Matt Pook / Bio | ||
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Award-winning producer/director Matt Pook develops and produces unique and compelling content across the media spectrum. Powered by a strong desire to leave a major and lasting footprint on urban entertainment development, Matt is dedicated to challenging traditional concepts about media and entertainment. His background runs the gamut - from journalism and documentary filmmaking, to professional theater, to animated and live-action films and television as well as themed entertainment. This has led to Matt's winning top industry awards in television (Emmy) and with the themed entertainment industry (Thea).
In addition to the more traditional media models, Matt is also throwing his creative energy behind experience marketing, creating cutting edge, total surround, walk through attractions that extend and reposition brands and even whole institutions. The NBA, Country Music Hall of Fame, Fox Studios, the city of Las Vegas and many others have all benefited from his unique point of view. Matt began his career in 1984 with the Public Broadcasting Service. That creative partnership produced many highly acclaimed and award-winning documentaries culminating in an Emmy for his production of The Secret Government with Bill Moyers. The next step was network television. At ABC World News Matt produced the popular Our World series with Linda Ellerbee. Following later was a senior producer position with NBC's The Today Show. In 1990, Matt was invited to attend the American Film Institute as a Directing Fellow. His short film, Castles caught the attention of Walt Disney Studios, who hired him to produce mixed-media projects for Disney Television. In 1994, he accepted an offer to head up Production and Development for daVinci Time and Space - the first interactive television venture in the United States. While the broadband interactive trials of the mid 1990's proved to be too ambitious for commercial applications - the experience proved to be invaluable in Matt's later thinking on multidiscipline creative development. sensing a creative match, Fox Studios invited Matt to collaborate in the development of the studio's first foray into feature-length, big-budget animation - Anastasia. This feature allowed Matt to indulge his passion for unorthodox projects that incorporate multiple disciplines, like CGI, art, modern dance, theater and music. Matt was once again able to bring all these passions to bear on Fox's next feature animation project - Titan AE. Returning to Disney Matt directed live-action sequences for Disney's One Saturday Morning as well as producing and touring Mandala, a mixed-media theatrical production in association with UCLA's Center for the Performing Arts. Producing Mandala helped gel his thinking about how to take entertainment before wide audiences in visceral and immediate ways. One of the first projects to benefit from Matt's approach occurred when Fox Studios asked him to reinterpret their blockbuster hit Titanic into a mobile, multi-platform, marketing attraction. Working with Fox executives and James Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment, Matt produced Titanic: Official Movie Tour - a forty-thousand square foot, total surround, walk-through, multi-media themed environment that opened to record crowds at Wembley Stadium in London and subsequently traveled throughout Europe. The show caught the attention of the Themed Entertainment Association who awarded Matt with a Thea Award for his efforts. |