In high school, Martin played drums, and just like every other prototypical high school band, his band had a crisis of identity-nobody could think of a name. The crisis reached an acute stage one afternoon when a high school student council representative called, needing to know the name of the band to do posters for an upcoming event. As the keyboardist stayed on the phone upstairs (his girlfriend had secured the gig), the rest of the musicians scrounged around the basement rehearsal space looking for inspiration. One paged through a dictionary, and others flipped through Martin's record collection.

Early '80's new wave pop aficionados will recall Big Country, a Scottish one-hit wonder who had a brief hit called "In a Big Country." On the flip-side of that record is a song called "Angle Park," which is about a rather dour, spooky park somewhere in Scotland. It sounded like a reasonable name, and before long Martin began using "Angle Park Productions" as a catch-all moniker for any music or video-related production activity. (As a sad aside, in 2001 Big Country's singer, Stuart Adamson, gained brief reknown when he took his own life after a battle with depression.)

The name "Angle Park Productions" was made official on December 26th, 1989, when Martin filed "AN ACT in relation to the use of an assumed name in the conduct or transaction of business in this State" with the County of Cook. Later, as Angle Park's role began to evolve beyond traditional film and video production, Phil and Martin decided to drop "Productions" from the end, and to this day, the company is known simply as "Angle Park," or more officially, "Angle Park, Inc."