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Mark Page never planned to work for Walt Disney Imagineering; he nearly missed his interview and was focused on film projects. That first meeting ultimately led to more than 15 years at WDI. Mark started drawing at five years old and enjoyed creating comic book and cartoon characters. This interest led him to attend the Art Center College of Design and pursue a career as an artist. Mark is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about his background and work as a Imagineer.
On this episode, Mark describes the path and challenges that ultimately led him to WDI. We talk about projects like the Mickey & Friends’ Greeting Trails at Tokyo DisneySea and AquaLab on the Disney Fantasy. Mark also describes his interest in sci-fi and steampunk that have influenced his art. This affinity led him to create concepts for Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge and the Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser. Bob Chapek presented Mark’s piece of the Starcruiser on stage while showcasing the new attraction.
Mark’s art was frequently shown at the Disney Galleries and spotlighted his interest in fantasy and steampunk. He talks about that experience and what has inspired his artwork. We also discuss his graphic novel Kana’s Island, a story of a boy and his family moving to an unexplored island and meeting its surprising creatures. Mark also gives advice to aspiring designers hoping to work in the entertainment industry. I really enjoyed speaking with Mark and learning more about his story and artwork.
Show Notes: Mark Page
Learn more about Mark’s background and work on his official website at markpagedesign.com.
Check out Mark’s graphic novel Kana’s Island and purchase at copy at kanasisland.com.
Discover more of Mark’s artwork on his ArtStation page.
Transcript
Mark Page: She brings out one of the prints that she bought of my piece that I did for the gallery. She was just going on and on about what she liked about it, and at the end she was just like, Mark, please don’t stop creating these beautiful steampunk pieces. And it was just like, really?
Dan Heaton: That is Concept Designer and Creative Director Mark Page, and you’re listening to the Tomorrow Society Podcast.
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Dan Heaton: Hey there, thanks for joining me here on Episode 180 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. Hope you’re all doing awesome out there. Really excited about this episode with Mark Page where we talk about his 15 years at Walt Disney Imagineering, including projects for Tokyo DisneySea, worked on the Disney Fantasy, Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, Galactic Star Cruiser, so much more and beyond that, I found it really interesting to learn about Mark’s background.
He got interested in art at a very young age, went to the Art Center College of Design and had some challenges being able to stay there and ultimately pursue his career as an artist, which eventually led him to Imagineering and that wasn’t something that he was that interested or knew that much about at first, but once he got there, it just seemed to be a great fit and led to just a lot of cool stuff with his career. We also talk about his art style, including his interest in steam punk and fantasy and that type of artwork, his graphic novel, Kana’s Island, which looks super cool, lots to cover. So let’s get right to it. Here is Mark Page.
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Dan Heaton: Mark, thanks so much for talking with me on the podcast.
Mark Page: Oh, my pleasure, Dan. Thanks for having me.
Dan Heaton: Oh, no problem. There’s just a lot of cool stuff that you’ve done at Disney and then beyond more than we could cover, but I’m excited to dig into your story and your background. How did you get interested even in becoming an artist when you were growing up and when you were younger?
Mark Page: Yeah, just I’d say my brother who’s older than me, I would copy pretty much whatever he did. I thought he was the coolest. He was my older brother and one day he started drawing and I was probably five or something like that. So I told my mom, hey, I want my own crayons. I want to draw too. And so most of the stuff we would draw would be superheroes and cartoon characters. So that’s really how I kind of got started was for my brother. It was just a natural thing for him to start drawing. He was really good for his age.
And even as we got older, and he was like nine and 10, he was drawing vehicles. A friend of ours came over and they had a Mercedes or something and he was drawing this car and adding all the details, and it was just for somebody of his age to know how to shade with their finger to get shadows and highlights. It just came innately to him, and I just kind of copied everything I saw him do. So that’s kind of how I got started, and I just naturally grew to love and kept going.
Dan Heaton: So what got you after you started, got beyond where you were following your brother and everything else, but what got you deciding, okay, this is something I want to pursue as a career, and then you ultimately went to the Art Center College of Design. How did that process go where it went from “this is cool” to “I want to do this”?
