The Napoleon Group Promotes Senior Staffers as Part of Ongoing Reorganization
Creative studio ups Annabel Salmon to V.P., Executive Director of Operations, Perry Morton to EP and Angela Gianforcaro to HP in preparation for further expansion.
The Napoleon Group has promoted three long-time staff members to new leadership positions as it prepares to launch several new lines of business later in the fourth quarter of 2016. The promotions were announced by Marty Napoleon, Founder/Chief Creative Officer of Napoleon, which earlier this year expanded its operations to the West Coast with the opening of a live action production arm in Los Angeles.
Annabel Salmon has been promoted to Vice President, Executive Director of Operations. In her new post Salmon is responsible for leading the bustling production hub that comprises Napoleon’s New York studio. Encompassing 14,500 square feet on two floors of in the Chelsea neighborhood, the facility houses 34 full-time artists, designers, editors, producers and directors, along with creative and support staff.
In addition, Perry Morton, formerly Head of Production, has been named Executive Producer. He now oversees 3 key areas of growth, Business Leadership for Volume Sales opportunities, Content Development/Production and Partner Relationship Management.
Rounding out the senior promotions is Angela Gianforcaro, who succeeds Morton in the Head of Production role. Formerly Senior Producer, Gianforcaro is a popular fixture at the studio who, is deeply engrained in its culture and has played an outsized role in its growth and success. She now oversees the project management team and their work in areas including pre-visualization, test production, audio post, VFX, motion capture, editorial and finishing.
“This is a company that engenders a high degree of loyalty on the part of its staff, and it’s a feeling that’s routinely mutual,” says Napoleon. “We have many people who’ve spent the better parts of their professional lives here, and the career histories of Annabel, Perry and Angela are perfect examples. Collectively they have close to sixty years’ experience at Napoleon. The knowledge, insight, experience and intuition they bring to our company, our clients and our talent is invaluable. In their new roles they’ll help lay the foundation as we reorganize in anticipation of the new divisions we’ll be unveiling later this year. ”
A London native, Salmon studied graphic design at Central/St. Martins before travelling to New York in the early ‘80s. After working for a small animation studio she landed at a New York test commercial studio, where she quickly mastered the latest digital retouching equipment from Quantel. In 1985 she joined Napoleon Group founder Marty Napoleon’s newly launched Napoleon Videographics, where her knack for solving business problems, married to a DP, with an understanding of working with creative people, led her to take on day-to-day operations of the company. She led the studio’s relocation in the late 1990s to the East Side of Manhattan from its Theatre District location, and performed the same miracles again when they moved to their current Chelsea home in 2013.
Morton is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design who got his start in the industry as a digital artist. He joined Napoleon early in his career and quickly progressed to editorial, compositing and finishing work for some of the studio’s most demanding ad agency clients. He was tapped by company founder and creative director Marty Napoleon to launch the studio’s first 3D department in 2010, and has continued to lead the company into new areas of production and post, such as its growth into live action and motion capture.
A graduate of the communications program at Boston University, Gianforcaro started at Napoleon in 2000, initially working in client service (which, as she recalls, entailed making frequent runs to Grand Central’s Oyster Bar to feed overworked agency creatives), and rose steadily through the ranks to her current post at Head of Production. Along the way she’s served as an Assistant Producer and Post Producer before being named a Senior Producer in 2010. Unflappable and with a producer’s eye for detail, she’s led teams on many of the studio’s biggest and most complex projects.
