| Aaron McEuen (President & CEO) | |
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Aaron has over 18 years of Theatrical
and Computer Programming experience which includes Digistar I, II & 3 training and
production, stage and lighting design and control, automation programming, as well as
planetarium design consulting. Looking for a way better to inspire people within the planetarium medium, Starlight Productions was born in 1996. Since then Aaron has worked for and trained over 50% of the Digistar community, including facilities in Australia, United Kingdom, France, Canada, and the United States. Aside from his current efforts at Starlight Productions, he also holds a position as Producer/Lead Animator at the newly constructed Clark Planetarium, home of the first Digistar 3 and pitless planetarium. He has also taken up other employment at the Coca-Cola Space Science Center as Director of the Omnisphere Theatre in Columbus Georgia. What he brings to the team is a vast knowledge of many production styles and varieties. This benefits Starlight in a way that allows us to be flexible, and move with the beat of the customer while sharing a bit of Starlight’s beat with you. Aaron lives in Murray, Utah with his wife and business partner, Mindy McEuen, and two children, Audrey & Sydney. |
| Mindy McEuen (Vice-president) | |
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Mindy is a devoted wife to Aaron, and
a mother of 2, Audrey & Sydney. She has been with Aaron since 1989, high school,
sophomore year. In 1994 she became a secretary for Oasis Stage Werks in Salt Lake City, one of the Western US’s largest stage and lighting companies. After awhile, she moved to a position of Personal Secretary for the owner of the business, Gary Justeson, also known as Frog. She began to gain a large respect for the industry when she met Mike Murray over the phone, when he would order fog juice for the Taylor Planetarium on Montana. After seeing Aaron’s interest grow, and noticing that Starlight was about to start, she just had to make sure she became a part of it. Mindy is now the Vice-President of Starlight Productions and, like Aaron, she also used to work at the Clark Planetarium. Without her support, Aaron wouldn’t be doing this today. Sometimes the two of them joke about her exact role as VP: is it Vice-President or Veto Power? |
| Bruce Thatcher (Developer/Animator/Writer) | |
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Bruce has over 22 years of experience
as a professional software developer, including nearly a decade of experience on Evans
& Sutherland's Digistar I & II systems. He has also developed many plug-ins for
Newtek's Lightwave. He has fifteen years of planetarium experience, encompassing writing, art & technical production, star show installation, and automation systems programming & maintenance. Bruce originally learned computer programming thirty-five years ago in high school, teaching himself Fortran IV using black market computer time on a mainframe computer at Colorado State University. Later, he honed his skills writing gaming, database, and web software on everything from Univac and DEC minicomputers to PCs, for companies of such repute as WordPerfect and Novell. Writing under the name of Franklin Thatcher, he is an international-award winning author with professional credits in both fiction and non-fiction. He has written a number of planetarium shows, including:
Bruce's background and experience in math, science, and technology stand him in an excellent position to undertake a multitude of production efforts. |