Story Summit 2016 - The Intersection of Story, Technology & Sustainability

Conn Fishburn is the Chief Strategy Officer of Zealot Networks, Inc., where he brings an innate understanding of the intersection between human behavior, technology and culture. With more than 18 years of experience, Fishburn is an expert in emerging media, marketing and consumer behavior. He has built a career and reputation by providing insight and business-building strategy to some of the world’s most powerful brands, including American Express, Coca-Cola, Disney, National Football League, NBC Universal, Motorola, Verizon, Viacom and the Women’s Tennis Association. As Founder and CEO of F3, a strategy and innovation firm, Fishburn focused his energy on Fortune 500 companies, agencies and early stage start-ups. Before establishing F3, Fishburn served as Head of Partner Innovation at Yahoo! where he defined, delivered, monetized and scaled the next generation of marketing relationships, user interfaces and brand experiences for key clients and their consumers. Fishburn graduated from Emory University with a dual degree in Social Theory and Creative Writing. Originally from Tennessee, Fishburn now lives in Venice, California.

Dylan Pearce has directed six feature films, ten award-winning short films and has worked extensively with virtual reality and 360-degree stereoscopic filmmaking. His films have been screened worldwide from theatrical to festivals, TV and VOD. He most recently directed the award-winning 40 Below and Falling 3D, which included a VR experience. The film is Canada’s first 4K 3D feature film with a VR experience, and has earned him a 2016 Canadian Screen Award nomination for best directing.

Dylan’s latest feature in development, Iron Dogs 3D won the 2015 Best Pitch award at the Stereo Media summit in Belgium this past year. Dylan is currently directing three VR short films and is exploring VR storytelling in trans-media. Dylan’s depth of work in the stereoscopic VR field has led him to work closely with 360/180-camera developers and VR headsets creators.

Frédéric Guarino is the founder of the VR Valley Network in Montréal and a VR strategist working with agencies and brands. He has spent more than 16 years at the intersection of media and technology, in business development, product management, and strategy roles. A graduate of the Paris Political Sciences Institute, he was raised in France, the US and Japan and began his career at the Bill Gates-owned Corbis Sygma in New York. His work grew to encompass mobile and social media marketing, applications and strategic development for companies in New York, Paris and Zurich. Frédéric was most recently with Mediabiz International, an integrated boutique production and finance company whose productions for film and television have won many nominations and awards. He is also an amateur historian of the cultural economy, in particular the positive interactions between technology and the arts. 

Mitch Dubin was born on June 8, 1953 in Dallas, Texas, USA as Mitchell Harris Dubin. He is known for his work on Saving Private Ryan (1998), Se7en (1995) and The Avengers (2012).

 In 1986, Steve’s professional career began as a handheld cameraman shooting college football and basketball, professional soccer and wrestling as well as rock headliners of day: Bockman Turner Overdrive, Leon Russell, and Edgar Winter, just to name a few.  In 1987, Steve landed a job with Kansas City’s public television station, where he cut his teeth in the art of visual storytelling; and then subsequently won the first of five regional Emmy Awards at the age of 24.

In 1994, Steve and his wife Stacey started their own company and on January 1, 1994, New Vision Pictures was born. In just a few short months, Steve would build a business – and a solid reputation – shooting award-winning news promotions for television stations across the county. 

As owner and operator of his Arriflex and Sony cameras, Steve became very prominent Director of Photography shooting for Directors and Producers in New York, Los Angeles, and all points in between 

In 2004, Steve took a bold step back on a firmly established career path and entered the world of Steadicam, the cinematic tool of choice for powerful, visual storytelling. This would lead Steve down a path of making movies that eventually moved him and his family to Los Angeles.  Over the next ten years he found himself working on a variety of Hollywood based feature films as well as multiple seasons on TV shows such as My Boys (TBS), Sons of Anarchy (FX) and Scandal (ABC).  Steve and his family continue to live in Thousand Oaks, California and he bases his work from the Los Angeles market.

