We recently connected with Mark Wisehart and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Mark, thanks for joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
To be honest, my Creative career began fairly young and as a direct result of being bullied. I was very small for my age and like many who have been bullied, you have to find something that works. What worked for me was comedy. I told jokes, I did voice impressions not necessarily to be funny but to be distracting. I needed to not get beat up, that’s good motivation. As the voices in my head began to flourish, puppetry was the natural path to follow and it was very rewarding, especially in the area of Character Development. The next organic part of my journey led me to Theatre. As I was a part of a large and Musical family, through my teen years, I found success early on in winning the National Choral award and Best actor for my portrayal of Albert Peterson in Bye Bye Birdie. As I entered college, I found a great love and passion for photography. Photography and VO eventually became part of my Edu-tainment Career and I found myself doing commercial work. Eventually I started finding my storytelling voice, this came when I had my children. I would sit for hours making up voices for the characters in their books. Storytelling organically led to mini documentaries and my passion for TV production. During an especially difficult time of career change, I was sitting in a camper trailer in California when I finally decided to record all my Voices. So I bought a digital recorder, wrote a script and recorded all of them. This became the tool that launched my career. Shortly after that I got work with Jonathan Park out of San Diego, then Disney came knocking and the rest is history. Looking back, my process was very organic and each element built on itself as I grew and moved forward. Moving Forward was the most critical part of my process. I also understood that there are no wasted catastrophe’s. Everything happens for a reason.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Most people who want a career in Voiceover dream wistfully about making it big someday with the likes of The Walt Disney Company. That’s where my career started, as Marshmallow the pardoned Thanksgiving Turkey. That one gig alone caught the attention of the head of Creativity and Innovation. It may sound crazy but all of my work has come Word of Mouth. People you meet become your friend, and if those friends are professionals, they need to work with people they trust to get a quality job done through to deliverable. That leads to more work, more friends and a lasting career. My career has been built on making friends and some of those friends needed creative business solutions. The world of Collaboration is now a Flat world. Meysen of Japan, Grape City, Balance Studios and Believe animation are Companies I’ve dealt with who need to ideate in a short period of time, and have it sent anywhere in the world. What used to take weeks or months can now take hours and sometimes minutes if you record live. Along the way, if I’m not having fun creating, I adapt by stepping out of my river of thinking, immersing myself in new experiences and being fearless about learning new things. This has led me to work with amazing clients like, Ford, NASCAR, The National Railroad Museum, The Veterans Administration, Les Paul and Museums across the Country. I’ve done Body Dot/Live action work, Video gaming Voiceover and I’ve written theme songs for Children’s programming. One day I may play Oscar the Dino on DinosaurUs ExploreUs and the next day play a 300 year old leprechaun named Greg. Fact is, I love being whoever I need to be. Character development and Storyline drive everything I do. One of my crowning achievements are the two commercials I worked on with the Disney Creative Inc, team, ‘Summer Nightastic” and “Let ME Go.”
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.
I think it’s important to not get bogged down in the details and not take yourself too seriously early on. I was told that if you are going to have a career in Voiceover, you had to have a reel. Catch 22 is that you can’t get work if you don’t have a reel and if you don’t have a reel you can’t get work. So I made a reel up from scratch, purely out of my imagination. I needed a tool, so I created a tool, something tangible I could give to someone instantly. My sister worked at the County of Riverside and one day a man named Pat Roy came in to get a permit for building a garage. They started talking and lo and behold, Pat is the producer of the Jonathan Park Radio series out of San Diego. She said, “my Brother does Voice work!” He gave her his card, said to send a reel over and I did. That was the start. I tell people who want to focus on the details of their career that, in the beginning, you don’t have to know the exact address, you just have to know It’s a State you want to go to. Broad strokes First. Don’t make friends because they are in the industry, just make friends. Friendships have done more for me in this business than anything else. My cartoon career began when I was running sound for a friend at a conference and a young couple came over and we became friends, amazing friends! I didn’t quite understand that Balance Studios was a Massive Powerhouse for Animation…. oops. I have Lunched myself to death in Hollywood to no avail, just enjoy the organic process of life. Let your gift work for you and bring you before great people.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Meysen of Japan teaches Japanese Children how to learn English. To do this they wrote a curriculum of books, songs and animations that do just that. I was asked to do ALL of the Voices for ‘The Spiders Web’ (book one of the series). It was amazing! Recording 8 Voices and a Narrator that were unique. Just plain fun. Then Book Two came along, ‘Mother who lives in a boot’. I recorded it, again… and again… and again. Finally, after much direction, I sent them the take they said they were happy with. I got my check in the mail and deposited it. Months later I went on their site and clicked on the Mother in a boot link and lo and behold, someone else’s voice was there!! I was kinda taken back. Why didn’t they just tell me they were going another direction? Finding out that way was tough. Then, I just sat back and said to myself, Mark, you did amazing on Spiders Web, and you got PAID for the work you DID do on ‘Mother who lives in a boot’. It’s OK, this stuff happens. I learned early on that you can’t take things personal. Keep moving Forward.
Contact Info:
- Website: markwisehart.com
- Instagram: @cre8tivethoughtdesign, @snb_studios, @g1cre8tive
- Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/mark-wisehart-851342a7
- Youtube: mark wisehart, creative thought design
- Other: Google maps producer, 14 million views strong! Warning: Mark A Wisehart is a murderer on death row. I’m Mark E. Wisehart.
Image Credits
All Photo’s were taken by me, are owned by me.