Mark Page: Yeah, that’s really interesting is it was something that became a passion of mine and I really couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else, but I didn’t know what I could do with my talent to make a living. Unfortunately, a lot of young people, especially in minority households, drawing or art or anything like that really is seen as more of a hobby. My mom would brag about us and she would show her friends and our drawings when they would come over and everything, but there was never any kind of like, you should pursue this, because my mom didn’t know what it could lead to, and I really didn’t either.
I didn’t even think about animation or which naturally you would think, oh, I could do that. But growing up I just figured, I guess I would do artwork that would go in a gallery or something because my brother and I would put our artwork in a lot of art shows and we would usually win first or second place in the categories we were in.
And it wasn’t until high school, one of my art teachers who she really took art seriously, she said, one day we’re going to go on a field trip and I’m going to take you guys to this place called the Art Center College of Design. And so I was so excited about that because it was a whole college dedicated to art and design. So we went there and as we’re approaching just this imposing black long rectangular box of a building with cool metal supports and then splashes of just bright white, black and white, and it was just like, oh my goodness, this is serious.
The architecture of the place, it just gave it this thing that I thought was a hobby, gave it validity. And I was like, oh, I have to go here. There’s no question. And then especially when we got inside, we saw people were designing futuristic vehicles and transportation design. People were designing for environmental design, illustration, product design, and you saw this stuff in the gallery, it was just like my mind was blown. I was just like, oh, I found my home. When do I start?
Dan Heaton: When you were there and actually going to school there, I mean, I think we’re similar age, and so I know schools back then were not offering classes in some of the entertainment, especially themed entertainment, but even movies and everything at the same level. Were you able to take classes in some of the things you wanted to do in terms of entertainment versus just more straight up fine art?
Mark Page: Yeah, actually, my major was illustration and back then in the mid to late ‘90s, the illustration program still had not gotten with the times. It was still kind of training people for magazine illustration. And I was kind of like, no, I want to work on the next Star Wars movie. I want to design characters and environments, and I want to be able to be involved in those projects that people go to the movies and watch.
So I went to my department chair and he realized that this was kind of a problem because there were other students and other majors that were, instead of designing a futuristic vehicle, and they were in transportation design, they were designing space vehicles. And so they realized that there was interest, especially with Hollywood right around the corner, that there were a lot of us that had an interest of working in the entertainment industry.
So what they did was with myself and a couple other students that really had this interest, they started to allow us to take classes in different majors that would make up an entertainment based curriculum. I was one of the first Guinea pigs of that, and now they have a full on entertainment design department. But yeah, I was taking transportation design classes and product design classes and all of that stuff helped me with my concept sketching and learning how to design things so that it could function so that it looked real and notations of how things wouldn’t work.
I wouldn’t have gotten that if I had just taken the traditional illustration track. So I was thankful for that. And actually in school, after when my mom saw how much it was going to be for me to go there, she was kind of like, I don’t know about this, but I was fortunate enough with my portfolio, I got two grants, which meant my mom and myself would have to come up with the other half, which was still a lot of money. And I think in the beginning she was using credit cards, and then after my second term, she was like, I can’t do this anymore.
I was looking at having to drop out of school, and I just was not, to me, that was not an option. I was going to figure out whatever I had to do. So what I did was back then you could take a term off and I took a term off and I was like, I got to figure this out. I have to figure out how I going to get a scholarship. And in my first two terms, I had been using work from class figure drawings, figure paintings, head paintings, perspective drawings, but that’s not what the scholarship committee wanted to see. I begin to realize they wanted to see what are you doing on your own time? What kind of work speaks to what Mark Page does or what Mark Page likes, not classwork.
So while I took this term off, I was really intrigued with stop motion animation. At the time, The Nightmare Before Christmas had come out, and that was a big movie, James and the Giant Peach. I had always liked stop motion, whether it was Gumby back in the days. And so I learned just with a super eight camera that I could play around with stop motion. I’ve never done it in my life.
I just did some research. There was no YouTube back then, so it was reading and asking people questions. So I bought a little used Super 8 camera, and I learned that you could, instead of just recording, you could buy this little lever that would allow you to take one picture at a time. That’s how stop motion is done. It’s one frame at a time. So I started playing around with it, and during that whole time, I was taking time off of school, I was making this little stop motion film.
