Who needs L.A. when you can build an animator’s oasis in Nova Scotia?

Best part of the studio is right here. And there you have it. You’re in the boardroom for the next meeting. Yeah, We’re known as the Reality Rejects. Growing up here, this is this is a bit of a dream. I always wanted to create art and create art in the in my own community. My name is Luke Conrad and the studio’s name is Cartoon Conrad. And we’ve been around for 21 years. Actually, from a very young age, I knew I wanted to do cartoons and that kind of led me down a a path to to this wonderful world of of animation. So when my wife and I first got married, it was we were planning on going to Burbank, Los Angeles, because we thought we had to. Well, she thought, well, let’s can we try it here for a year. And I was like, OK, let’s try it here for a year and if it works, you know, we’ll stay if we can survive. And it worked. I’m so thankful that we were able to not just stay close to family and community, but we’re able to work on some really cool projects and bring them into the community. Right now we’re working a show with Nacelle and Dwayne Johnson. We’ve we’ve done development for people like Will Smith, we’ve done Cool Apari, We worked on brands like Ninja Turtles, The Simpsons, many, many Woody Woodpecker, many, many projects over the years. Cool little spots in the building as well, but don’t tell anyone. We purchased this building in 2012 and when we purchased the property, it was actually abandoned. And so we had, Except for there’s some raccoons that lived in the building and after rustling with him for about 6 months, we were able to come in and start the studio. What happens is we take the script and then we extrapolate from the script itself and create storyboards to kind of show the action, the movement. My name is Reed Morrison. I’m an editor here on Robo Force at Cartoon Conrad. It’s a reboot of an older property. It was a a toy property that sort of fell by the wayside right around when like Transformers came out. And now they have an opportunity to kind of step in and save the day a little bit. We’ll give you the lot. We’ll show you the lot studio lot, the farmhouse that creates animation in the middle of the woods in the East Coast of Canada. There’s something romantic about that for LA and and so that unknowingly people remember us because of that. And we have like deer and owls and ducks walking around. Turtles, a lot of snapping turtles in the spring. Yeah, we have to. We’re probably the only studio that get puts out a warning to not pat the turtles. And you may have noticed the upside down airplane over in the field that was a Kijiji find that was going to be just like a studio prop storm came through and off it went. First I was a little concerned because I didn’t know, you know, are people going to come out? You know, are people going to be here? Is this going to be difficult? Like a lot of people were lived in Dartmouth and it was faster for them to drive out here than it was to go from Dartmouth to Halifax. The studio grew. We had to get more spaces to put them. So we bought different properties that are adjoining the original farm lot. But also we didn’t want to just be a studio that’s buying up land. We want to give back to the community. So there’s a little red apple in the woods that is actually a library and the little kids from the daycares come through and they take books out and put books back. And so we really want to be a place that the community feels like it’s it’s an asset to the community. I actually have a really good quote that Luke gave me. He said whenever you turn something ordinary into extraordinary, there is always a story behind it. I’ve been in a bunch of different professions and this is my forever home. I’ve been here, like I said, seven years. And something about just that completely encompasses how he feels about his crew and his business turning ordinary things into extraordinary things.