I mean, what part of those product names sound anything less than *HELLA TIGHT*?
I had the privilege of creating the print design, logo design and photography for my very excellent friend Sarah’s new babywear brand, Milk Riot!
Mad kudos to her for keeping the fabric organic, the dyes natural, the production local (Aussie designed and made), and the vibe epic. Tell all those nasties to get on their bike.
Check out some pics from the shoot, starring my extremely handsome godson and his outstanding group of pals.
We are all in search of that illusive golden Maccas fry… Figuratively and literally. So when Klaus asked me to slap some new art on his skateboard I thought “It’s a stretch, but I think we can make it work.”
When a friend of mine requests a cake that looks like a 70’s glittery leopard shagpile rug for her 30th birthday, that is what they will darn-well get. My superpal Hazel did exactly this, and my other superpal Sarah and I rose to the occasion, delving into the unknown world of fondant to craft this dream into a reality.
We also thought it appropriate to add a scantily clad woman into the mix in the spirit of dirty thirty.
Ohh la la!
We blindly raided our local Spotlight store
Working out the perfect colour ratio for the fondant
roll it out nice ‘n flat
cut it and throw it over a cake, use leftovers to make pillow, add nudie torso
two cakes were baked for height and the tops cut off so they were perfectly flat discs. We used the leftover tops to make the legs! Add icing gel bra – how saucy!
We tried this for the leopard pattern. It didn’t work.
So we did this instead! And added edible glitter!
Throw it on her! (delicately)
Add furry purple trim and text! (so many icing nozzles were used to make this cake) and VOILA!
Best darn cake I ever did see.
There’s me dressed as Freddie Mercury trying to light the thing
Did you say “GIMME MORE STOP MOTION ANIMATION, POR FAVOR!”?
Can do.
Tropfest, the largest short film festival in le worlde is holding a 6-second #tropvine competition prior to opening for entries for the real deal… and there’s $5k on the line.
Yes please.
After the wild success* of the Winning Formula title sequence which saw Klaus and I become professional** stop motion animators, I thought I should give the method another crack. We found an appropriate dad joke, I printed and cut out a bunch of animals, took a ton of photos, recorded Klaus and myself doing the dialogue then edited it down and… Voila!
If you’d like to see an HD version of the video, click here.
When Klaus and I were being dragged along like a bag of oranges behind a speedboat (?) by Sydney rental market search we had embarked upon, we decided to get into some zen activities to balance ourselves out.
So we painted.
But first, we built our canvas out of timber, then blackwashed it…. then we painted. Then glued and added some of that gloriously floaty GOLD LEAF (like the classy bastards that we are), then varnished it all.
We reckon it’s a picture of the moon.
We did finally find a place (thanks for asking), and as it’s a rental, we can’t put any holes in the wall. So it sits on the mantlepiece, which turns out to be more trendy than hanging it up anyway. So what I’m trying to tell you, is that we are somewhat on point in this instance.
Check out le processé:
black washed canvas with solid black shadow line
dem geometries doh
filling in the blanks
painting with glue
adding gold leaf
before vaccum
post-gold leaf sealer, pre-varnish (keeping the shadow line matte)
Upon my return to Sydney, I was commissioned to do a mural in the Universal Magazines office in Sydney. Let’s not waste any time getting to the time lapse of the project….
I used tape, acrylic paint and acrylic paint markers (so as not to fumigate the office while they were working).
Now to backtrack… As the client was not keen to have an enormous animal or two sprawled across their walls (as I most certainly would have done otherwise), the concept sketches, (based on the broad ideas of paper, inspiration and spreading ideas) looked something like this (made a gif to keep things jazzy):
While Klaus and I searched for our castle on the northern beaches of Sydney, we knew that there was one piece of furniture that was required above all else … A surfboard rack. (as we were being given a spectacular array of hand-me-downs of pretty much every other thing you need in a house – thanks fam)
So when we finally did lock down our bitchin’ beachside haven, our first stop was the hardware store, then straight back to my mum’s place to rip the bandsaw, drill press and various other power tools.
What a waste of a gloriously big and flat timber surface, I thought. So I chucked a painting on it, inspired by Klaus’ favourite mural in San Francisco which I reckon speaks the language of the ocean. Great to have a bit o’ Bay Area memorabilia supporting the shred sticks.
