapter ends on Sunday.

(Lithos Entertainment)

Now that Le has established a look at Ash and his world, the comic book must follow. right? With intellectual property, the traditional thinking is to cross-promote everything to create a visual presence. But even this part of Ashfall’s world-building is done in an unorthodox fashion because of their opposite philosophy.

“I had to show John: What if you look at this character as if he’s already been in the world for 75 years? In Batman, over the course of 75 years, Batman has had a lot of different looks. What’s the same as the ears, the sigil and the cowl. What you see In a TikTok series it’s not necessarily what you see in a comic book series, and it’s not necessarily what you see in a game. There will be nuances, but the basic pieces are there, and that’s what I think makes an iconic character,” says Mompower.

“For the artistic interpretation and being transmedia, I think there’s a huge opportunity to reach different audiences. Someone might not have my taste in art. So maybe a TikTok video will get them really excited about this in a way that comics or even game footage won’t.”

A Los Angeles man has been arrested and charged on suspicion of hacking into the Instagram accounts of influential women in an attempt to extort money and engage in sexual video chats over a period of nearly four years, federal prosecutors said.

Amir Hussain Kalshan, 24, was charged Thursday with two counts of wire fraud, one count of unauthorized access to a protected computer to obtain information, one count of accessing a computer to defraud and obtain value, one count of aggravated identity theft, and one count of one. Threat to damage a protected computer, prosecutors from the US Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California he said in a statement.

The indictment says Gulshan would use “SIM swap,” a technique whereby a mobile phone number associated with one SIM card is fraudulently reassigned to a different SIM card, to send influencers’ Instagram password reset codes to a phone in his possession. Once logged into his alleged targets’ accounts, Gulshan would impersonate them and ask their friends for money, collecting $15,000 from one account’s friends.

In other cases, he “extorted victims for money and sexually explicit chats to restore the victims’ social media accounts,” according to the indictment.

Gulshan allegedly demanded $5,000 from one of the victims and told her she would regain control of her Instagram account “if she started a video call and stripped it for him.”

He also allegedly charged other victims hundreds of dollars for “verified badges, knowing that he could not provide verified badges, which he allegedly sold,” the indictment alleges.

If convicted, Gulshan’s maximum sentence will be 20 years in federal prison for each of the two counts of wire fraud against him. The other four charges carry shorter additional penalties.

Gulshan pleaded not guilty at Friday’s arraignment hearing in US District Court in Los Angeles, Ciaran McEvoy, a spokesman for the US Attorney’s office, said. His trial date was set for April 18.