It didn’t have any script and nothing, it was just these two clay figures, and I was making this up as I went. One of ’em is just standing there, he’s frozen, and then he’s holding this eraser. I was just like, whatever props, it was just whatever I had. So this other character comes along and takes the eraser out of his hands and they get into a little skirmish, and I’m filming all of this, and I have no way to check if the animation looks right or how it’s coming out. I did this for three months, every day, eight hours a day, all the while trying to figure out how am I going to get a scholarship? What am I going to do to get a scholarship so I could stay in school?
So anyways, finally it came to the time where I was like, all right, I have to see the fruits of my labor. So I went and had the Super 8 video footage transferred onto a VHS tape for the first time. I got to see all of this work that I’ve been putting into this little film, and it came out pretty cool. It was like, oh my goodness, I can’t believe this. So school started back up and I went and talked to my department chair and I just told him my situation and he’s like, do you have any work you’ve been doing on your own? Things that you’ve been working on?
I was like, not really. Then I said, well, I’ve been playing around with stop motion animation, but I didn’t think that was something I could use because I was an illustration major. I wasn’t a film major, and I thought, I can’t use this for a scholarship. And he was like, oh, no, Mark. When I let him see the video, he was like, you have to use this. So the scholarship committee saw it, boom, got my first scholarship, which allowed me to stay in school. And then the following term, I said, I’m going to act like I’m actually working on a film, so on a stop motion film.
So I built six maquettes that looked like they could be animated. I did all the artwork for the set designs and some of the visual development, and all of this was put on a wall. I borrowed a case from the gallery and had all my little maquettes in the case. It was a pretty nice setup, I have to admit. And with that, I got my next scholarship, and by my fourth term at Art Center, there’s eight terms until you graduate. By my fourth term, the rest of my tuition was paid. So I was very fortunate. Kind of a long-winded answer to your question of that.
Dan Heaton: That’s great. though. That’s a great story, especially just how you, I wouldn’t say stumbled, but how you were doing something on the side that ended up really setting you up for a career. I know that you ultimately ended up, you had an internship at Rhythm & Hues. You worked at Creature Shop and then ultimately ended up at Imagineering. So I’d love to know a little bit about that process, kind of like how as you were finishing up school, you ultimately the steps that got you to work at Imagineering pretty soon after school.
Mark Page: So I almost missed, we had interviews with several different companies. We could choose which companies we wanted to choose. So I chose Lucas Arts of course, or George Lucas’s company, Dreamworks, Disney Feature Animation, Disney Imagineering, and Nike. And I almost didn’t show up for the interviews because I was at the Creature Shop, which we were working on. It was either My Favorite Martian, which most people won’t even remember that movie or, so I worked on the X-Files movie, and so I thought, hey, I’ve already arrived.
Why do I need to go interview with these people? Well, in that business, you’re on that project for three months, six months, and then you’re done. I didn’t realize that. My counselor said, oh, no, we have these meetings set up. You can’t not show up. You have to come. So I was all bummed out that I had to take a day of work.
We were doing some really cool stuff, and you’re seeing the creatures getting built right in front of your eyes, and it was just like, oh, man. So anyways, I showed up for my interviews and was very interested in working for the Lucas Company, except they wanted me to start working in 3D, and they wanted me to kind of be a computer jockey, and I probably could have taken the opportunity and gotten into the concept design department.
But Imagineering was the company that they told me they loved what they saw in my portfolio because of my imagination, and they were going to, if things worked out, that I would immediately be able to start designing stuff because they respected my imagination and my designs. And that to me said a lot. And I never thought about working on theme parks. The woman who interviewed me, her name was Kathryn Klatt.
She was awesome; she became a friend. She told me to keep in touch with her, and in the meantime, I had gone back to Rhythm & Hues after school and was working there. I kept calling her and kept calling her, and nothing was happening. And probably about three months later, three or four months later, they called me into have an interview. I don’t know what the interview process is now, but back then it was like you had to interview with seven or eight creative senior creative directors, and they had to all say, thumbs up. Wow.
It was like this gauntlet of interviews, which I had no idea that was going to happen. And they all said, yeah, he’s got the goods. And so I started in 1997 at Imagineering, worked there for two years, and then the economy took a nose dive, and there were layoffs in 2000, which at the time I was kind of like, well, I’ll go out there and try animation and do something else.
Ultimately ended up at BRC, which is another company that designed theme parks and now museums and a lot of other things. And then after that, I freelanced for a couple years, and then in 2007, early 2007, I got a call from Kathryn again and they wanted me to come back to Imagineering in this time to take more of a creative lead role.
