Beyond the bathtub and stove showroom, through a discreet doorway and up the stairs lies a series of offices filled with rows of high-performance computers.

This is the command centre for a whole new realm.

It’s a land of animation, but there’ll be no Mickey Mouse here, no loose-limbed Sheriff Woody or Buzz Lightyear ­battling it out in a toybox.

This is where rebellious possums live and curmudgeonly wombats and quokkas and whatever other Australian animals Nadine Bates and Kristen Souvlis conjure up on their way to becoming the Disney and Pixar of Australia. And then the world.

“From the very beginning,” says Bates in the conference room at the premises at Rocklea, in Brisbane’s southwest, “when people said, ‘What’s your goal’, we said: ‘World domination’. And the bigger we get, the more realistic it seems.”

That’s a lot of confidence for a woman who says she’s the reclusive type who is happiest sitting alone eating chocolate, and a business partner who admits to bouts of impostor ­syndrome.

But with a trajectory like the one they’ve been on over the past six years, why not keep aiming big?

For the first time in the Australian animation industry, a 10-film franchise deal has been signed between the ­Brisbane pair’s production company, Like a Photon Creative, an ­as-yet-undisclosed large international media company, and distributor Odin’s Eye Entertainment.

Three animated ­feature films worth $9 million will be distributed worldwide first, with an option for another seven, bringing the total contract to $30 million.

Even before the first film hits the screens this Christmas, the duo is reaching across the globe with a gamified, storytelling app, KinderGo.

It’s been number one in iTunes’ children’s entertainment in more than 30 countries and is a nominee for a Kidscreen Award, a global prize to be ­announced in Miami, Florida, on February 12.

Both women worked in children’s media when, in late 2012, they met for coffee on James St in the inner-Brisbane suburb of New Farm.

The feisty pair fought over who would pay. “I took no shit from her and she took no shit from me and I knew it would be OK,” says Bates.

An instant bond was forged and since then, they’ve helped each other through a wedding, a divorce, pregnancy, motherhood, ­creating a company, excruciating contract negotiations and a crash-course into the land of animation.

Because, despite embarking on the biggest animation deal ever done in ­Australia, neither of them can draw. “Oh god no, I can’t even do a stick figure,” says Bates, 40.

Bates and Souvlis share a glance and hoot with laughter. Souvlis, 33, composes herself and adds: “What we can do, is imagine worlds.”

READY TO ASSEMBLE

Swedish meatballs — “with lingonberry sauce!” — and free wi-fi. It was that perfect combination that led Souvlis and Bates to meet regularly at Ikea in Springwood, the Logan City suburb equidistant from ­Souvlis’s home in New Farm and Bates’s place at Tamborine Mountain, in the Gold Coast hinterland.

They’d set up their laptops in the kitchen showroom, or the lounge ­display, and throw ideas around. Plus a bit of free furniture advice.

“People would walk past and go, ‘How comfortable are those chairs?’ And we’d be, ‘Really good, I’ve been sitting here for hours and my bum is not as numb as you’d expect’,” says Bates.

It was early 2013 and they were freelancing, both having quit their jobs to strike out on their own.

Souvlis had been a producer at Jonathan M. Shiff Productions, the Gold Coast-based filmmaker behind young teen films H20: Just Add Water and Mako Mermaids, and Bates a writer for Network Ten’s children’s shows.

Their plan now was to come up with some ideas to pitch at the Screen Producers’ Association conference in Melbourne later in the year.

Surrounded by shoppers and occasional tables, Bates settled into a couch and told Souvlis a story.

She’d been driving with her sons, Elijah, now 14, and Nathaniel, 12, and saw some donkeys in a paddock with the word “rescue” on their blankets.

“What if,” suggested Bates, “they were ­donkeys that thought they were superheroes because they had ‘rescue’ written on their blankets?”

To which Souvlis replied: “What if they were balloons?” Says Bates: “And I went, ‘Change approved! Let’s make it a show!’ ”

They look at each other and burst into giggles. It’s what sustains their partnership, they say, an ability to make each other laugh. And they prop each other up.