I used acrylic paints for the colour, then chucked a gloss over it, then drew the outlines with a dark brown acrylic paint pen (that Kramer gave me for my birthday – thanks pal) and left it matte for a bit of texture. Froth city.
Chronicles the epic rise and fall of Angelo Morello, a young Calabrian who finds himself entering a life beyond his wildest dreams from small time gambler in the 1960s to controlling the Australian cannabis trade during the 1970s.
I played Tina Morello, a flight hostess and Angelo’s wife. Great script. The whole project was a lot of fun (apart from the time I fell down the stairs running out of a slippery bathroom scene and ended up in the Royal North Shore Hospital emergency ward. More colourful language has never been uttered. A story for another time.)
So we wrapped principal photography on the film and I got antsy for a poster so I offered up my services of art direction and graphic design. Only problem was, I needed to be in the poster, so I couldn’t shoot it. Oh, and it needed to be shot from directly above. On a bed.
concept sketch
Oh how the stars aligned.
No more than a week after I had drawn the concept sketch (when I should have been doing architectural CAD drawings at work), mum informed me that there was a huge scaffold at her house as the ceiling was being painted. Bingo. I called my mate Tristan F-S who shimmied out on what was similar to a pirate ship plank setup over a bed sheet and some pillows that we hand thrown on the ground, and we shot that weekend.
If you find yourself in San Francisco this Sunday evening at 6pm, and you’re as jazzed on indie filmmaking as I am, come on down to the 9th Street Independent Film Center in SoMa and catch the super-ultra-mega-advanced-screening (aka. sound and colour isn’t done, but we have a picture lock) of Frisky – my feature film directorial debut! A lot of legends helped make this project a reality, so bloody get there! Tickets available here: https://friskyscreening.eventbrite.com
In an interesting turn of events, I will have my first two feature length films completed within two weeks of each other… Although they were shot twenty months apart.
If the first film, “Winning Formula” (writer/producer) were a human, it would be in preschool by now. Probably painting macaroni necklaces, collecting cicada shells to stick in other children’s hair and singing the Good Ship Lollipop while masterfully tapping its foot to the teachers’ amusement. Or not. But probably – because there’s a ton of me emotionally jammed into that film in every aspect and I really did love those damn cicada shells with their clingy little claws and shiny little bulb eyes as a kid. The second film, “Frisky” (writer/director/producer) would know virtually nothing beyond the realm of it’s own mother’s bosom.
One of the many notches in my belt was punched by the series of animators brought onboard to tackle the title sequence and graphics throughout the film. I seemed to have a knack for hiring people with an ability to vanish. Slippery little suckers.
So after my third attempt at desperately shackling one down like a dateless sixteen year old on the eve of the year ten formal (that’s prom, America), I realised that none had really nailed the aesthetic we were looking for anyway.
Fortunately, while I was back in Australia in October, Pru and I had filmed each other acting out the Winning Formula Title Sequence Script against a green screen (AKA a piece of green fabric my mum plans to sew into a dress that we pinned to the curtains in my mum’s bedroom), just in case the animator needed the reference images, which is what I used to create the polaroids. It’s all about looking after your future self, even if you don’t directly mean to.
Pru Vindin and myself green screening.
There we were, Klaus and I, a couple of days before Christmas, at his parents’ house in Ohio, with no animation experience, just giving it a red hot crack. I had photoshopped some polaroids of the two protagonists, Liz and Tilda, marauding across the United States and ordered a few maps off Amazon. So between 9pm and 1am, with a giant block of styrofoam, an old cork board, a tripod (that we returned to Walmart the next day), some map pins and a brief discussion, we did it.
Our night sounded like this: “Hold. Click. Move. Hold. Click. Move.”, and looked a lot like this:
But by sundown the next day, the spoils of our evening efforts and my hasty editing looked like this:
Massive thank you to The Greencarts for their legendary track, “Ride or Die”.
Stay tuned for the Winning Formula trailer – we had our special advanced screening in Los Angeles last night! And keep ’em peeled for more info on Frisky – to be screened in a couple of weeks in San Francisco! YEW!
THEDARCLAUD■ 
