When Asaph "Ace" Fipke's sons, aged 5 and 7, watch Slugterra, League of Super Evil or Rated A for Awesome on TV with their friends, they can claim some serious bragging rights.
Their dad produced those shows.
As the producer of several popular animated children's series airing on YTV, Disney XD and Cartoon Network, Fipke admits he's something of a celebrity at children's birthday parties.
"I'm still the cool dad," said the 43-year-old animation studio head.
Not so cool that he might jeopardize his "neo-nerd" credentials, however. He likes snowboarding, for example, which is cool. But he's also the co-founder and CEO of a Vancouver animation studio that is so proud of its geeky pedigree that it called itself Nerd Corps Entertainment Inc.
More than a decade ago, when Fipke and fellow co-founder Chuck Johnson left Mainframe Entertainment Inc. – now Rainmaker Entertainment Inc. (TSX-V:RNK) – to found their own animation studio, they would spend long days hunkered over their computers doing animation tests, then spend hours after work - still at their computers – playing computer video games.
"We actually started in a little apartment in Coal Harbour, where we were – 10 of us –pulling together doing an animation test, and that's where the name Nerd Corps came from. We'd play with our high-powered computers. We'd network them and play all sorts of nerdy video games, so we thought, 'Let's call ourselves Nerd Corps.'"
With a staff of 310 and several original series to its credit, the East Vancouver studio has grown into one of North America's largest independent computer animation companies.
There are more than 20 B.C.-owned animation studios, according to Creative BC. Sony Imageworks Pictures also has an animation studio in Vancouver.
"We do have a very vibrant and robust animation industry here," said Robert Wong, vice-president of Creative BC. "Nerd Corps is the biggest of the Canadian companies producing their own IP."
Most Vancouver animation studios do service work – making animated films and TV series on a contract basis for large studios, publishers and toy companies.
Although Nerd Corps got its start doing service work, it has also produced six of its own original TV animation series, including Slugterra, which was nominated for an Emmy and which has a line of toys and action figures being sold in Western Europe, the Middle East and Latin America.
The studio's newest original series, Kate and Mim-Mim, is for preschoolers. It's scheduled to air in 2014 on BBC Kids and Knowledge Network.
"We own those properties," Fipke said. "It's an interesting thing to be a B.C.-based company and own intellectual property and all these exploitation rights of it.
"With the prospering of each one of those properties, it all lands back here in B.C. It's a very different thing than being a service company, where the upside sits down south or elsewhere."
As the creators of original properties, like Slugterra, Nerd Corps doesn't just make money from licensing its series to channels like Disney and YTV, it also owns the marketing rights to toys and games based on the series' characters. Slugterra is No. 14 on Apple's puzzle games, for example. Each series also has its own website.
Fipke did not start out with the aspiration of becoming an animator. He originally wanted to become a screenwriter or director, but fell into animation after graduating from film school.
Born and raised in B.C., Fipke was a child actor whose father was in show business. Wayne Fipke managed the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton for several years, and as a child, Ace Fipke acted on stage and in TV commercials.
He studied liberal arts at the University of BC but dropped out to study film at the Vancouver Film School. He planned to become a writer and director for feature films. But after graduating film school, he got a job as a producer for Mainframe.
His first job was producing Beastwars: Transformers – a computer-generated (CG) animation series for kids – for Hasbro Inc. (Nasdaq:HAS).
In 2000, Fipke quit Mainframe to go independent and landed a "service gig" producing the Dragon Booster animation series for Story Hat and Alliance Atlantis Communications Inc. Finding a studio to make the series proved challenging, however, so Fipke and Johnson decided to build their own.
"It was still difficult at that time to find in Canada a really solid CG studio that met the standards," Fipke said. "Together we thought it would be easier to build a studio than to send it elsewhere, so on the back of this 39-episode project called Dragon Booster we built this studio."
Fipke said he decided to concentrate on computer animation for children rather than feature films, because studios like Pixar and Imageworks were dominating that space, whereas he saw opportunities to improve the quality of comic-book type action-adventure animation for kids.
"There was room for better work to be done in that particular side of the business," Fipke said. "The feature film business is a very specific niche, and there are a lot of very good companies doing very well with it. We wanted to look at it from a reality standpoint: If we come in, can we be the best at this, or would we just be a mediocre wannabe?"
While doing service work for other companies, Fipke and Johnson started developing a slate of three original shows and greenlit all of them.
"We weren't just a studio, we were also creators," Fipke said. "Most of the stuff in Vancouver at the time, it was service work that was mainly done, not as much wholly owned properties."
For the first few years, the company employed roughly 70 people. It later added a second production line to bring the headcount up to 140. The company now has five production lines – meaning it can work on five series at a time – and a staff of 310, and plans to be at 400 by year's end.
Unlike the feature film industry, which has been leaving Hollywood North for regions with better tax credits, Fipke said B.C.'s business tax rates and Vancouver's talent pool make Vancouver a good place to be for computer animation studios like Nerd Corps.
"It's basically created our business and sustains it. Without it, it wouldn't for the most part, disappear, I think. The labour tax credits – both B.C. and federally – are absolutely one of the most essential aspects of keeping things alive in the industry.
"The second thing is: Where else do you want to live?" •