When Souvlis tries to diminish her role, saying she rendered Bates’s sweet story about superhero rescue donkeys absurd by suggesting they be made of balloons, Bates interrupts. “That’s not what you did, you made it ultimately commerciable.”

Then there’s more chortling as they decide commerciable is not a word.

They back themselves, too. Many great ideas wither on the vine of inaction. Souvlis says their success is based on “chutzpah, and we do fun, creative, and we deliver on it”.

With the seed of an idea, the duo went to the conference.

They didn’t know many people. That changed after ­they shouted the bar top-shelf tequila.

“We made friends,” says Souvlis. “And those relationships,” adds Bates, “have been some of the most important relationships we ever made.”

The next morning, hungover, they pitched their idea of farm animals made of balloons on sets made of craft mat­erials to Disney Australia and Nickelodeon repres­entatives.

A couple of months later, Bates and Souvlis received a letter of interest from Disney.

Now they had to produce a trailer. Screen Queensland gave them $7500, they hired Brisbane-based animator Paul Gillett and composer Ack Kinmonth and, three months later, flew to Sydney to show Disney.

They expected some ­to-and-fro, suggested tweaks, or a “No, thank you”.

The Disney reps asked how many episodes they were ­planning. Told 13, the reps said, “Make it 26”. The duo breathed deep and asked what happened next. “Then they said, ‘Now we give you a big bag of money’.”

Champagne flowed at the Oyster Bar at Circular Quay later that day. Balloon Barnyard was the first series Disney Australia commissioned out of Queensland.

Then the hard slog began. Both went back to full-time work — Souvlis at Brisbane-based production company, Hoodlum, and Bates at Screen Queensland — while they worked on the project.

“Now, that bag of money,” says Souvlis, “turns out it’s not a huge bag. It’s more like a travel-sized makeup kit of money. But what it did was open the door for us to build up a finance plan.”

The total budget was $1.14 million, of which 15 per cent came from Disney.

They worked at night, Bates writing most of the episodes and doing the story production and Souvlis immersing herself in the art of bookkeeping and finance planning.

Bates could have no role in the financing to avoid conflict of ­interest through her job with Screen Queensland, which helped fund the project.

The Australian Children’s Television Foundation and the Brisbane-based post-production company The Post Lounge (which did the animation of the seven-minute episodes) also contributed.

As Balloon Barnyard was coming to life, they had another win. Every year, Sesame Street invites 15 companies from around the world to make a pitch for a segment.

The famous US children’s show bosses had knocked back the Balloon Barnyard idea — (‘They couldn’t do balloons because they’re a choking hazard in the US,” says Souvlis with a slight eye­roll) — but liked the Brisbane duo’s style and invited them to pitch.

They came up with hoedown-dancing sheep and pigs doing a counting song. Griffin did the animation and they became the first Australian female team to write and produce for Sesame Street.

They were on a roll but their personal lives were running at different speeds. Souvlis had rekindled her love affair with Alexander Shakhovskoy, her boyfriend when the former Somerville House schoolgirl was doing her Bachelor of Creative Industries and Drama at Queensland University of Technology. They married in 2015.

That same year, Bates divorced her husband of 20 years, who she’d met in her first week at the University of Queensland after moving from her Central Queensland home town of Gladstone to study, for a short time, political science.

The big decisions kept coming.

For months, they kept baulking at the idea of giving up jobs they enjoyed to ­commit full-time to the company. They were terrified.

“But I knew full well that if we were going to do this properly,” says Bates, “it needed 100 per cent commitment and I needed not to be conflicted.”

They bit the bullet in mid-2015. “It’s a lot of faith,” says Souvlis. “It’s a lot of hard work, a little bit of luck, it’s a lot of support from family, friends, team members, and the government and organisations you pitch to.”

Balloon Barnyard was delivered in early 2016 and became the second-highest-rated show on Disney Australia. They got paid in August 2016. That’s the movie business. To ­survive, they needed to diversify.

