Painterly animation about the things kids actually go through. The MRI, the divorce, the broken bone. Made carefully, by hand, by a family who has been through some of it.
See what we’re working onFirst look at our pilot The Playground Hero coming soon.
Backyard Dreaming makes original animated stories for children. Warm, painterly, slow enough to breathe. The work is rooted in a simple belief: kids deserve stories that don’t paper over the hard parts of being a kid.
The studio is built for children who feel unseen. Kids navigating a hospital they don’t understand. Kids whose parents are tired. Neurodivergent kids. Kids who don’t see themselves in mainstream shows. We make for them first.
It is small, deliberate, and family-run. We trust our audience’s emotional intelligence. We validate the feeling before we offer the tool. And we never use a song to skip past pain that deserves to be sat with.
A small slate, written and storyboarded carefully before a single frame is animated.
In production
Five animal heroes whose powers are coping tools, not magic escapes.
An animated series for ages 3-7. Hope, August, Ella, Leo, and Snippy face the things real kids face: the MRI, the divorce, the broken bone, the day a grandparent isn’t there anymore. Pilot episode The Playground Hero is in storyboard.
In development
Quiet, painterly stories. One feeling at a time.
A short-form anthology built for neurodivergent kids who find big-noise animation overwhelming. Five-to-seven minute pieces, each centered on one emotion handled with care. Currently in writing.
We post the rough drafts, not just the polished pilot. This 7-second test was generated through Veo 2 image-to-video conditioning using a hero portrait of Hope. It does not match final character canon yet — coat color drifts, Snippy and Ella are missing, and the environment includes a palm tree that doesn’t belong. We’re posting it because the work in progress matters. The final pilot reel ships when character continuity locks across every shot.
Iteration log: v1–v4 hand-rendered references · v5 SDXL+IPAdapter ipadapter_scale=0.75 (anchored to source pose) · v6 Veo 2 image-to-video (Hope canon-drifts) · v7 next: AnimateDiff multi-character.
Erik Courtney
Founder · Writer · Showrunner
Backyard Dreaming is run out of Santa Monica by a small family team. Erik is a writer, entrepreneur, and dad to two kids — one of them on the spectrum.
He started the studio after years of watching his children turn off most kids’ television because none of it sat with the hard parts long enough to feel real.
Most kids’ entertainment treats hard feelings like a problem to solve quickly. A song. A lesson. A neat ending. The kid is told, gently, to move on.
Backyard Dreaming was started by a parent who wanted the opposite. Stories that sit with the feeling first. Stories that say, in essence: this is real, this is heavy, you are not weird for needing more time. Then, when the kid is ready, a small tool. Never the other way around.
The work is animated by hand and storyboarded slowly. Episodes are short, painterly, and made with the assumption that a four-year-old can hold complexity if you respect them enough to give it.
For festival programmers, distributors, journalists, parents, fellow animators — we read everything that comes through.
You’ll be writing to a real person, usually Erik. Replies aren’t instant, but they are real.