So I came back and first I was on the Animal Kingdom team with Joe Rohde, one of my mentors. And then pretty soon I joined the Tokyo Portfolio, which also Joe Lansizero, another one of my very good mentors was heading up, and then he was also asked up the Cruise Line and Hong Kong as well. He was the first one that said, hey, Mark, we have this project and I want you to art direct, and it’s in Tokyo. And I almost had a heart attack.
I think the only other place I had been outside of California was Hawaii. And I was like, I had never been put in charge of that many people. This was for the Lost River Delta project at Tokyo Disney Sea, and had a lot of worries about not offending people and a whole new culture and all of that. But it was an awesome opportunity that Joe gave me. I grew a lot, learned a lot, learned a lot about leadership and not just designing. That just after that, it just kind of catapulted things at Imagineering and Joe and Joe Rohde, those were my guys. They would use me a lot. And so yeah, I was really, really fortunate to have both of those gentlemen take me under their wing and my two, not too bad to have Joe Rohde, Joe Lanzisero.
Dan Heaton: You’re doing okay. Your teachers.
Mark Page: Yeah.
Dan Heaton: Yeah. I’ve talked to Joe Lanzisero a few times. He’s awesome. Speaking of people with enthusiasm, he’s got a lot of it.
Mark Page: Yeah, if he could bottle that up and sell some of that, he’d be a billionaire. Yeah, he has enthusiasm for days.
Dan Heaton: So at DisneySea, I know one of the projects I believe we worked on was there was Mickey Greeting Trails, and you have some of the art on your website. So when you’re doing something like that, and I know it’s a team effort and everything, but those are such iconic characters and you’re trying to put ’em in this kind of new setting. And I mean, for you coming in, what’s that like to work with, I mean, iconic characters, but then you’re trying to create something kind of different and that works in this Lost River Delta in the same way.
Mark Page: I think fortunately for me, I had done a lot of freelance work for Disneyland and specifically for the graphics and packaging for their food and merch departments, and you had to learn to draw those characters and they had to be on model. And especially if it was Mickey or Minnie or the Fab Five, Donald or Goofy, some of the other characters, they wouldn’t be as stringent about, but with Mickey and Minnie and yeah, you have to nail ’em else, you’ll be doing revisions forever. So that helped me.
Also the fact that this greeting trails, which is kind of a large area, it’s supposed to be like a dig site, these Mayan versions, ancient ancestors of Mickey and Minnie and Donald and Goofy that occupied this environment. So we are designing them in a way that they look like they were sculpted or painted and designed in that kind of visual vocabulary that they were done by the ancient Mayan, I forget what our writer called.
I forgot the term he used for the artwork we were doing, but it was like tuna, Tuni K or something. So he came up with this whole story behind why these tune kind of mind looking characters existed. And so it was like a dig site and the characters are there doing research and we’re invited to come in and see all of the cool stuff they’ve uncovered. So there was a lot of storytelling that needed to be done so we could see, okay, this is where they’ve gotten now, but through old photographs that things we did showed when these characters arrived, and as they discovered things that you saw going through the environment.
So all of that told the story of them coming and discovering antiquities and boxing them up, and Minnie taking notes in her sketchbook. She’s taking notes of the bugs and the floral and fauna. And so it was an awesome, awesome project. I worked with landscape architects, engineers and really had to try to push for, we wanted this look that things look old and they’ve been there for thousands of years, and some things have scaffolding, which it’s going to be made out of steel. How can we make it look like it’s made out of wood, wood timbers? So it was definitely a learning process for me. I really wanted to push for the look, and then I would learn from them what methods we could take to capture that and tell the story we wanted to tell.
Dan Heaton: Images I’ve seen look amazing. I haven’t been able to make it to DisneySea yet, but just of that and then just the park in general. I mean, come on. It looks incredible.
Mark Page: Oh, it’s amazing. You have to go. You have to do it.
Dan Heaton: It’s on the list. I’ll let the kids get a little older and then we’ll see. I wanted to ask you too, you mentioned Disney Cruise Line, which you were an Art Director there, and I believe involved with some projects on the Fantasy. So I mean versus a theme park when you’re designing on a ship, I mean, I’m curious to learn a little bit one about your experience, but also what that’s like to work in a sort of a different area, but sort of similar.
