Incention@incention_io
Welcoming another mentor to the Adim mentorship program, Sanjay Sharma! Sanjay is the Founder and CEO of Marginal MediaWorks, Inc., an innovative media company focused on premium storytelling from singular subcultures and voices. Sanjay is a company builder, always looking for intersections between content, culture and technology, from his past efforts in videogaming/creator economy (Machinima) and hip hop (All Def) to his latest venture.
At MARGINAL, he and his team focus on connecting diverse storytellers, popular genres, and established talent to traditional and new formats from feature films and scripted series, to animation and audio. It’s here where he finds stories that are begging to be told, expand the pipeline of diverse creatives in Hollywood, and have breakout commercial potential to reach broad audiences.
“We use popular narrative storytelling as a vehicle at once to drive cultural change at large, and narrative systems change in the industry itself.”
Sanjay looks for stories where, as he often says, “identity is a prism and not the plot.” To him, the hallmarks of a good story include: “depth of character; tangible narrative plot with dramatic tension and propulsion; unique atmosphere and setting; and most importantly, a guiding voice and point of view that we’re not used to seeing, but framed in a well-known story archetype or subgenre.”
The voices behind these narratives are underrepresented in Hollywood and typically working outside the system, in the margins, from where Sanjay believes the most bold, unique and urgent storytellers have always come. Sanjay is constantly seeking out these undiscovered stories. In just a few years, MARGINAL has become prolific in indie films (8 films to date, its most recent film won “Best Picture” at TriBeCa Film Festival in NYC) and also sold its first series, animated series and scripted fiction audio series, all with emerging and established BIPOC/LGBTQ creators. “New narratives, new heroes, new narratives systems,” Sanjay says (MARGINAL is building out its own proprietary data-sciences platform to approach content sourcing and development in fundamentally new ways). And that’s why he’s been closely following the potential of the blockchain and Web3, and is so excited about Adim.
Thank you, Sanjay, for finding fresh new voices, championing them, and getting their projects made. Together, you’re changing the narrative.
