In a plan to get some traffic to BoMToons.com I made up a press release and sent it to the Daily Universe (BYU's newspaper). When I say "Made up a press release" I literally mean I made it up from scratch. My buddy Charan, who came to Provo from India and converted to the LDS church at age 17 was the perfect subject for my pseudo-story...mostly because he wouldn't mind being the front man and actually likes random attention. The result turned out to be much larger than I expected.Here's the text from the release I sent out:
BOOK OF MORMON CARTOONS HARMONIZES WITH INDIAN BOY'S CONVERSION, September 19, 2005 - Provo UT
Who would have thought that a small east-indian immigrant to Provo and convert to the church would become so immersed in Mormon culture as to start a website featuring cartoons and games based on the Book of Mormon? Well, Charan Prabhakar has done just that, and he calls it www.bomtoons.com.
Charan came to Utah Valley as an infant from Madras, a city near the ocean in Tamilnadu India. His high-school days at Timpview gave him ample opportunity to learn about what he considered the "strange Mormon lifestyle." At age 17, Charan fully embraced the LDS church by taking all 6 discussions and being baptized in the same week. At 19, Charan left for the Melbourne Australia Mandarin-speaking mission where his time with other missionaries further acquainted him with the nuances of Mormon Culture. He now teaches Mandarin Chinese at the MTC and attends BYU as an MFHD major. His time at the MTC and BYU has provided him yet another unique perspective on Mormons as a people.
As Charan journied from his secular life to his current LDS outlook, certain things in the scriptures always tickled his peculiar sense of humor. Of this he said, "my creative side was always pushing me to create some sort of monument to the funnier things in the scriptures...finally I thought 'what about a website?" Charan recently launched BoMtoons.com which takes a tongue-in-cheek look at some of the funnier passages and stories from the Book of Mormon.
The site has cartoon shorts about Nephi and his brothers going after the brass plates, games featuring a missionary and his nerdy red-haired, pimple-pocked, chubby greenie, a section for fans to submit their own toons to be shared on the site, and much more.When asked about his motivation for the site, Prabhakar said he hopes his voice-acting on BoMToons.com will help propel his acting career.
###
Charan has actually been involved in some of the voice acting on the site, but in reality it's mostly run by Jon and I. Jon and I agreed that we'd tote Charan as the front man to avoid the limelight ourselves and give Charan some publicity since he's an aspiring actor in real life and could use some connections. Well, maybe Jon didn't agree with the plan, it was more me telling Jon I was going to do it, and Jon trying to convince me not to because Charan might get in trouble (I did get Charan's permission before I submitted the article...don't worry).
The Daily Universe picked up the story (Link to the story)
The visits to BoMToons went from averaging about 30 per day to over 300 on the day the article ran, and then slowly evened out at about 70 per day after a week.
Then, low and behold, a major paper in Utah, the Deseret News, contacted us and asked if they could do an article also..."Of course" I agreed, "as long as Charan is made out to be the brains behind the project."
So, last Saturday the Deseret News published this article in their Religion and Ethics section.
The site received over 900 visits (I use the term "visits" instead of "hits" because "visits" indicates unique computers that access the site whereas "hits" don't really mean much) the day the article ran. Sunday brought even more than Saturday, and today we're headed for around 700. I've been hit with quite a few emails and our forum has been going crazy. An anti-mormon site even posted a link to one of our games about an atheist in the Book of Mormon and his eventual fate (they say the premise of the game is typical of their dealings with Mormons because you "can't win" -lol-). We've been contacted by people in the UK and even Hong Kong, kind of crazy for a site with such a limited fan base.
Hopefully something good comes out of it for Charan. As for us, it's fun to have some fans and feedback on our creativity.
So that's the story of my 15 minutes of fame. Makes me wonder about how accurate the other stories are that get published in the paper. ;)
Here's a link to a video that the BYU Daily News did on us too.
No comments:
Post a Comment