Mark Page: So there’s definitely a different set of rules when you’re working on a moving vehicle rather than a piece of land. We were designing a water play area, so this was an area where the story was is that Hewey, Dewey and Louey have the ship has some leaks, and they’ve tried to come up with their way to repair the leakage, except their methods are actually causing more problems. And that’s of course to make sure the kids get totally soaked.
Yeah, not only was it crafting a story and the design, which I was used to, but it was also learning about how, because we work together with a group called The Fountain, people who designed all of the water play systems, and there’s different types of water jets to give you if you want something that looks like mist or you want something that just dumps water or if you want pop jets that do little tricks, I learned about all of this stuff to the point where I had to do a diagram that kind of dictated which pop jets or which nozzles I wanted for whatever the activity was.
So yeah, there was a little bit of a learning curve there, but of course, on a cruise ship, you have a smaller area to work with. You have to keep in consideration that it doesn’t want to interrupt the look or the aesthetic. It wants to feel like it’s part of the ship and not just be like, you walk into this area and it’s like, whoa, what is this? Kind of respecting that. Yeah, those were the things that, because working with the whole Cruise Line team and they have their wants and desires, and we don’t just come in and say, hey, it’s going to be like this.
It’s like we have to work together with them and then work together with the fountain people and make sure that what we want can happen. And yeah, the Fantasy was again, my man, Joe Rohede, he asked me to design the mini statue in the atrium and designed and art direct the Dumbo sculpt that’s on the aft of the ship. So yeah, it’s my fingerprints were all over it.
Dan Heaton: I’m tempted to just keep asking you about the Fountain people, but I do want to ask you other questions, so I won’t do that, but no, that sounds really interesting. Just the idea of, like you said, you’ve got to work with the needs of the Cruise Line versus the needs of a park. It’s very different. Well, you mentioned earlier Star Wars, you being interested in that, and I know at least at a minimum, I’ve seen a few of the concepts that you have on your website of Galaxy’s Edge, I believe, like of ships flying over or drones, and then I believe there’s one of the Star Cruiser.
But I’d love to know for you, I mean getting a chance in some form to do those concepts or be involved with Star Wars, I mean, what was that like for you to be able to do that, or at least have a role in such big projects now that Disney, of course owning Lucasfilm and all of that?
Mark Page: Oh, it was amazing. I mean, as soon as we got that announcement that Disney acquired Lucasfilm, I was just like, oh, are you kidding me? Can this get any better? I was just like, everybody in this company is going to want to work on one of those projects, so it’s like get in line. But fortunately for me, there were people that knew of my work and knew that I was versatile. That was one thing that I always, and I still try to be, is versatile in the breadth and the type of things that I design. So I don’t just design cute characters like Mickey and Minnie. I do futuristic stuff and steampunk stuff and sci-fi stuff, and robots and aliens.
So people knew that I had that ability, something I’ve tried to work on. Yeah, fortunately for me, they needed a concept designer for one of the Star Wars projects, which was the Galactic Star Cruiser. So for the initial pitch of that, I did six concept pieces, one of which Bob Chapel unveiled at D23 after the pitch was made, and everybody said, yes, we’re going to do this. He announced it at D23, and I still have, it was one of the images that was used online and in publications, which that was pretty cool.
Dan Heaton: Oh yeah, that’s awesome.
Mark Page: So yeah, I mean, those six images were enough to, there were probably other artists that were asked to work on it, but early on, yeah, I got to do those images that helped get the project off the ground.
Dan Heaton: You’ve mentioned a few times just your interest in fantastical sci-fi steampunk, that design. I know that for a while you were creating fine artwork that was sold at the Disney galleries like that, but I’m curious for you, I mean, what got you really interested in that type of art or just in that type of design where you’ve done so much in that area?
Mark Page: Actually, I’m planning to do more work that more fine art pieces like that that play around in that steampunk realm, and I like to give mine a fantasy feel. So it’s a little different than most steampunk art you would see. But yeah, I’ve always been intrigued with that Victorian era, and especially when I started to see steampunk designs where it was things that would be built in the future, but they were made with that kind of Victorian turn of the century aesthetic.
I just thought that the combination of those two things was just beautiful. I think that that was a time when things weren’t just built for function, but they were made to look beautiful. And I think they still practice that a lot in Europe, and they don’t just design things for functionality, but it’s got to be aesthetically pleasing. I think that’s something that here in the states sometimes a lot of things are just done purely for function.
