People who don’t know David Paperny tend to view him as that quirky Vancouver producer behind the S&M TV series Kink; a colorful and lively character who wears a black cowboy hat and shows up at parties in leather pants.

But don’t let the zany facade fool you.

Paperny and his company partners – wife of 26 years Audrey Mehler and second cousin Cal Shumiatcher – are savvy producers who have created one of Canada’s most prolific nonfiction production companies. Since opening its doors 15 years ago, the Vancouver prodco has produced over 300 hours of programming and won more than 30 awards.

In 2008, Paperny Films had its best year yet, producing 42 hours of programming worth $14 million in budgets. The company’s expanding slate and quality productions earned Paperny a CFTPA Entrepreneur of the Year Award earlier this year.

Paperny Films has found a very successful niche in the docusoap arena, making provocative and innovative reality series such as The Week the Women Went (CBC), where women in a small town are sent away for a vacation and the hapless men are left in charge; the OLN series Road Hockey Rumble, in which small-town rivalries are settled via road-hockey throw-downs; Chop Shop (Slice), chronicling the antics of a counterculture hair salon in Vancouver; and 100 Mile Challenge (Food Network), following citizens of a small town in B.C. who survive only on food grown within a 100-mile radius of their home for 100 days.

‘We challenge each other to come up with the craziest ideas,’ says Paperny of the three-way partnership. ‘Our reality shows and docusoaps have strong documentary elements that make them edgier and more real. It all comes down to the characters and conflict and finding the drama – figuring out the high stakes in people’s lives. These shows may look simple but it’s fairly complicated.’

Incidentally, on the occasion of this Saturday morning interview at the Paperny Films office – situated in the South Main Street hipster area of Vancouver – the company president is not wearing leather, nor his cowboy hat, but rather shorts and a T-shirt.

‘The leather pants only come out on festive occasions,’ says Paperny with a mischievous smile. ‘The black leather shorts come out even less frequently.’

Mehler and Shumiatcher say they leave the more flamboyant clothing choices to Paperny.

‘David and I did get matching latex shirts for the launch of Kink in Montreal,’ admits Shumiatcher, although he didn’t enjoy the experience. ‘You get really cold wearing latex.’

Beyond the quirky docusoaps, Paperny Films has also taken on challenging projects such as the Gemini Award-winning Confessions of an Innocent Man (CTV), the harrowing story of a man who survived a three-year imprisonment in Saudi Arabia, and Devil Plays Hardball (CBC Newsworld), where mentors were paired up with homeless people seeking to turn their life around. Their filmmaking team also had unprecedented access to the Canadian Armed Forces for Combat School (Discovery), following soldiers training for combat in Afghanistan.

‘Controversy isn’t something we shy away from,’ says Mehler, who is a director and producer at the company and oversees corporate strategy. ‘It’s something we embrace. We don’t necessarily tell the easy stories but the most difficult ones.’

Paperny, who is originally from Calgary, met Mehler, an L.A. native, at graduate school in Philadelphia. Both had a bug for filmmaking, and settled in Toronto, where he worked as a news and current affairs producer at CBC and she had a job at TVO. Paperny was transferred to Vancouver and, in 1994, he and Mehler decided to become independent producers, opening Paperny Films together. That same year, one of Paperny’s CBC docs, The Broadcast Tapes of Dr. Peter, which also aired on HBO, was nominated for an Academy Award. The couple have three adult children.

Shumiatcher – Paperny’s second cousin and a longtime Vancouver producer of U.S. dramatic series – worked as a consultant for the company for many years until becoming a partner four years ago.

Working with family could be challenging, but the partners say they make a great team.

‘We have the same approach to life that incorporates a desire to try new things – to not be afraid and dive right in- and this helps us in our project and business development,’ explains Mehler. ‘If we didn’t have this shared attitude, it wouldn’t work.’

The three share responsibilities for overseeing new projects and managing corporate development and the overall finances of the company.

‘No one is forced to carry all the pressures,’ says Mehler. ‘But as far as dividing up responsibilities, Cal is in charge of overseeing productions;

David has the relationships with broadcasters, bringing in the business and spearheading new projects. And I keep the boys in line.’

They are also sounding boards for each other.

‘If I’m blowing my stack, if I am mad at a broadcaster and think they’ve done me wrong and want to call them up and speak my mind, Cal says, ‘David, do you really want to do that?” explains Paperny. ‘There’s a lot less ‘drunken dialing’ experiences that way.’

Paperny Films has a full-time staff of 20 and over the past year has employed 700 on contract to work on productions shooting across Canada.

Until now, the company’s growth has been organic, but over the past year the partners have become more strategic. They set up an advisory board of top business people – including the dean of Simon Fraser University’s Faculty of Business – to help the company develop long-term strategic plans.

‘Developing a long-term business plan has allowed us to think about where we want to be and how we are going to get there because, to be honest, up till now our growth has been spontaneous,’ says Mehler.

Despite the rapid growth, the partners say the key to their success is staying focused on the projects themselves – not allowing the day-to-day distractions of running a business get in the way of the creative.

‘We still see all the rough cuts and read the scripts and give notes, but we are also able to hand off projects to top creative talent and manage them,’ says Shumiatcher.

The partners are proud of their strong relationships with the creative community, hiring not only top talent from across the country, but also taking chances on emerging filmmakers.

‘We have a lot of young people, fresh out of film school, driving the creative on our shows,’ says Paperny. ‘We have become nurturers of a lot of new talent, which is very satisfying.’

It also means that filmmakers from across the country bring their ideas to the company.

The economic downturn and financial difficulties facing Canadian broadcasters have slowed down the company’s slate this summer, but the partners remain focused on the silver lining.

‘In a lot of ways we are glad that the growth is slowing at this point as it has been frantic for the past few years,’ says Shumiatcher. ‘When you have seven productions going at once, you don’t look ahead as much as you should. We are having the opportunity to do that now.’

Paperny Films is using this quieter period to focus on development and forging new relationships. They have travelled to Europe to build their international profile, while also focusing a lot of their energies on the U.S.

‘We’re more aggressively seeking U.S. partners and American agency representation for the first time,’ says Paperny. ‘We are looking at series like Flashpoint that used Canadian and American money to make a show that is a hit on both sides of the border. We feel we can do this in non-scripted programming just as well. ‘

In fact, the company has been approached by Cartoon Network – which is moving into live action – about an opportunity to make a docusoap for the channel. They are also developing the series Cold Case: Truth and Justice for PBS, investigating Ku Klux Klan crimes that took place 40 years ago during the civil rights era. American philanthropic organizations are investing in the project.

Paperny Films is also shooting a new reality series pilot this summer for Rogers Media’s Biography Channel called Dussault Inc, following the comeback of a former high-school-drop-out-turned-hot-shot L.A. fashion designer who lost his fortune a year ago.

Also shooting this summer is in development with W on a reality series about a multi-generational Italian family who runs the Hockley Ski Resort in Ontario. They also have a series in front of Discovery following Bombardier’s development of a new generation of eco-friendly airplanes.

The company is also expanding into scripted drama, developing a half-hour comedy series for Showcase with Cameron Labine (Control Alt Delete).

Paperny Films has invested heavily in its in-house post-production facility so they have more control over finishing costs and creative elements. But they have stayed out of the distribution game.

‘You can’t be an expert in everything and you have to recognize what you are good at and what you are not,’ says Mehler. ‘Ultimately it comes down to whether we would make more money or be more successful selling shows ourself? At this point we don’t think that would be the case.’