Manuel Godoy, co-creator of Black Sands Entertainment, joins Cheddar News to discuss securing a deal with Kevin Hart and Mark Cuban on 'Shark Tank.'

Between Bells

Black Sands Entertainment Co-Creator Talks Growing the Company With 'Shark Tank' Deal

Welcome back to Between Bells. This segment is brought to you by Jpmorgan Chase celebrating black culture and our communities every day after witnessing the lack of representation of black characters in story lines to entrepreneurs recently struck a $500,000 deal with kevin Hart and Mark Cuban on shark tank for their company, Black Sands Entertainment. The company uses its power as a way to diversify the entertainment industry and storylines joining us now to discuss is Manuel Godoy, co creator of Black Sands Entertainment. Manuel, welcome to the show. Your wife, also a co creator of the company. What was the inspiration behind your publishing house? Yeah, so um thank you so much for having me. Um well our motivation for what we were doing was basically trying to tell stories about history before slavery. We have stories about Egypt, we have stories about the mali empire Madagascar and basically I felt that you know, you know african american people just basically had a lot of their legacies taken away from them, you know, in the earlier days, um in this country. So we need to get back to that at least get some of our roots back so we can have our own legacies to build on as well. That's what our company does and we've been focusing more on comics Right? But now we're moving into animation and also online distribution. I'm a huge fan of comics, we were just looking at the animation, it looks incredible. It looks beautiful. I can't wait to check it out. You sold over 100,000 print copies in 2021 with $1.2 million why was this deal with Kevin Hart and Mark Cuban? So important for your company? Well, um, you know, one thing is when you're independent company, there's just certain barriers that you simply cannot get past, right no matter how many, how much numbers you have. You know, at the end of the day, you know when you want to do big time productions, you know, like full animated features, you know, you don't need budgets that are north of $30 million Right? And that doesn't just come out of nowhere that like you have to have certain people connected to a property in order to even have that conversation at all with these big corporations. And you know, the deal with Mark, Mark Cuban and Kevin Hart makes that possible without having to basically give up everything right? Because they're more stronger in the negotiation, you know what I mean? Sure, I do understand 100%. I do. So let's talk about your app. You guys released a comic app ranked top 40 on apple and android. I will be downloading it right after this interview. Can you tell us more about the app and what the experience is like? Absolutely. So Bsp comics is basically a platform very similar to web tunes in to pass as far as giving digital comic books that are in mobile friendly optimized format. Right. And uh it's a really good app, we have about 750 chapters on there right now from 45 different titles. So, you know, these are different creators in the community who made really great comic books themselves, we curated them to make sure that everybody had the best possible comics before them. And you know, there's plenty of content from a whole wide array of different storylines, basically working on african mythology, history, sci fi and fantasy. That's the things that we typically focus on. Mark Cuban and Kevin Hart aren't the only big names attracted to your company. You guys also work with animators from Sony Pixar Disney, just to name of few. Are there any challenges when you work with these companies when it comes to your initial vision and the storylines and characters that you had in your head along with your wife? Yeah, so I was fortunate enough to do a partnership with um Turner Serrat in 2019 when we formed our studio, Black Sand Studios and he had so many in the industry um contacts and people that he's worked with in the past that he was capable of getting these, like, you know, basically these, you know, hit makers right in the industry to work on our production uh you know, straight up from, you know, the colleague like and and just um you know, the way they worked together, right? And um you know, it's just been very fortunate that we've had that manpower has been a big thing for us just because when Covid basically stopped everyone from doing live action, right, everybody started doing animation for a while. So everybody was getting recruited. But now we're really getting a lot of traction on the manpower side and were able to keep like, you know, the control over the story and how we want to deliver it because we're all building this in house. You know, we raised like a million dollars in 2020 to make our animated pilot and we're almost done now. You know, I have about 30 seconds left. I want to ask you very quickly though. Any new characters or stories that you're thinking of, what should the fans be expecting in the next few months or a year is here Manuel Oh, we're definitely gonna have some video games for the black sands universe. Um, you know, ASAR is definitely going to get some video games, video games gonna be huge. That's the next step after our animated properties and you know, so look out for that. Be prepared as always be ready to invest, right? Because that's what we do. We take investors from the community. Well, cheers to your success. I really cannot wait to check out your product Manuel Godoy, co creator of black sands Entertainment, Jpmorgan Chase is committed to advancing racial and social equity visit Jpmorgan Chase dot com slash ABP to learn more