BY THE BOOK

As a young mum living on Tamborine Mountain, Bates had to find an outlet for her creativity.

After aborting her political science degree and heading overseas with her now ex-husband, she’d returned to do the same degree as ­Souvlis, with the addition of a Bachelor of Education.

She taught for a year but that stopped when she had Elijah at the age of 24.

“I was incredibly antsy to do something,” she says. “My brain is a cattle dog; if it’s not given work, it will destroy the furniture.”

She started writing books for Elijah, creating stories about magical beings who lived on the mountain.

From her kitchen table, Hootenanny Books began, a boutique publisher that became the first Queensland company to issue digital copies of picture books.

It was this work that led Bates to write for TV, and now she figured these books could give her and Souvlis the cashflow needed to keep producing their projects.

“I looked at all the resources we had at our fingertips; I had a library of books,” says Bates. “If we could mesh them with some of the really talented technical people we knew who could build platforms of entertainment, we had something.”

They needed funding, though.

In early 2016, they started pitching their idea to investors: how about an interactive, one-stop shop for children’s storytelling and games? ­

Brisbane Angels, a collection of entrepreneurial investors (one of whom, Kris Trevilyan, is now the chair of Like a Photon Creative’s board), and the Queensland Business Development Fund liked the idea and $2.5 million was raised.

KinderGo launched in August last year and has 4000 subscribers worldwide.

“Kids have at their fingertips a library of books where they can interact with the story and characters throughout,” says Souvlis of the app that uses tap and hear technology and is downloaded from an app store through a monthly subscription.

“So there are 10 islands, and each has a theme. There’s Dino Island, Dream Island, Play Island. Each has interactions, so a dinosaur comes out of the river and you collect dinosaur onesies. It rewards them for reading.”

Twenty people now work at KinderGo but Souvlis and Bates well remember the early days, when they took up an office tenancy in inner-Brisbane’s Woolloongabba (which still houses KinderGo) just before Christmas 2016.

They had four staff, no furniture, grubby carpet. The carpet is particularly memorable because it’s where they sat as they brainstormed what would ultimately become the mega-film deal operating under the catchphrase Tales of Sanctuary City.

It began with a phone call from an old contact of ­Souvlis’s.

He was now working for the large international media company and he had seen a press release announcing that Like a Photon Creative had been chosen to receive a $250,000 grant from the Screen Australia Enterprise Program. He called Souvlis to chat … and later asked if her company would pitch for his concept of creating a slate of animated, family entertainment films to be released in ­cinemas on school holidays.

He gave them a week.

“And we sat on the carpet and came up with some concepts, some little paragraphs,” says Souvlis. It wasn’t the most sophisticated of presentations; just a Word document and a few stock images of animals off the internet. But he was hooked.

“I think he saw the ­proliferation of creativity that came out of us,” says Souvlis. “He thought, these people know a story, they know how to create characters, a story arc. He told us much, much later that, after he got our document, he stopped all conversations with other producers and providers and said to his ­assistant, ‘We need to work with these people’.”

They were asked to come back with 10 fleshed-out ideas.

The international brand promised $100,000 if they could get another $100,000.

“So we spoke to Screen Queensland and it couldn’t quite believe what was happening,” says Bates. “Screen Queensland were like, ‘This is not a thing, this doesn’t happen’.” The businessman flew up to meet with Screen Queensland’s chief executive, Tracey Vieira. They got the extra $100,000.

Vieira recalls being astounded by the magnitude of the prospective deal but says “that’s why we back them, because they’re doing things we haven’t seen before”.

The duo stood out to her when she became chief executive in 2014 because they were not focused solely on one project but intent on building a company with international reach. “They don’t just create a production, they take it out into the marketplace and sell it, and that really has been their point of ­difference,” Vieira says. “Their ambitions aren’t just about making productions for a local channel, it’s about making production globally and doing a slate of productions — in a whole range of different things, not just these movies — and getting them all going at once. I think that makes them unique; they very much feel like a Disney in the making.”

