VOYAGER MEDIA COMPANY

Mark is a founder of FutureTechLive! and Space Teams. He comes from the story side, having started inthe theater: writing, directing and designing for the Tony Award-winning McCarter Theater on the campus of Princeton University. He then shifted into storyboards, working heavily in commercials before moving into animation.

 

After developing projects at Cartoon Network (“The Cosmic Clubhouse” and “Iowa 88”)) and Disney Channel (“Sumo-Pop”), Mark moved on to producing/writing/co-directing a ground-breaking collaboration between NBC, The International Olympics Council and XFM (one of China's largest Media Companies), for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. As a producer and writer, Mark has worked in both live action and animation, in the feature world (with Lionsgate, the Walt Disney Company, Sony and Universal), in television (with Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, Disney Jr., Ryan Seacrest Productions, BBC America and TNT) and in the gaming world. The first feature he co-wrote, The Ghastly Love of Johnny X (produced and directed by his pal, Paul Bunnell)
continues to live a vibrant life in cult cinema.
 

For the past decade Mark has worked to marry tech with narrative expression and smart application to create exciting solutions in the entertainment media and the ed-tech arena; to place the user as the hero (to steal from Joseph Campbell). His work includes:

• Collaborated in creating an expansion of the adobe software package to allow After Effects to work more dynamically and fluidly in the animation pipeline, establishing greater labor/cost efficiencies on the Cartoon Network animated series, “The High Fructose Adventures of Annoying Orange” while overseeing visual narrative, storyboards and layout application.

• Supervised production on the “Endorsed By” pilot for TNT and Seacrest Productions, introducing an ambitious modification of the painted FX techniques introduced in the Richard Linklater film, “A Scanner Darkly”. This was a second significant collaboration with Adobe to evolve the After Effects software to create a more evocative and production friendly solution. TNT showcased the solution at Upfronts for the upcoming season. This project was in partnership with Izzy Pick (Masked Singer) as the show-runner.

 

• Supervised production for Space Media Ventures (a partnership with Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Curved Light Entertainment) on a unique virtual reality experience, “Stardust”. The production incorporated the best elements of ed-tech in an innovative experience: hands-on immersive application (birthing stars in a galactic nursery, constructing a solar system from scratch, becoming a super-charged Sherlock Holmes in seeking life on distant planets), spatial audio, a fusion of entertainment and gamification with real science and physics. This was begun as a project for the Oculus Quest (when it was in prototype) and integrated cutting- edge production solutions including Volumetric Capture (with Metastage) and fluid haptics.

 

• Launched FutureTechLive! In partnership with San Diego’s Comic-Con International as a featured event space designed to introduce attendees to emerging technology, allowing them to interact with the creators and experience innovation first-hand. The breadth of the event includes immersive tech, robotics, AI, volumetric capture, holograms, and gaming. Over the course of eight years, the event evolved from a wholly onsite experience to a virtual and interactive platform. We partnered with Unity to introduce a metaverse for attendees that added music and esports in ways that expanded the social, collaborative and gamification of events in exceptional ways. FutureTechLive!, based on its success, was sold to Blockchains, Inc in 2022.

• In addition to the Metaverse innovations with unity, we have been a core strategic partner in creating virtual sustainability, further developing solutions for virtually augmenting live events in ways that bridge global audiences in immersive experiences and enhance their interaction by providing carbon-neutral opportunities with virtual collectibles and placing the attendees and our partners in the “Hero’s Seat”.

• Developed with Unity Labs an augmented level of interaction/integration with documentary/ reality series that will fuse AR with streaming content to expand educational options in programming and allow for greater user-control. We are developing a series, Augmented, which will launch this signature piece of ed-tech to a broader audience. 

• Co-created Space Teams, an ed-tech company which features a platform, SpaceCRAFT, and eco-system that will inspire and activate the next leaders in Space and STEM and engage and connect people in an interactive exploration of the cosmos. Our platform features data sets from NASA and JPL. A partnership of SimDynamX (co-owned by former NASA astronaut, Dr. Greg Chamitoff) and FutureTechLive. Our pilot program debuted in Australia. Strategic partnerships include NASA Space Grants, ESA Foundation, Virgin Galactic and AWS. We are in discussions to launch initiatives with Roblox. www.space-teams.com

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• Mark served as the Head of the Creative Studio and Sr. Director of Innovations at Blockchains, Inc and is currently a board member at One Giant Leap and Space Teams Academy.