Yeti Farm Creative, an artist-driven studio and one of Canada’s most robust animation pipelines, is making strategic moves to facilitate the company’s continued expansion and development of its own intellectual properties (IP), as well as its work as a sought-after service studio.
The company has restructured its management team, with partner Jay Surridge as chief creative officer, responsible for shepherding in a new production and development slate, and tapping Stephanie Marcott (formerly of Method Studios, Framestore, DNEG) as international recruiter to manage talent acquisition. Known for its proprietary 2D Sweet Tweets series, along with its production of 2D animation hits Hotel Transylvania and Pete the Cat, Yeti Farm Creative has also recently moved its operations to a state-of-the-art facility equipped with the latest technology to better support its growing production needs.
Yeti Farm Creative founder and CEO Ashley Ramsay said, “Jay has done such a great job with the creative and production teams at Yeti and I know he will flourish in this broadened role. Our new studio space in downtown Kelowna is the perfect place to house our permanent group of story and development artists and I’m excited to announce more about our originals in the coming months.”
The studio also recently entered into two development agreements with executive producer Irene Weibel (Moon and Me, Bravest Warriors) for two CG projects, one from Michael Bruza (Outlandish, SciGirls) and the other with The Mother Company (Ruby’s Studio).
Surridge said, “We have built a great core group of artists and producers over the past few years on shows like Pete the Cat with creator Jeff Swampy Marsh, our own Sweet Tweets and the upcoming Summer Memories. The last couple years Yeti found ways to naturally evolve to the industry’s new hybrid production world, allowing us to collaborate more efficiently as a studio in all departments and take a larger role in productions at all levels. We’ve had a creative booster shot. I look forward to working with Stephanie to further build the artist team for these and other exciting new shows, including a 3D series that Irene brought to us, which we are developing with Corus Entertainment’s Nelvana Studios, as well as the comedy series Alpha Betas, starring top YouTube creators, among other projects.”
Summer Memories, debuting this summer, is a 2D animated comedy that follows 11-year-old Jason as he romanticizes the most pivotal summer of his life…which was just a few weeks ago. Produced with A&N Productions, founded by animator/producer Adam Yaniv (Alvinnn!!! And The Chipmunks, Night at the Museum); Aircraft Pictures (The Breadwinner, Holly Hobbie); and Weibel, the 20×30’ series is commissioned by WildBrain Television’s Family Channel and distributed internationally by WildBrain Ltd.
Among the series now in production at Yeti Farm Creative is Alpha Betas, an animated show developed and produced by 3BLACKDOT, writers and showrunners Chris Bruno and David Howard Lee, and some of YouTube’s most popular creators – VanossGaming (Evan Fong), BasicallyIDoWrk (Marcel Cunningham), I AM WILDCAT (Tyler Wine), and Terroriser (Brian Hanby), with more than 40 million subscribers across their channels – who have begun working on more episodes and bonus content.
Yeti Farm Creative animated the series pilot, which has already garnered over seven million views since its YouTube premiere in 2021, and will continue production on the series with LA-based studio Octopie. The show centers on an elite virtual strike force of four top gamers who drop into the virtual realms of videogames to fix potentially world-ending issues. The Alpha Betas series is set to premiere in fall 2022/winter 2023.
