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Podcast: Alien's 40th Birthday And How Tongal Helped It Celebrate


The Spear Sisters and crew on set for production of  Alien: Ore, one of six short films based on the Alien film franchise released by Fox as part of the original movie's 40th birthday.

Alien, the iconic science-fiction horror film, turned 40 on April 26. To celebrate the franchise – which has spawned a host of other films, comics, games and more – 21st Century Fox Film worked with the Santa Monica-based creator platform Tongal to surface ideas for six short films built in the Alien narrative universe.

Tongal, which counts 170,000 users on its platform, generated 550 proposals from its members. Eventually about 1,000 people from the creator platform worked on one or another of the resulting shorts, said Tongal founder and CEO James DeJulio. For those interested, the shorts initially debuted on IGN, but will be collected at AlienUniverse.com beginning May 3, and will be available on social media too.

Tongal CEO James DeJulio

In my latest Bloom in Tech podcast episode, I talked with Tongal's founder and CEO James DeJulio about the 'Alien' anniversary project, how the Tongal platform works, and the challenges that brands, marketers and ad agencies face in creating enough content to both build fan engagement and do it in a cost-effective way.

You can listen to the Bloom in Tech podcast with DeJulio here:

https://anchor.fm/davidlbloom/episodes/Short-Films-on-Aliens-40th-Anniversary-and-Tongal-CEO-James-DeJulio-e3snft