Céline Tricart is an independent filmmaker and stereographer who is particularly interested in storytelling for stereoscopic cinema. She has already directed several shorts, three of which were shot in 3D, and received many awards around the world. Since 2008 when she graduated from the famous ENS Louis Lumière film school in Paris, she was the stereographer of more than 20 live broadcast, commercials and documentaries, and of the first French 3D feature film "Behind the Walls" from directors J. Lacombe and P. Sid (Sombrero Productions- 2010). She has been in charge of many 3D trainings and is often asked to join international high-end conferences as a speaker and 3D specialist, and worked with the R&D department of the french company Binocle (3D rigs and softwares) during 4 years as lead stereographer. Céline Tricart has published a book about 3D storytelling in early 2013, available worldwide, and then moved to Los Angeles. She works now closely with the award-winning company 3ALITY Technica on numerous projects including "Stalingrad" from director F.Bondarchuk and "Transformers 4 : Age of Extinction" from director Michael Bay. At present she is writing and developing her own feature-film projects.

Beth Janson is a media and philanthropy consultant with over 18 years experience in the cultural sector. From 2009 to 2015 she served as executive director of the Tribeca Film Institute, the non-profit founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff. She joined Tribeca in 2003 and was the creative force behind the development of its signature programs, including the TFI New Media Fund, a $5M partnership with the Ford Foundation and the first-ever fund for independent transmedia work in the US; Tribeca All Access, a grant and networking program for minority filmmakers; and the Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund. Prior to Tribeca, Beth worked in the programming department of HBO Documentary Films, and as programming director of the Newport International Film Festival. Before her career in film and media, she worked in theater administration, including at The Public Theater and New Dramatists, and as an assistant to actor Liev Schreiber. 

Denise Quesnel is a researcher of immersive content creation and virtual reality, specific to R&D for VR, stereoscopic 3D, high frame rate, CAVE and Fulldome content. She has been working as a consultant in designing workflows for the VFX and film industry since 2007, and has been a full-time researcher at Emily Carr University of Art + Design since 2011. She is also the Director of R&D at Vancouver’s VR/motion capture studio The Sawmill, and in her research she designs and executes experiments around cognition, perception, and brain-computer interfaces with immersive environments. This work frequently is in partnership with international collaborators, and she enjoys the experience of co-creating artistic content. She is the 2016 and 2017 SIGGRAPH VR Village Chair, co-creator of the Consortium for Future Reality with NYU’s Media Research Lab, co-founder of the Canada Chapter: Advanced Imaging Society, a contributor to the Immersive Technology Alliance, and board member of several CG, VR and S3D organizations around the world.  

For most of his 13 years at Marvel Comics, Carl Potts was an Executive Editor, overseeing 1/3 of Marvel's publications. Top comics creators Carl discovered and mentored include Jim Lee, Whilce Portacio,Scott Williams, Art Adams, Larry Stroman and Jon Bogdanov. His creative discoveries include June Brigman and Mike Mignola. When he should have been sleeping, Carl wrote and drew comics, covers and posters for Marvel. Among Carl's projects was a celebrated run as writer/layout artist on Punisher War Journal and his writing on Venom, Prowler and Shadowmasters. He created Alien Legion and was creator/artist on the Last of the Dragons graphic novel. The Alien Legion screenplay Carl wrote was bought by Jerry Bruckheimer Films. Carl is currently developing his Last of the Dragons graphic novel as a TV series. Carl has given his seminar on sequential visual storytelling at Pixar, The Society of Illustrators, Blizzard, Blue Sky, LucasArts, Syracuse Univ., Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD), SUNY Purchase, NYU, FIT, Ogilvy; Mather and Psyop. He teaches in NYC at School of Visual Arts and online for Academy of Art University. In October 2013, Carl's book, The DC Comics Guide to Creating Comics: Inside the Art of Visual Storytelling, was published by DC/Watson-Guptill (Random House).

Don Paré’s passion is to mentor entrepreneurs towards success. He has a consistent track record that both investors and entrepreneurs have come to rely upon. He is a Keynote Speaker on strategic planning and evolving funding modalities. He speaks from experience not from an academic perspective and is often called to turn companies around or assess them using his proven innovative report card model.

Don has over 40 years of experience with high technology companies and end-user departments, holding various executive roles including Chairman, CEO, President, V.P. Operations, V.P. Sales and Marketing, General Manager, VP partners and channels, Development and Marketing Manager, Minority Shareholder and Active Director.

Mr. Paré has participated as co-chairman of the Data Processing Management Association Conference in Ottawa and co-founder of the Banff Venture Conference.

