By Avery Mullen
Lynn Chadwick and Steve Cooke, the founders of That Animation Company, spent decades on the brink of crossing paths before they finally met.
Chadwick’s career is based on being a salesperson for animation and television studios, pitching their services to buyers like broadcast networks or even other studios looking to outsource work. Cooke, meanwhile, has spent much of his working life leading animation teams.
In three separate instances, Chadwick and Cooke worked for the same company or were involved in the same project before they decided to launch their new venture together.
In January, they became business partners, founding a new animation startup that they hope will grow to be defined by its fair treatment of employees in an industry infamous for poor working conditions.
“It’s like ‘six degrees of separation’,” says Chadwick. “We didn’t even know each other until the last place we worked at the same time.
“We were very surprised and quite pleased. It just makes you realize how small the industry is.”
The duo first came close to meeting in the late 1990s, when they were both involved in a science fiction television series for the now-defunct Salter Street Films. A live-action science fiction series that has since gained a cult following, Lexx was filmed on what is now the site of the Nova Scotia Power offices on the Halifax waterfront. Cooke worked on digital effects for the series, while Chadwick was tasked with selling it.
The next time their careers almost intersected was in the 2000s in Toronto. Cooke was working for a studio called Elliott Animation on popular children’s shows like The Care Bears, which featured brightly coloured, anthropomorphized teddy bears. Chadwick, for her part, was a vice president at Nelvana Enterprises, the company that collaborated with Elliott to distribute the show.
It was at the more recent employer, Dartmouth-based Huminah Huminah Animation, where the two finally got to know each other. Chadwick was hired there in 2021, and Cooke in 2022, both as vice presidents.
“The two of us would have regular update meetings directly with the clients,” recalls Chadwick. “So we found we were routinely sitting together, talking to crew and to clients about properties we were working on. And at that point, we realized we were very similar in our thoughts. Our values for how to treat the crew and how to treat the client were very aligned.”
When they were both laid off a handful of years later, they met up and began to discuss what a joint venture could look like.
“The way we’ve always worked through our entire careers has been resultant in lots of extremely good content being created, but also deep relationships being forged,” Chadwick says. “People take meetings with us, and that’s taken years of behaving in that fashion to have people gain that much trust in you. We started realizing that all of these ideas and all of these feelings and values (we have) are the same. That’s what led us to take the plunge.”
Chadwick and Cooke launched That Animation Company in January and have already won one project, doing character design work on a potential television series for a U.K. client, for which they hired two contract employees. If the concept does grow into a fully-fledged production, it could be a source of recurring work for their nascent business. They also have several more potential deals in the pipeline.
“Once we launched, the reception to the news has been phenomenal,” says Cooke, who has also held senior roles at DHX Media, which for a time owned the globally-recognized Peanuts brand and associated Charlie Brown character.
“We’ve had so many conversations with people who are really happy we’re doing this. There are a lot of studios out there that want to support the good studios in the industry, the people that really take care of their clients and crew.”
Chadwick and Cooke describe ‘fair treatment of staff’ as a key element of the brand they want to develop. Animation employers have historically garnered a reputation for operating on tight deadlines, with staff putting in long hours for little pay.
Cooke, though, sees that paradigm as reflecting poor planning by management during the process of bidding on new work. He expects deadlines and crunch periods to always remain part of the industry, but he believes studios’ cost estimates can sometimes be overly conservative and timelines occasionally verge on too optimistic.
“When it comes to crew, I’m a big believer in (the principle that) you pay people properly, you allow them to have a life outside of the job,” he says. “Career isn’t the only thing, animation isn’t the only thing. People want to have lives outside of that.
“I remember when I started out working, some days you would go to work at eight o’clock in the morning, and you would work through until 11 o’clock the next morning before you would get to go home. Because the industry is very deadline-driven.”
Cooke believes those working practices are changing in the animation field, but gradually and at varying rates depending on where in the world a company is based. He and Chadwick believe new studios can best capitalize on those changes by taking a leading role in the transition, rather than clinging to old practices.
“Obviously, when our productions get going, there will be some crunch periods, there will be some deadlines,” acknowledges Chadwick. “But … if you are empathetic and mindful that people will get tired, that people will need breaks, they will want to go see their families, you’re going to get a lot more out of people.
“This ‘sword of Damocles over your head’ situation doesn’t really work anymore. Just because it worked for 30 years doesn’t mean it should work today. Times change.”
Also likely working in favour of That Animation Company, Chadwick says, is that she and Cooke are starting the business at a time when the industry has experienced a market correction and is now potentially set to begin growing again.
In the fall of 2020, this reporter wrote in The Chronicle Herald that the shutdown of live action television and film sets had led to a surge of new business for the animation studios, to such an extent that major players in Nova Scotia were being offered contracts that far outstripped the size of the local talent pool. At the time, this led some executives to chafe at the cross-border travel restrictions that limited their ability to hire workers from the United States.
As live action sets have reopened and public health conditions have normalized, that additional work has largely dried up. That process has also been hastened by a protracted, five-month strike by the Writers Guild of America in 2023, which Chadwick and Cooke say created economic pain in the film and television sector that has led to the traditional, largely U.S.-based buyers of animated content being more cautious with their purchasing.
“It’s a tough place right now,” says Chadwick. “The large companies with the huge, expensive overheads and the big office buildings have had to make some significant cuts. It’s been very, very tough for many people.
“However, the one thing we know, because we’ve been through this for so many years … is that it all bounces back, albeit in a different way, potentially. The one thing we know is that content is king, and content will always be required in some way, shape or form.”
Lynn Chadwick and Steve Cooke are co-owners of That Animation Studio, which they promise will offer employees better, fairer worker conditions than have historically been commonplace in the industry. Cooke recalls spending well over 24 hours at a time in the office in the early days of his career. Contributed
