A creative crossroad led TAG member Ian Graham along a new animation path.
When you’re ready for a change, open a new door. When you can’t find that door, sometimes you have to build it. Longtime Storyboard Artist and Producer Ian Graham knows this only too well. After a 30-year career spent working on such series as Danny Phantom, SpongeBob SquarePants, The Fairly OddParents, and Glitch Techs, Graham carved out a new path for himself by initiating the Los Angeles outpost of the Australia-based Flying Bark Productions, where he serves as the L.A. Senior Vice President, Creative.
Graham grew up in an entertainment-industry household, the grandson of vaudevillians and the son of Second Unit Director Bob Graham and Kate Quillan-Graham, who ran a commercial production company. “For me, that became a big foundation of what I find so useful today in my adult life,” he says. “At my dinner table as a kid, you had the creative on one side and production on the other, and I could hear the debates and the things they struggled with.”
Graham graduated from ArtCenter College of Design where he made several key friends who helped foster his love of animation. After many years working on kids’ series in the Nickelodeon universe, he began to branch out, taking his talents to Invader ZIM in the early 2000s. Having been glued to his TV as a kid watching Robotech, along with his fascination with anime and the works of Hayao Miyazaki, Graham jumped when opportunities came along to work as a Storyboard Artist on Avatar: The Last Airbender and Director on The Legend of Korra.
If the path from Bikini Bottom to the Airbender universe seems unusual, Graham argues that there is a common denominator.
“Having good old-fashioned drawing skills can take you quite a distance in our industry,” he says. “If you have the skills and the heart, then you can make the connection between different types of shows and be able to change lanes for projects.”
In 2019, at the end of his stint as a Supervising Producer on Glitch Techs, Graham was at a creative crossroad. Other series work was available, but after three decades in the field, he felt the need to try something fresh. He saw how studios such as Netflix, Amazon, and Apple were working in partnership with smaller studios like Titmouse. “Not like the way it used to be with just the big major studios doing all the heavy lifting,” he says.
Envisioning this different model of delivering animation to major studios, and having enjoyed his work with Flying Bark on Glitch Techs, he contacted the company’s leadership and asked if there was interest in starting an L.A.-based presence. To Graham’s thinking, Flying Bark could have an outlet on the ground in Los Angeles overseeing production using local expertise. “We have something the rest of the world covets,” he says. “The ability to do a real TV production pipeline because of years of experience.”
Pitching the idea to Flying Bark CEO of Content Barbara Stephen, Graham offered himself as the creative engine. In addition, he wanted to support The Animation Guild, and he says Flying Bark had his back. “The deal was that we will start an L.A. studio, and it will be a unionized studio,” he says. “I know the value of the Union, I’ve been a Union member for almost 30 years.”
Graham says Flying Bark was excited to have an L.A. presence, and once they agreed to give the venture a try, he launched it out of his garage. After weathering the industry shutdown due to the pandemic, Graham and Flying Bark Los Angeles began producing pilots for Netflix and Fox Animation.
“I’ve spent my whole life directing Storyboard Artists, involved in writing and storytelling from nuts to bolts in animation,” he says, “but it’s rare that someone like me steps into a kind of executive role to try to grow things.”
A high point came when Netflix reached out and asked whether Graham would be interested in working pre-production on the animated series Stranger Things: Tales from ’85. He was paired with Executive Producer and Showrunner Eric Robles, who he already knew, and Flying Bark Los Angeles did the fully unionized pre-production, including concept, development, scripts, boards, and more, with Flying Bark Sydney doing the production work. Also in the pipeline with Netflix are two more high-profile animated series: Clash of Clans and Minecraft.
Having outgrown Graham’s garage, Flying Bark Los Angeles now takes up an entire floor in a building in Burbank. “One of the things I’m most proud of is the fact I’ve been able to employ and bring in lots of people in the animation industry,” he says.
Granted, Graham’s achievement took talent and plenty of hard work, but it’s a path that he insists others could also follow. “I know the animation industry has been struggling, but there’s also a lot of opportunity in terms of growth,” he says. He advises his animation kin to keep an eye out “because the only thing preventing them from finding these opportunities themselves is just doing it… There are many studios all over the planet that would love to have footprints in L.A. That footprint, if unionized and done properly, could help the growth and stability of our industry.”
