Ken Faier launched Epic Story Media six years ago with the goal of creating high-quality entertainment for a young market.
“We create content for kids around the world,” says the 57-year-old Leaside resident, who won a Gemini Award for best animated show, Dragon Booster, on CBC as an executive producer. “I am looking to create magic.”
Epic’s calling card is the wide range of options available to their partners and customers – the flexibility to create content on diverse platforms as well as producing original brands and franchises internationally.
“I call Epic’s army a bit of an ecosystem because we are a 360 company and we do a lot of the things that anybody who owns a brand is going to want to do,” says Ken, who also shared a Canadian Screen Award in 2018 for another animated series, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs.
“We have it all under one roof. We attract the creative community to us to pitch us ideas. For kids’ properties, television shows, the goal is to build them into brands. That’s the core of it.”
Behind everything Epic does is the drive to create options that fit the young market – entertaining and educating along the way. One offering, for instance, centres around a seven-year-old girl learning computer coding.
“I care about kids and I care about what they’re consuming,” says Ken. “We make shows that we sell around the world to broadcasters here in Canada and in the U.S. and Europe. I’m a producer and distributor of television shows.
“We also develop toys and we develop video games as well,” Ken adds. “We’ve got a mobile game studio (in Quebec), we’ve got a studio that develops games for Roblox. I’ve got an operation in Vancouver that does mobile games for kids. And then we’ve got the animation studio in Quebec City with a partner. The goal is what we call 360 properties – a kid loves the show, loves the video game, loves the toys, wants to go to the theme park to experience it.”
An ever-shifting entertainment landscape means Ken and his team must consistently adapt to address evolving consumer habits. The company’s mobile games exceed 100 million downloads.
“Technology has changed since the iPhone and YouTube came out and changed the kids’ business,” says Ken. “Kids primarily are spending time on YouTube and Roblox, so those are two areas that we’re active in. Roblox is interesting. It’s multiplayer and there are almost 80 million people a day playing on it and there are millions of games. So, you can go with your friends – digital versions of yourselves – jump into a game together and just hang out, talk or text or communicate.”
The challenges are many when conceptualizing, financing and creating content for a digital-savvy generation of kids to whom network television is increasingly archaic.
“This generation grew up without TV,” says Ken. “They picked their own content. They curated themselves.”
Epic Story Media’s YouTube channels, including the main channel, Epic Story Jr., have more than 100 million pageviews and over 200,000 subscribers.
Although much of his work concerns the business side, Ken relishes the chance to dive into the creative space.
“We’re a creator-driven company,” he says. “That’s the part I love the most, is being a partner to creators. I call them wild stallions.”
