‘Filmatick’ makes TV, film impact with UC’s help

“I immediately fell in love with the whole process of digital animation so I switched my major and enrolled in an animation program in Minnesota after four years in UC’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP),” says Gasaway. 

Thirty years later, Gasaway returned to Cincinnati, began teaching digital animation in UC’s Digital Media Collaborative program and started "Filmatick," his own pre-production software company with the help of the Venture Lab startup pre-accelerator in UC’s 1819 Innovation Hub — the nerve center of the Cincinnati Innovation District® (CID). 

“Entrepreneurs are embracing the creative culture and industry engagement that thrives here,” says David J. Adams, UC chief innovation officer and architect of the CID. “Mike’s return to the district reinforces our goal to attract and retain the kind of talent that becomes a true catalyst for innovation and growth.”

Gasaway adds, “As Cincinnati continues to build a pool of digitally-skilled talent, the Cincinnati Innovation District will be the place where individuals can push boundaries and make an impact in our communities, businesses and industries."

Millennials may know him from his animation work on the “House of Mouse” Disney series from the 90s, but most of the world recognizes him from his later work as an animation supervisor on the Jimmy Neutron Nickelodeon film before he moved on as director behind the television series “The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius.” 

From there, Gasaway moved up as director and co-producer for Nickelodeon’s “Back at the Barnyard” and “Planet Sheen” television series before returning to his alma mater to teach and develop his own game-changing pre-production software program, “Filmatick.”

“As an animation director, I was always able to work with a storyboard artist and an editor that could put my animation together. It was a great way to get my ideas from inside my head up onto the screen with everyone understanding what we want to do,” says Gasaway. “But when I moved from 3D-animation to live action I was suddenly stuck without a storyboard artist or editor and faced the dilemma of how to get the creative concept to my director of photography, production designer and assistant director.”

Admitting he’s not much of an artist, drawing mostly stick figures, Gasaway instead employed his keen understanding of digital 3D-animation and began creating each shot and scene using a newer digital graphic program. Assembling them in Adobe Premiere Pro, Gasaway now had his film and storyboard completed before he was even on set or had to shoot a single frame.

In the year since developing the “Filmatick” program, Gasaway has seen the industry go from working in a face-to-face collaborative environment to everyone on the creative set working remotely. Ironically, his new program allowed him to communicate easily and work efficiently with a bevy of film artists spread out across the country.

But it begged the question, “How do I get this program off the ground and get the word out?” he says.

Look no further. As an animation professor at UC, Gasaway turned to the Venture Lab, a pre-accelerator program inside the university’s 1819 Innovation Hub where they help turn startup ideas from scratch into a viable company. 

"Being a UC grad and professor, of course I wanted to be a part of the Innovation Hub,” says Gasaway.

The pre-accelerator program gave him the tools he needed to successfully build a company with the potential to revolutionize the film industry. Grant Hoffman, director of UC startups, and everyone at the 1819 Innovation Hub were instrumental to his success, he adds.

“The Venture Lab kept us on track, made us focus and taught us how to pitch our product to investors and consumers. Because our team already had our product, we were ahead of the game compared to most of the other cohorts,” says Gasaway. “At the graduation presentations — in a format much like a shark tank — we pitched our company to their group to see if we could get funding. 

“We did! We pitched it well and got fully funded up to $200 thousand and also got a CEO out of this.”

Included in Gasaway’s “Filmatick” business team is his wife Lisa Blaney-Gasaway who has the sales background, Brendan Dickinson, who has the technical expertise and his wife Samantha Dickinson, who has the marketing background. But they were missing that business sense, he says. 

As a software expert and as the Venture Lab’s entrepreneur-in-residence, Ben TerreBlanche joined "Filmatick’s" company as their CEO and became what Gasaway coined as “the perfect last piece."