Profile: Nick Couts

By Dawne Belloise 

As a kid growing up on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, Nick Couts says he always loved art, drawing and making little films of his friends’ escapades on their BMX bikes with his VHS camera. He’s carried that creativity into his freelance business, LOVEcinema, where he does 3D animation, motion graphics and design, from text and titles for commercials and films to animating characters for ESPN. His company has a broad spectrum of styles and clients and he can service them from his home in Mt. Crested Butte.

Nick started out in the suburbs but his family moved out to the country during his middle school days until he left for college. There he’d create little films with GI Joe figures. “It would take all day,” he explains of the stop-animation style, like Claymation, where his staged soldiers would fight battles. Later, Nick created more action-type films at the skate park, filming skateboarding and BMX biking in his mini DV format. In high school and throughout college, Nick had saved up enough earnings from shooting weddings to buy better, more professional equipment. “I was always ambitious and there was never a dull moment,” he smiles. From early on, he knew he wanted to pursue this path in the art world, so he focused on how to monetize it in commercial ways to enable him to pay the bills by doing filming, editing and visual effects for everything from logo designs and promotional videos to weddings. 

With his main influences mostly revolving around BMX biking and the skateboarding culture, Nick felt that it was a little more attainable in being able to recreate the scene and the process, plus, “I enjoyed riding and skateboarding. It was a cool way to keep up to speed with what the pros were doing. The videos made by different filmmakers were so cool and I’d watch them over and over again, not only for the sport but the technical aspect of filming,” he says of his motivation. He developed his own unique skills for logo design, web videos and ads for local businesses. “It was fun seeing stuff you made yourself on TV.” 

After Nick graduated from high school in 2004, he enrolled at the local Columbus College of Art and Design. It was a solid school for a creative design curriculum, and he got a reasonable scholarship with partial grants. He took everything from painting courses to architectural drawing courses to color concept and film, all while working. “It was the busiest time in my life,” he tells. The first three years, Nick worked random jobs including shooting weddings, working at Home Depot and even as a window cleaner dangling from ropes on dangerously tall buildings. “There were a few moments that we had some scares on those buildings,” he recalls. He’d pull all-nighters after work sometimes to get his school projects and course homework completed. “There was a big workload at that school. It can take like eight hours to create content.” He earned his BA degree in Fine Arts with a major in Time Based Media Design, which is basically, he explains, film and animation. 

During those years paralleling with school, when opportunities arose to do work related graphics and animations Nick would take those odd jobs which became his auxiliary income that allowed him to further his craft through college. In his senior year at college, Nick got an internship at a local studio called Spacejunk, a video production and animation company, which he still occasionally works for. “That was my first big foray into the field.” After he graduated in 2008, he was hired full-time, working with them for eight years until 2014. That’s when Nick decided to go freelance and create his own company, LOVEcinema. He still worked with Spacejunk, subcontracting and teaming up on some projects. “There was plenty of work, it’s a fairly large industry and it’s not regional. There was plenty of non-local work,” he says.

A year later in 2015, Nick got a bit of wanderlust, sold his house in Columbus and bought a camper trailer. He hit the road since he could work remotely from anywhere as long as there was decent cell connection or internet. “I had a passion for the outdoors and the mountains. I grew up skiing on little hills in the Midwest and I loved skiing,” he says. But it wasn’t until college that he visited the slopes of Copper Mountain to ski with his uncle. “That was the catalyst moment when I thought, this is epic. I wanted to move to the Rockies. For me, it was the first time being west of Mississippi and it was transformative.” As soon as Nick returned home he bought a new ski setup and made various skiing outings a couple of times a year following the snow to resorts in Utah, Montana and Whistler. “It was that cool adventure of skiing and traveling to national parks that was the impetus to hit the road and sell the house.” Leaving Columbus with his camper, he traveled around to western locations with a focus on visiting national parks, and he hit about 30 of them, sometimes having to stay longer in places where there was internet or cell service for connectivity to upload and download large files for work.

When living on the road during the winter, Nick would try to stay in a ski town and in the 2015/16 winter, he split his time between Breckenridge and Park City living in his trailer at an all-season RV park. “You’d have to wrap the pipes with heat tape and then skirt the bottom of the trailer, but it was cool because you could somewhat affordably stay in a ski town. The heat was mainly propane, and I’d have to fill the tanks every week,” he says and can now laugh about how the windows would freeze up and the pillows would freeze to headboard due to the moisture caused by propane heaters. “It was an adventure!” he remembers.

Nick had heard of Crested Butte and its reputation of, “rad, fun, steep and challenging terrain.” In the fall of 2016, he arranged to come to CB. He had visited that prior spring to explore options for camping, of which there were none, so he rented a cabin in Almont for the winter and parked the trailer, arriving in time for Vinotok. Coming from down-valley Nick recalls, “You don’t see the mountains, but then wrapping around Round Mountain, it was epic – this is insane and so beautiful kind of epic. Even now, it still blows my mind how beautiful and special it is.” Once winter hit, Nick was skiing and playing hockey, which he had played in Ohio when he was in his 20s. He joined the Gunnison rec hockey team’s fall league and then joined the CB town league. 

Nick says that the emphasis of his life had been traveling and living on the road, “But winter was so much fun here,” and he’d already made many friends. “Skiing was really good and the access to public lands for backcountry skiing was amazing, and then this community,” he says were all factoring into his realization that he wanted to stay here. His new friends had convinced him to stay for the fabulous summer, so he took the time and felt it out, eyeing the real estate market. As summer rolled around that first year, he wound up at Mesa Campground in Gunnison, “Because it was super cheap back then.” Later, Nick ended up buying a fixer-upper condo on the mountain in 2019, just before the COVID real estate spike. He later sold that and moved into a deed restricted condo in Pitchfork where he currently resides today.

Nick says that what makes him tick is his love of the outdoors. “I do trail running and fly fishing in the summer when I’m not working. Outdoor adventures here have only gotten more exciting,” which he shares with his fur buddy Australian Shepherd, Murphy. “So long as I have the choice, I want to be here.”