Supreme leader of the neo-nerds: Animation entrepreneur Asaph Fipke holds forth on boys, toys and TV shows

March 25, 2014 4:52 pm

Supreme leader of the neo-nerds

By Sally Davies

Asaph Fipke has a dirty secret. His business card describes him as the Supreme Commander of Nerd Corps, an animation studio and distributor in Vancouver. But the cartoon producer did not have a television in the house as a child.

“I always looked at TV as a special treat, something of a forbidden fruit,” says the ebullient 43-year-old, who got his fix at friends’ houses and the movies. “But it gave me a lot of time to think about the stories in between.”

Mr Fipke, known as Ace, has since turned his repressed childhood passion into a business that is part of the pulsing creative ecosystem of Vancouver, labelled the “Hollywood of the north” by its advocates. The city’s reputation for excellence in animation and special effects has been partly built on tax breaks and the presence of global gaming company Electronic Arts.

On a recent trip to the UK to build contacts with broadcasters, Mr Fipke is sporting a smattering of stubble and a light, aubergine-coloured sweat­er over a checked shirt. His stylish ap­pearance seems like a defensive shell to help contain his childlike enth­us­iasm for his job. “The most serious business meetings I have are with my five and seven-year-old sons,” he says. “Sometimes you step back from a rough day, and you go, ‘OK, there’s pressure but for God’s sake, we’re making cartoons for a living’.”

The 12-year-old company made its name with action cartoons such as Slugterra, a show that has screened in about 170 countries and won a glut of awards including an Emmy, TV’s ans­wer to the Oscars. It depicts an underground world in which tiny animals are shot out of gun-like blasters bef­ore turning into powerful, villain-vanquishing versions of themselves. The show is so popular with his sons’ friends that Mr Fipke keeps a big box of Slugterra toys at home to hand out.

The idea for the show came from a challenge thrown down to him by the toy companies, Mr Fipke says: “How do you play with a traditionally taboo subject like gunslinging? It’s an unfortunate reality, but you throw young boys into a room with a Barbie and they’ll turn it into a gun.” Slugterra, he argues, satisfies the urge to fire away at a target but with a cutesy, cuddly angle that falls short of endor­sing violence.

Nerd Corps works with child psychologists to ensure its stories and characters are appropriate and satisfying for the audience. In Mr Fipke’s ex­perience, “boys tend to want to vanquish evil through acts of heroics, while girls tend to want to change evil and fix it.” He acknowledges that gender-specific TV programming can re­inforce stereotypes, but says those norms are hard to budge without a “concentrated effort by all parties in­vol­ved, from government to private corporations to schools”.

Mr Fipke has learnt the hard way about the importance of relationships with partners such as toy companies, to which Nerd Corps sells licences and takes royalties from sales of merchandise. Storm Hawks, which first aired on the US’s Cartoon Network in 2007, was the first production Nerd Corps devised and produced in-house, and it failed to get a second season.

The show established Nerd Corps’ reputation for storytelling and technical prowess, Mr Fipke says, but the company did not appreciate the imp­or­tance of getting it in the right time slot, with the right ratings, on the right networks, as well as aligning broadcasts with the re­l­ease of merchandise. “Kids want to live the brand across TV shows, video games and toys. But that’s expensive and there has to be an incentive for all the partners you get involved with.”

Nerd Corps weathered that storm and staff numbers doubled in the past year to 400. Its annual production budget is currently about C$30m (US$27m), on which it makes up to 125 episodes. About half its revenues come from cartoons devised in-house and the rest from outside commissions.

Mr Fipke dec­lines to reveal revenue figures, but says the company has always bootstrapped and used money from external contracts to fund its own cartoons.

The business has come a long way since 2002, when Mr Fipke and co-founder Chuck Johnson squeezed 10 writers and animators into a tiny apartment to try to win a contract to produce Dragon Booster, an Arthurian-inspired epic commissioned by Canada’s public broadcaster.

The two co-founders knew each other from an animation and design studio in Vancouver now call­ed Rainmaker. Mr Fipke had graduated from film school with the aim of bec­oming a writer and director, but got hooked on creating new looks for cartoons; Mr Johnson specialised in rounding up technical resources and talent, a role he now fills as Nerd Corps Dungeon Master (chief operations officer).

It’s an unfortunate reality, but you throw young boys into a room with a Barbie and they’ll turn it into a gun’

– Ace Fipke

While they were trying to land the Dragon Booster deal, the writers and animators would do animation tests on powerful computers by day, and use the same machines at night to play networked video games. “One eve­ning we turned to each other and said, ‘we’re nerds’ – and the term stuck,” says Mr Fipke, explaining the origin-myth of the Nerd Corps name.

The team wore the guerrilla-nerd mantle with pride: there were prizes for nerd of the week and they egged each oth­er on with the idea of a “nerd re­naissance”. “The idea of the neo-nerd became the company mandate,” Mr Fipke says, with a trace of nostalgia for those early days.

Nerd Corps won the two-year contract and they bumped up numbers to 60 to fill the brief, hiring via friends and professional networks. One of Nerd Corps’ original group was re­cruited straight out of school as a designer and is now an art director. “He was just one of those kids who drew all the time,” says Mr Fipke.

The company has expanded into new genres, including “tween girl” shows such as Kate & Mim-Mim , and educational comedies. Mr Fipke rec­ent­ly met the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in Cambridge to discuss a new collaboration. The Canadian animators are working on turning a book by Professor Hawking and his daughter Lucy into a show, featuring a boy who journeys through the cosmos with the aid of a supercomputer.

Even in the intimate setting of Prof Hawking’s home, where Mr Fipke was invited to share a roast dinner, the Supreme Commander found it hard not to turn the encounter into a “heroic journey” worthy of a character in one of his cartoons. “We heard a crash and saw smoke billowing from the hallway,” says Mr Fipke. “Like the good, burly Canadian boy I am, I jumped up to save the day, thinking it was my chance to protect the world’s greatest living brain from a house fire.” As it turned out, the problem was just a blocked chimney.

The entrepreneur credits his father with helping foster the imagination that has been the foundation of Nerd Corps’ success. Wayne Fipke ran a theatre in Edmonton, Alberta, where his son took bit parts. The eight-year-old Mr Fipke wrote a play that featured a flying horse, floating castles and mid-air combat.

“When I finished I had this sinking feeling it would never be made because it was too hard from a production perspective,” says Mr Fipke. “But my father sat me down and said, ‘Anything you think or dream can be done’.” While the play was not produced, Mr Fipke says, he now sees that Storm Hawks captured many elements of his original vision.

And his dad’s support for Mr Fipke’s creativity, fired up in all those hours not watching cartoons, has stayed with him: “I think that’s an inspiring lesson for young creators.”

Stretch your mind out: Ace Fipke on creative business

•  Partner with people who complement you. While Mr Fipke favours creative work, Ken Faier, president of Nerd Corps, “is a type-A personality who travels the world and brags about us”.
•  Use consultants. When Nerd Corps branched out into comedy and girls’ shows, Mr Fipke engaged child psychologists and merchandising consultants to make sure the cartoons and associated products were right. “Consultants are some of the best tools we have.”
•  Be sceptical of one-hit wonders. “Creating high-quality entertainment is a marathon run.” He points to the flotation of Candy Crush developer King Entertainment . Its success will depend, he says, on relationships with distributors and spin-off products. “We’re in a strange place with casual gaming, in that a lot of things go viral, but it’s not even with intention.”
•  Take time to ask questions. “I wish I had taken more time to stretch my mind out,” says Mr Fipke, adding that entrepreneurs must know how they fit into a sector.