Ernie Merlan

I have over twenty years of experience in the entertainment industry. Twelve years working on Imagineering projects including Indiana Jones, Innoventions, and Tokyo Disney Seas. My television and motion picture projects include Pee Wee's Playhouse, the Mask of Zorro, Dance with Me and the Legend of Zorro. As CEO of Merlán Creative Studio, I have gathered top creative talent to produce content for clients from Disney, Universal, and ABC to code Black and Morley Builders. Together we continue to create cutting edge content for touch screens, mobile apps, motion pictures and multimedia. Our focus is and alway will be optimizing the user experience. For the last seven years I have been building a non-profit, Exceptional Minds (www.exceptionalmindsstudio.org), a visual effects and animation school for talented young adults with Autism. As the Executive Director, I saw 10 of our graduates get permanent jobs in local studios, including Marvel and Cartoon Network. Another 20 artist begin work the in-house studio. EM's visual effect team has worked on projects like Star Wars: the Last Jedi and Marvel’s Black Panther. Our animation team has completed projects for the Los Angeles Zoo, Sesame St. And the Special Olympics. I have loved building Exceptional Minds and serving as it's Executive Director. As the school and studio are off and running it was time for me to get back to being a fulltime creative. I am currently working on several productions and seek a creative projects that push the bounderies of what is possible, while still serving the community through a start up non profit that paints murals for and with the community.