From 1998 to 2001, Mr. Paré was President and CEO at MessagingDirect, where he raised over 18 million dollars in start-up funding and boosted the company to #1 growth firm in Edmonton’s high technology sector. Although the company was 800,000 in the red when Mr. Paré joined, he later merged it with a very large US Banking Firm for over 75 million CDN. Shareholders saw their investments grow by manifold during a time where the market was depressed.

Specialties:He founded and is the Chairman of Real Value Capital, and in that capacity mentored and found investment for many Ottawa, Toronto, Edmonton, BC and California high Tech start-ups. RvC Inc has helped such companies as MessagingDirect, CleanKeys, Well and Wise Online, ACI, Arrow Engineering, WiseNav, WebPlan, Contol F1, Shana, and many other technology enterprises.

Angela is a media producer and communications professional, as well as a recovering actor. Currently working with the National Screen Institute to develop and expand digital media programs, her past work includes roles at Tactica Interactive (Seed, Weather Gone Wild, Pinkertons), CBC, Whistler Film Festival, University of Winnipeg and the National Film Board of Canada. As a documentary producer she has worked extensively in the adventure realm, with productions heading up mountains from Tibet to British Columbia and on the sea in Antarctica. Most recently she co-produced for the series The Explorer’s Club with FlorianFilm (ZDF/arte), the Canada/US co-venture Soul of the Sea (Blue Ant) and the short documentary Buzz… a quirky look at the mosquito and its psychological, social and economic impact on the people of Manitoba. She started working in film as an actor with directors Guy Maddin (Tales from the Gimli Hospital) and John Paizs (The Big Crime Wave). She is a member of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, the Documentary Organization of Canada and is a past board member of WIFTV, DOC-BC and the University of Manitoba.

Marcia Douglas is the Director-  Business Affairs and Digital Initiatives at the Canadian Media Producers Association (CMPA). The CMPA represents the interest of independent producers to promote and advance the continued success of the Canada’s independent production sector. Marcia brings extensive experience and a broad knowledge of the Canadian media landscape and the production and financing of projects across all platforms. For the past 5 years, she has lived at the crossroads of broadcast and digital media. As program manager for the Bell Fund, she oversaw the day-to-day operations of the national cross-platform fund and supported the development and production of hundreds of projects. In addition to Program Manager, Douglas was also an analyst for both the Cogeco Fund and the Independent Production Fund.

Prior to her role at the funds, Douglas produced several award-winning projects that screened at festivals worldwide including TIFF. Earlier in her career, Douglas was an assistant director and production manager.

Douglas has completed a post-graduate studies in Children’s Media. She is also serves on the Digital Governance Committee for the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television and co-chairs the Digital Advisory Committee for WIFT-Toronto.

Michael is an Emmy® award-winning filmmaker whose films have earned him more than 80 international, national and regional awards. During the late 80’s and early 90’s, Michael garnered five titles as WCNPA Television Photojournalist of the Year. In 1992, Michael was one of the first journalists into war-torn Somalia prior to the UN-sanctioned “Operation Restore Hope.” Since then, Michael has acted as a network storytelling consultant and helped launch the world’s first weekly science program, Discovery Channel’s “Daily Planet.” Michael is the only a filmmaker in history to be granted access inside a classified U.S. Department of Defense weapons competition. Battle of the X-Planes earned Michael his first Emmy® for best long form news and current affairs documentary. He has produced, written and directed numerous primetime specials for National Geographic, Discovery Channel, History, PBS, ZDF Germany and Arte France. Some of his network credits include Gemini®-nominated Secrets of the Dinosaur Mummy, Hunt for the Mad Trapper, Hitler’s Stealth Fighter, Lost Nuke and Mars Rising. Michael also teaches fiction and nonfiction storytelling in Digital Cinema Production at NAIT and has been a judge for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences since 2010. Michael recently produced, wrote and directed the documentary feature, Unclaimed,which began its theatrical run in New York and Los Angeles this past May.

Matt is currently the President of Real Value Capital and also Director of cancer focused biotech start-up In Edmonton. Real Value Capital provides strategic planning and corporate mentorship to emerging companies. Matt contributed to overall growth and strategy of the company and contributed to year over year growth of the business. Matt brings over 10 years experience in the capital markets and working with startup companies, has also completed various courses on the exempt markets and also completed the Canadian Securities Course.