Big Bug Invasion

Working from its home colony of Vancouver, the budding studio Giant Ant Media has quickly made a name for itself by consistently impressing with its quality video and motion work

In an industry that’s quickly becoming overrun with the term ‘storytelling,’ it’s refreshing to come across a creative studio that truly embodies the term. Giant Ant Media’s partners, Jay Grandin and Leah Nelson (also partners in real life), may come from diverse backgrounds (Grandin from industrial design; Nelson from film school) but they have founded their rising studio on the foundation of conveying compelling narratives through video, stop-motion animation and motion graphics.

“When you go to art history class and learn about cave paintings, you don’t talk about strategy and convergence,” explains Grandin. “Storytelling seems to be this thing that’s timeless, that can transcend mediums and transcend markets...We call ourselves a storytelling studio, but we’ve been wary of attaching ourselves to a specific executions, because we want to tell stories in the best way we can. If it’s a good story, you can make it on the iPhone and it’ll be fine.”

Giant Ant has crafted narratives on behalf of clients as varied as Clearly Contacts, the Canadian Cancer Society, the Public Salmon Foundation and Reverb, plus some pieces executed for agencies such as Cossette and Rethink Communications. A stop-motion animation they produced in early 2010 in partnership with Rethink for the Design Currency conference quickly went viral — a phenomenon that is not new for Giant Ant, as Grandin explains.

“I studied industrial design at Emily Carr and got my dream job designing office furniture for Steelcase. My manager bought a Canon XL2, which no one touched, so I started taking it home on the weekends. I started making these silly videos and posting them on YouTube and MySpace, and then one of them got featured on the homepage of MySpace back when MySpace was a big deal. So I made some more and then one Christmas, Leah and I made a video together that went viral. It was on the front page of YouTube and MySpace and had five or six million views in a couple days.”

At one point they were two of the most popular filmmakers on MySpace. By the end of 2008 they were busy enough to justify acquiring office space and the next year they hired their first employees. And they’ve stayed busy; they’re currently finishing a documentary on a group of street youth in Dar es Salaam who recorded a hip-hop album, while simultaneously developing a pilot for a show exploring the local food source potential around Vancouver. With an eye on the future, they intend to expand while holding true to the storytelling ideals on which they were founded.

“The kind of work we did six months ago is totally different from what we do now,” says Grandin. “We still look at our portfolio from six months ago and cringe, and we know we’ll do that again six months from now. So we definitely don’t feel like we’ve ‘arrived’ yet. We’re just a young studio; we’re all trying to learn together and build and grow and we’re not really sure where it’s going to end up, but we do think we’ll end up creating stories for a while.”