Kia; Epic Ride is a commercial I recently worked on which will be screening during today’s Superbowl. Have a look! I also worked on a 15 second spot that accompanies the main commercial.

There’s even a making of video.

The TV spot “Emerald Cities” for health insurance company Kaiser Permanente I worked on a few months ago has started airing in the U.S. and has been getting some attention. It was a nice project to work on, with the matte paintings being done here in Australia and the rest of the project being done by the Animal LA office. It also made me want to drive up with west coast of the states and visit the California redwood forests…

Hungry Beast is an upcoming show on the ABC (that’s Australia’s ABC, folks) that I’m looking forward to seeing for a number of reasons. 1) It’s being produced by Andrew Denton, 2) I know a bunch of people involved in the show – namely my friend and flatmate, Aaron Smith (who developed and shot the cool slow-mo-pro-mos) and 3) It’s an interesting premise.

From the PR department:

“The media is a hungry beast it devours everything and is never satisfied. Now, 19 newcomers to television recruited after a nationwide call for young talent – are being given the opportunity by the ABC to feed the beast. Each week, they will produce a half-hour of topical TV, as well as daily web content, bringing viewers news from outside the loop. This means they are being asked to find stories that arent part of the regular news cycle or to cover stories that are, from a fresh angle. They have been given one editorial instruction: tell us something we dont know. Beyond that they are being encouraged to use every skill they have humour, curiosity, passion, bullshit-detection and good old-fashioned snooping around – to bring us the world as they see it, re-mixed.”

My New Favourite Show (MNFS) is the horrific, yet strangely amusing and intriguing, Dexter. Is it wrong to like a serial killer? You’re supposed to like the guy, but have this uneasiness constantly lurking while you watch the show over the fact that this is a “bad guy” pitched as a “good guy”. Or perhaps a “good guy” doing both good and bad things. It’s also an example of why American TV series should be 12 episodes, not 24, because there’s no padding.

This is a DVD buy, unless you have Pay TV – this is not a show that will ever get shown on Australian free-to-air TV unless it gets… well, cut to pieces. It has a killer title sequence as well. Ha! See what I did there?

So, what have I been up to? We completed the idents for ABC2 last week. I’m pretty happy with the result, but unfortunately multiple people have noted that it looks like a ‘powerball’ commercial. Aw, crap. This was unintentional on my part – it’s supposed to look like Monkey Magic, but I guess by having the 2 emerge from the ‘stone egg’ it does give it a powerball-esque aesthetic.

Thursday was spent at the ABC having a sound mixing session for the idents which was pretty impressive watching the sound designer at work. (Plus this week’s celebrity sightings: Margaret and David from At the Movies and the one and only Rampaging Roy Slaven). Big shout-out to Peter Neville for doing the 70s-oriental-funk-synth soundtrack, too. So when I get the final sound mix back I’ll post the video.
On Friday the class all had a ‘farewell’ lunch down in Chinatown for the students that have finished the certificate course. Eleven hours later we finished… It was a long lunch, but on such a crappy day it couldn’t have been any better.

Some more shout-outs before I leave: Amy has just updated her hate-blog which is slowly gaining a small cult-following of AFTRS people. Adele finally updated her blog a while back with her tales of far-off countries and ‘Witness’ has continued to upload awesome images of Adelaide street art on his flickr account, reminding me that I haven’t uploaded any new photos for months…