The small team at the helm of a new Ottawa-based media company, 3NITY Group, has a vision to bring to life the largest Catholic entertainment studio in the world. 

To show how big they are thinking, they recently set their idea down in numbers at a presentation for potential backers: a $500 million financial plan to be realized from a variety of sources.

“That’s American dollars,” Chief Financial Officer John Pacheco told attendees. “In Canadian dollars it’s, well, it’s a lot more.” 

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CEO Frida Abaroa and Creative Officer Ethan Pierce come to the venture with an expertise in media production, discomfort with the current state of animated entertainment, and deep concern for the children who consume that media.

Working for three years as Operations and Creative Director for a Kelowna, B.C. media company, Abaroa saw that though the atheist owners understood that “entertainment was going in a very dark direction,” their idea of a positive alternative was fundamentally flawed.

“They focused on nutrition, nature, and family,” Abaroa said. “Even then, I knew the most important element is missing. I decided to leave that corporation to dedicate myself to producing Catholic entertainment because the God-element is central. I can't tell children that they're going to have a healthy, balanced life if God is not part of it.”

In a Nov. 9 presentation to the Queenship of Mary community in Plantagenet, Ont., midway between Ottawa and Montreal, Abaroa provided a rash of examples of movies or television series in which traditional morality has been inverted: classic evil characters are portrayed as good and vice versa. Abaroa cited the 2014 Disney movie Maleficent, a retelling of the Sleeping Beauty story from the perspective of the evil fairy and the FXX adult animation series Little Demon, also a Disney production. 

Algonquin College graduate Pierce is at the outset of his career. While working as an intern on a Netflix production, he realized he “disagreed with the core values” of the show and prayed “that God would use me in my field to give him glory.”

The Canadian company already has three major projects in the pipeline. The Coming of the Messiah is an animated series that relates the broad swath of salvation history, delving “deep into the eternal battle between good and evil.” Once Upon a Parable will reproduce all of Jesus’s parable stories, telling both the Biblical story and offering a modern interpretation. Geared towards parish use, specifically for children’s liturgies, the goal is to animate all 156 Sunday Gospels of the three-year cycle of liturgical readings.  The third project is Moramel, in which a group of children are taken on an adventurous journey of faith.

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The artwork of the three pre-production projects is lush and classic, at times mimicking the brushwork of paintbrush on canvas. The style of animation reflects the centrality of beauty to the mission and vision of the 3NITY team.

 Pacheco, a chartered accountant, financial analyst and self-described “Catholic activist,” is officially part of the team as the money man CFO. but is equally enthusiastic about the emphasis Abaroa and her creatives place on transcendental beauty.

“We've always heard the phrase beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That is not totally wrong, but it's incomplete because real beauty, as Frida has coined the phrase, is in the eye of God. It's objective, it's not subjective,” Pacheco said.

There is also an emphasis on sound Catholic doctrine in the evolution of the creative process. It’s not to just avoid the oftentimes superficial nature of modern media, but to ensure 3NITY remains 100 per cent Catholic.

“From the very beginning, I was adamant that we need to be with solid, and I mean really solid, Catholic theologians, especially when there is so much confusion, even within our own Church,” Abaroa said.

Pierce compares developing the design of a specific character to that of the monastic practice of lectio divina, or prayerful reflection on Scripture. In creating the character of Adam, and attempting to capture in animation the facial expressions he might have had as he interacted with the Lord in the Garden of Eden, Pierce speaks of how he would “imagine and reimagine the most accurate way we can show Adam in a state of longing? I imagined that the thing he does is kind of like St. John at the Passover meal where he leans against Jesus' chest in complete trust.”

Being Catholic is not only part of their creative process but central to the business model. When presenting their extremely ambitious funding goals, including the target of half a billion U.S. dollars, the team say they are unapologetically relying upon the God’s provision. 

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But alongside the big dollar signs is a big vision for the for-profit business to eventually become a means of channeling funds into charitable missions such as the support of orphans and Catholic education. Using Pope Benedict XVI’s idea of an “economy of communion,” the spiritual entrepreneurs hope to partner with Genesis Charitable corporation, whose mission is to fund Catholic animation.

“We have an incredible opportunity as Catholics to give our side of the story and invite people in. There are a lot of people looking for hope and meaning, and that's all tied into what we're going to try to offer, which is an objective, purposeful life,” Pacheco said.