Welcome to the Imaginarium

The CSA Imaginarium is where we open the doors to the creative process behind Cinema Sound Audiobooks. It's a place where we can share more than the finished product. Here, you'll see ideas while they're still taking shape—developing stories, evolving characters, early concepts, visual experiments, alternate directions, things we've changed our minds about, and even a few things that probably weren't supposed to leave the creative room just yet. At the center of the Imaginarium are Fred Copeland and Tracy Ortolano, the leadership team helping guide Cinema Sound Audiobooks into its next chapter.

Fred Copeland, founder and President of Cineplex Studios and Cinema Sound Audiobooks, brings more than four decades of experience in media and entertainment. His career began in television and includes experience as a morning news producer for ABC television, along with work connected to CW, KHON, FOX, and ABC productions. His background spans television, film, writing, directing, producing, and audio production. He is also a former SAG Producer and WGA West signatory. In 2004, Fred founded Cineplex Studios, continuing a career devoted to developing and producing original entertainment. He later wrote and directed the feature film Believe and has spent years developing original characters, stories, and fictional worlds across different forms of media.

That history eventually led Fred to Cinema Sound Audiobooks. Rather than approaching an audiobook as simply a narrated book, he wanted to create an entire listening experience—bringing together human voice actors, full casts, sound design, music, and immersive audio production while also developing a visual identity for the characters and worlds listeners are hearing. Today, Fred oversees the creative direction and continuing development of Cinema Sound Audiobooks and its expanding collection of story worlds.

Working alongside Fred is Tracy Ortolano, Vice President of Cinema Sound Audiobooks. Tracy is an important part of the leadership and continued evolution of the company, helping take ideas from development and move them forward as Cinema Sound Audiobooks grows. Her role extends beyond any single production. She works alongside Fred on the larger direction of the company, helping shape how Cinema Sound Audiobooks develops, presents, and expands the experience surrounding its stories. Together, Fred and Tracy continually evaluate new ideas, explore different possibilities, adapt when something isn't working, and ask one of the most important questions in any creative process: What could this become?

Cinema Sound Audiobooks didn't arrive at what you see and hear today overnight. We've moved through multiple stages of development, experimenting with different forms of storytelling, production, presentation, technology, artwork, character development, and distribution along the way. Some ideas worked immediately. Others took years to find their proper form. Some changed completely, while a few were probably best left on the drawing board. That's part of creating, and it's a part of the story we want the Imaginarium to reveal.

The immersive, full-cast audiobooks we produce today are the result of that evolution—stories performed by ensembles of human voice actors and surrounded by sound effects, music, atmosphere, and detailed audio environments. But we didn't want the experience to end with what you could hear. We began creating visual worlds to accompany our audio worlds, allowing audiences to see our characters, locations, environments, spacecraft, cities, landscapes, and other elements that previously existed only in our imaginations.

And now we'd like to show you how we got here.

Through the CSA Imaginarium, we aren't simply going to show you finished projects. We're going to show you the journey behind them—the earlier versions of ideas, characters before they became the characters you know, concepts that changed direction, visuals that helped us discover what a world should look like, and stories that began one way and ended somewhere completely unexpected. We'll also share some of what we're developing right now. Some of it may eventually become finished Cinema Sound Audiobooks productions. Some will undoubtedly change. And some may never make it beyond these walls.

That's exactly why we want you here. The Imaginarium isn't simply an archive of where we've been. It's our working creative space—a look at where we've been, what we're creating today, and where our imaginations might take us next.

Welcome to the CSA Imaginarium.