My thing was is I wanted to celebrate the idea that if you’re designing a vehicle or designing an environment or whatever, that it should be aesthetically beautiful. So that was kind of the genre, if you will, that I chose. And some people at the Disney Gallery saw the work I was doing, and they were like, we’re going to be having this steampunk show. We would love to have you in it.
Of course, with Disney characters riding my vehicles or in the paintings. That was kind of a one-time show, and they were actually looking for other artists that did kind of steampunk looking stuff. And I quickly got all of my buddy Brian Kesinger, if any of your listeners haven’t seen his work. Brian Kesinger is amazing now, I think generated direct, an animated show at Marvel. He does his own work, his own books, really, really cool guy.
So anyways, they brought him in, but my work seemed to not just resonate with people that liked steampunk stuff, but I was amazed at sometimes people I would never even expect to that kind of work. They loved my stuff. And so I did work for the Gallery for seven years, so it didn’t even have to be a steampunk show, it was just they knew people had an affinity for what I was creating. And I had some people on Instagram send me pictures this, this was the Mark Page wall in my den, and they would have four, five of my prints. It was just like, oh my goodness, I’m serious. I could go on and on. There’s so many stories with the Gallery stuff.
Dan Heaton: It has to be so validating when somebody does that where they just, we are so excited about your art. I think that’s awesome.
Mark Page: Oh, yeah. One, I’ll just say this real quick.
Dan Heaton: Go for it.
Mark Page: This one day. Sometimes as artists, you don’t feel, there’s times that you just don’t feel creative or you’re not digging the stuff that you’re doing and you’re just feeling kind like, ah, I don’t have it anymore or I don’t have it today. I was feeling just really kind of down this one day, and I went on Instagram and this young lady had sent me her post that she put on, and she’s like, I just want to talk about Mark Jason Page, and what an awesome artist.
And she brings out one of the prints that she bought of my piece that I did for the Gallery, and she was just going on and on about what she liked about it. At the end she was just like, Mark, please don’t stop creating these beautiful steampunk pieces. And it was just really this morning I felt down in the dumps. I was hating everything I was doing that day and then boom, to see that. And it was just like, yeah, I mean, what people can do or say about your work, it can just totally take you to another level.
Dan Heaton: Yeah. Well, speaking of your work, you also did a comic book, which from what I’ve seen looks awesome. So I’d love to know just what inspired you to make that and kind of create the story and the style that you did.
Mark Page: Yeah, I have always wanted to do a comic book. My thing is I’ve always wanted to do films, but it’s not that easy to sit down and say, hey, yeah, I’m going to do a film. But you can kind of do the same thing with a comic. You can tell a whole story and you can frame up the illustrations the same way you would with a camera if you were shooting a film.
And so it was something that I always wanted to do. I been playing around with some storylines, and then my first trip to Hawaii, I went to Maui. My buddy and I, we were in this, I think we were getting some groceries and stuff, and I heard this woman, she kept calling to her son, Kana, come here, Kana. And I never heard that name. And I thought, oh man, that’s such a cool name.
I never forgot that name. And I was like, if I do a comic book, the character’s name is going to be Kana. So little by little, I started playing around with concept designs of what he would look like. And strangely enough, people ask me, is this based on what you look like when you were a little kid? And I’m like, I didn’t design him to look like that, but maybe subconsciously, I don’t know.
So, yeah, I just wanted to do something with a character that he’s an islander. I wanted to do something that there wasn’t a lot of comics or animation or things back then that had characters of color. This was back in 2006, and I loved the old Sinbad movies with the Ray Harryhausen stop motion creatures. So the story is really kind of a take on The Wizard of Oz, how friendships really matter, and especially when everybody’s kind of trying to achieve the same goal.
Alice in Wonderland, where a character discovers this strange and unusual world, and in Kana’s case, it’s kind of like his little secret. There’s always these creatures that he encounters. And all of those go back to my childhood of watching those old send down movies. So the stories about his relationship with his family, how he looks up to his father, his father’s a hero figure to him, and then how he wants to help others. And a lot of times that means going up against some of these kind of larger than life creatures, but at the end of the day, it’s a really positive message, I think about family and friends and of course adventure.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean, based on just what I’ve learned and what I know about your background in art, it just seems to be a really good fit and really cool comics. So I hope that a lot of people check it out as still continually. Well, I just have one more kind of a big question for you. Well, I just was curious for you too, I mean, if people are looking, I mean, to aspiring to become artists or work in the entertainment industry or something just based on your story, do you have some advice you might give them, not about finding jobs, but more about what, from your background, what might help them to keep pushing forward?
