ENTERTAINMENT SCIENCES GROUP - Key Persons

Barry Nolan - CEO, President

Job Titles:
  • CEO
  • President
  • Creative Advisor
  • Creative Consultant and Electronics Design Engineer
  • President and CEO of Entertainment Science Group
Don Nolan, President and CEO of Entertainment Science Group, has enjoyed over 30 years of software development experience in a variety of industries, including robotics, factory automation, aerospace and telecommunications. He holds a degree in Engineering and Computer Science from California State University at Northridge. Don's greatest love, however, has always been the entertainment industry, where he spent much of his early years working with his father doing motion picture visual effects work. In 1995, Don founded Entertainment Sciences Group, which has since been devoted to innovating software and hardware technologies related to entertainment applications. At a very young age, Don became fascinated by dark rides, particularly the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean rides at Disneyland. This fascination later led Don to develop a simple computer program to run haunted houses and other venues at the local schools. In time, this simple program grew into something much more sophisticated and VenueMagic® was born. Today, VenueMagic is used all over the world, not only by haunted houses, but also by theaters, live performers, museums, theme parks and even by DJ's and night clubs. VenueMagic includes powerful animatronics programming tools and has been used extensively by companies such as Disney and Universal Studios. Don continues to do contract work in the entertainment industry in addition to pushing forward the work of improving VenueMagic. Don also enjoys video production and music composition, incorporating these into as many projects as he is permitted to. Barry Nolan retired from the Motion Picture Industry in 1993 where he had over 25 years of experience in special photographic effects. He has worked on close to 100 feature films. He is also credited as Visual Effects Supervisor on over a dozen features including King Kong (1976), Flash Gordon (1980), Dune (1984), Red Sonja (1985), Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1986), SpaceCamp (1986) and Leviathan (1989). Barry was a pioneer in the development of electronic technologies for the visual effects industry and was the first to successfully introduce electronic compositing into a feature length motion picture in 1980 (Flash Gordon). Barry works as a creative consultant and electronics design engineer. He also assists in video and visual effect production as needed on projects.

Ben Holmes

Job Titles:
  • VP of Product Development and Services
Ben Holmes joined the company in 2009, bringing with him a large assortment of colorful hats. Ben holds a degree in Information Systems and Technologies from Weber State University and is well versed in all of the state-of-the-art internet and network development tools. He is also expert in the installation of audio/visual, lighting, network systems, and in overall show control system architecture. And that's just one box of the hats he wears. Another box includes hats for project management, webmaster, electronic design & manufacturing, 3-D CAD, CNC, servo control systems, quality assurance, customer support, carpentry, cabling and a plethora of other useful (often disparate) skills that greatly enhance the scope of the services we can provide for our customers. Ben excels at onsite integration and support. His broad skill set combined with a strong talent for troubleshooting makes him an essential player in all of our contract work. His willingness to go the extra mile often finds him assisting other onsite contractors with their own technical issues just to make sure the overall project is completed on time. Ben's multi-role function as VP of Product Development and VP of Services puts him in a perfect position to keep the company well connected with the latest in technological innovations from a variety of industries and disciplines.