With the funding secured, LAPC was able to employ writers such as Peter Ivan, who wrote the award-winning “dog protects penguins” film Oddball, screenwriting partners Shayne Armstrong and Shane Krause, and actress-turned-writer Trudy Hellier, as well as fly in an animation director from Singapore to talk through how to keep it in budget. “Because they are very small-budget movies,” says Bates.

“A maximum of $2 million to $2.5 million. Disney and Pixar movies are between $100 to $300 million each.”

At the end of 2017, with the first few scripts written and presented, the international company gave the green light.

“They said, ‘We’ll take the first three and we’ll contract with the following seven,” says Bates.

The first film, The Wishmas Tree, about a young possum’s misguided wish for snow and the mayhem that causes, is scheduled for release at Christmas this year, meaning completion by September. Pixar and Disney take three to 10 years to produce their movies.

DEAL OR NO DEAL?

Then the deal fell apart. Not all of it, just the bit that ­involved sales to the rest of the world. That news broke the day after Souvlis went on maternity leave in March last year.

Bates did not tell Souvlis.

“I know her; she eats, sleeps and breathes this business and if I had whispered a single bit of it to her, she wouldn’t have been able to stay in the ­moment,” says Bates. “You have that child once. That’s ­precious time you don’t get again.”

So Bates hit the phones to rescue the deal. She did, sec­uring Odin’s Eye as the rest of the world distributor.

Souvlis gets teary as she reflects on the work Bates took on to allow her time with her baby boy, Rafael.

“She let me stay in my love bubble and I will never forget that,” says Souvlis. “You can speak about her tenacity and her creativity, her ­strategic brain, but fundamentally she is a person with people at her heart. I came back from mat leave and I had no idea about any of this, I just came back to a deal that was done.”

Says Bates: “Yeah, forgot to tell you it was one of the hardest f---ing three months of my life.”

They roar with laughter.

It ended up being 12 months of contracting.

The deal was only finalised late last year, and includes financing from Screen Australia and Screen Queensland.

It was a risky time; taking the leap of faith to employ more animators to begin pre-production, and using KinderGo and other Like a Photon Creative projects to keep them afloat. And they mortgaged their houses.

But if sales of the first tranche of films are good — there’s already $US4.2 million ($5.83 million) in advance sales, and the promise of another $US3 million mid-year — Like a Photon Creative will be on its way to becoming an animation powerhouse.

Their deal is a bit of a coup in the movie world.

They insisted on retaining intellectual property (IP) rights, a rarity in slate deals. “It was low-budget so we needed to have skin in the game,” says Souvlis.

“This is about building a business, not just a production. We hold the risk, so we should hold the IP.”

Now they’re in full swing. About 60 animators and ­producers are working to create the first three movies. By mid-year, there’ll be 130. Many of them will be from Queensland, some of whom were employed in the gaming animation boom of the 2000s but left the state after the ­industry downturn.

“We have brought people back to Queensland, we have homegrown talent, seniors, juniors, interns,” says Souvlis. “And we don’t have wage gaps for women.”

They are in awe of animators, how they take an idea and bring it to life through talent and skill.

“There is something about animation, it suspends disbelief more effectively than live action,” says Bates. “It puts you in a place of fantasy so quickly that you’re able to get lost in the story.”

They admit it’s been hard to release the reins on their ideas and allow the animators and producers to have ­artistic freedom.

“We now are not the creative leads; we set the strategy, the creative tone, but we run the business,” says Souvlis. “We need to let other people’s creative vision shine within our overarching vision.”

After all, they’ve got an empire to build. Right now, Souvlis is in San Francisco with her family, after Like a ­Photon Creative was accepted into AusTrade’s landing pad program, which helps businesses get funding to expand ­globally.

She will spend four months meeting investors and venture capitalists with the aim of raising between $US5 million to $10 million.

“For KinderGo,” says Souvlis. “To branch into the ­English as a second language market.”

Says Bates: “So really, world domination.” ■