Storytelling uses a plethora of mediums, and animation is one of them. During the 2023 AFROTECH ™ Conference, director and animator Chaz Bottoms and singer Dawn Richard led a session called “World Builders: The New Storytelling Frontier” to discuss how the technologies within the animation industry are creating revolutionary ways for people to tell stories. In their respective career journeys, Bottoms founded CBA Studios — one of the few Black-founded animation studios globally — and has worked with companies such as Disney, Hulu, and Adult Swim, per Forbes. Aside from Richard’s music career, she has a passion for animation. She created a comic book series called “Danity Kane” and works with Adult Swim as a creative consultant, as AFROTECH ™ previously reported, to amplify and create opportunities for Black animators in the space. “We are a beautiful people to draw, but we are a difficult people to draw in the sense that for people who aren’t us, they don’t know what they’re doing,”...

Sunny Hostin, a legal analyst best known for her co-hosting duties on “The View,” has announced that she’s launched a social justice-focused production company. Variety exclusively broke the story, and they revealed that the company — Roots & Wings Productions — will “spotlight characters neglected by Hollywood.” Roots & Wings will produce both films and television shows, and their stories will focus on social justice issues currently at the center of news stories in the United States. “I want to make sure that someone watches and knows that seeing an Afro Latina journalist on screen is a possibility,” Hostin told Variety. “I’m humbled to have the backing of a company like Disney. We’re going to create really intentional premium and diverse content together that centers on women and people of color, as well as people in the LGBTQ+ community — stories that I think, will be fresh and that you haven’t seen before.” Sunny Hostin also confirmed that the first production up for proffer by...

When it was announced that Oscar-winning actress Lupita N’yongo would be teaming up with edu-tainment startup Kukua to serve as an executive producer of a new animated series, it didn’t take long for the news wires to light up with excitement. But according to the company’s chief operating officer, Vanessa Ford, the partnership with the “Black Panther” starlet was a natural one. “Lupita, as you may know — she’s a big vision type of a person,” she told AfroTech. “And initially, when we pitched her the idea, we thought she’d only be interested in getting involved on a surface level. But, you know, she was so in love with the idea of “Super Sema” that she asked to become a shareholder of the company, and it grew from there.” Billed as “Africa’s first kid superhero series,” “Super Sema” follows the adventures of the titular Sema and her brother, MB, who use their “tech-novating” powers to save their town of Dunia from a heartless robot uber-villain. From their “Secret Lab,” they code...