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Marcus LaPorte is a Studio Artist & Production Designer for Film & Television, located in Austin, Texas.
LaPorte's career began at Troublemaker Studios in 2001 as a Prop Fabricator, where he quickly became a staple in Robert Rodriguez's Props Departments, focusing on custom prop fabrication, mold-making, and special effects. In the 9 years following, he went on to create many iconic movie props for more than 25 multi-million-dollar movies, including Sin City, Predators, Friday the 13th, True Grit, and Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof.
In 2010, LaPorte's career shifted away from a custom Prop Fabricator and into Production Designer and Art Director roles for independent films and national television commercials. During this period, LaPorte's wide-ranging artistic talent and ability to lead multiple departments and their creative teams impressed some of the biggest commercial clients in the world, including Apple, Disney, LucasFilm, AT&T, Nike, Visa, Chevrolet, ESPN, Microsoft, and Home Depot.
In 2014, after completing numerous commercial productions and television advertisements, LaPorte teamed up with the well-established, comedy-driven, internet-filmmaking group known as Rooster Teeth Productions. Soon after production designing and fabricating the key weapons and props for their sci-fi comedy feature titled Lazer Team, Rooster Teeth quickly tapped LaPorte as their full-time Production Designer. LaPorte then spent the following 8 years steadily bolstering Rooster Teeth's on-screen production value across 6 visually distinct creative groups within the company. With his main focus on improving their live-action content, LaPorte additionally designed all the sets for Rooster Teeth's broadcast studio talk shows as well as their video podcast series. From 2014-2022, LaPorte visually crafted an enormous amount of content, including 6 feature films, 58 short films, 210 episodes spanning 17 television series, and 13 video podcast series, featuring notable collaborations with The Slow Mo Guys, Meow Wolf, Achievement Hunter, while additionally hosting an episode of "Discovery Channel's Shark Week."
Perhaps one of LaPorte's most significant contributions while at Rooster Teeth came from the other side of the camera, when, in 2017, he and fellow co-worker Adam Ellis created and hosted the charming and educational DIY prop-building series Master & Apprentice. This "how-to" series highlighted LaPorte and Ellis' friendly workshop banter and shenanigans through a smattering of challenging prop builds pulled straight from pop culture movies and video games. Master & Apprentice ran for 9 episodes, featuring props from IPs such as Star Wars, Blade Runner, Monster Hunter, Destiny, and Devil May Cry 5.
In October of 2022, it was announced that LaPorte's creative efforts on In Space with Markiplier and Director, Mark Fischbach, earned the project an Emmy nomination for "Outstanding Interactive Media," once again highlighting LaPorte's track record of success at being able to take a filmmaker's idea, make it real, and transform it into next-level visual content.
As for 2023 and beyond, LaPorte's current 22-year career of well-established leadership ability, attention to detail, and mastery of countless studio art mediums across 200-plus film productions have positioned him to take on much larger and more complicated professional roles in the near future. LaPorte has proven himself to be an unstoppable force in the Art Department, and given his ability to elevate every project he touches, we'll be keeping a sharp eye on what he brings to the table in the years to come.