Mark Page: Well, definitely you always want to keep working on the fundamentals. I know everybody says that, but it’s true. I mean, no matter what new technology comes out or what computer programs come out, if you have the core knowledge of perspective and figure drawing and a sense of color and light and the fundamental things that you’re taught in art school, and then I think a big thing is giving yourself a project because it gives you kind of a goal to push towards.
So what I would do a lot of times is I would just come up with a story which forced me to create the world and the characters, and what does the architecture look like in this world and what’s the hierarchy of the characters? And by doing that, developing that you automatically kind of start to develop a portfolio that’s showing your sense of design and how you think about designing things, whether they be characters or environments or world building.
So I would say, yeah, definitely. There’s plenty of software out there that you can use that is going to just enhance your natural abilities, but give yourself a project and that will a lot of times help you at the end of it. You might have a portfolio full of designs for this project.
That’s something I did early on, and I found that to be successful, especially when imagineering some of my portfolio and they mentioned that it was my imagination, they could see with the images that, oh, there’s a cohesive story being told here. These are the characters that live in this world and this is what the world looks like and this is what some of the plant life looks like. I didn’t set out to create that just innately was something I wanted to do. Just explore these worlds and get lost in it worked in my favor.
Dan Heaton: Awesome. I think that’s great advice. And I know too, Mark, that you do have some of your art online and also I believe have an Imagination Art Book, and Kana’s Island. Is there somewhere if people want to follow what you’re doing or check out your work, where should they go?
Mark Page: So my website, Mark Page design, page, spelled PAGE, markpagedesign.com, has some visual development stuff that I’ve done for a couple of animation companies. One being Netflix, there’s work on there from the mini theme park projects I’ve worked on. Mostly it’s kind of showing stuff I’ve done in the industry and things that I’m interested in, of course, but there’s a shop on there where you can order prints of some of my stuff. I’m going to actually add more prints to the shop of my steampunk stuff. Again, I’m going to start exploring more of that.
And you can also get my Art of Mark Jason Page book on there. Then I have another site, kanasisland.com, so it’s KANASisland.com, and that’s where you can read about the graphic novel, which I revamped it in. 2008, did a Kickstarter and it went from a black and white comic, which I got nominated for Best Newcomer at the San Diego Comi-Con, didn’t win, but I was nominated, but had to throw that in there.
I realized for a newer group of young people, I wanted to redo or refresh all of the art and actually turn it into a 72-page book rather than just a 32-page comic. So now it’s full color graphic novel, more of a story, actually, the story I already come up with, but now it’s actually in the book, so you’re getting the latest of Kana’s Island. So yeah, on my site, kanasisland.com. And then yeah, if people want to follow me on Instagram, that’s Instagram and LinkedIn is where I usually post my latest stuff.
So on Instagram it’s just @Markjpage, and I’m playing around with AI art. I know that that’s controversial with people. To me, it’s another tool and people can have their opinion, but if the rubber meets the road, I can take a piece of paper and a pencil and still give you a design. I’m not relying on the computer to do everything for me. I may use that technology, but I’m usually doing things to tweak it and paint over it so that it works, because a lot of times it needs somebody with some skill to make it actually make sense, if that makes sense. Yeah. I’m not saying that’s exclusively what I’m doing, but I have been playing around with it.
Dan Heaton: No, it’s cool. I mean, that’s something that’s been coming up a lot lately with AI, and I think you’re approaching it in the right way. Well, Mark, this has been great. I hope everybody checks out your art, which is awesome. It’s been so great to talk with you. Thanks so much for being on the podcast.
Mark Page: Oh, thanks for having me, Dan. Anytime.
Dan Heaton: I want to give a big thanks to Mark and to Ethan Reed for helping to make this podcast happen. You should check out Mark’s book, Kane’s Island, and Ethan’s new Little Golden Book, Santa Stops at Disneyland. Both are super cool.
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