Stepmates Studios · Melbourne
DEADLINES
FEAR US.
Broadcast-quality 2D animation at the pace of the news cycle. Based in Melbourne.
The Work
What We've Shipped.
How We Do It
The Pipeline.
Three moves. No waterfall. From scribble to final master, you deal with Mark and Seb — one point of contact, one approval chain.
Surgical Writers’ Room
Surgical Writers’ Room
Ideas lock, boards roll. A decade-deep shorthand produces pages in hours, not days. Every beat is pre-timed to frame and budget, and the writers stay on the floor through final pixel — carrying the vision from first idea to last composite.
Parallel Pre-Production Pipeline
Parallel Pre-Production Pipeline
Script, design, and animatics run in parallel — no waterfall bottlenecks. Pre-vis drops the same day the script locks; exec notes bounce back by lunch; refined animatic is in comp overnight. Every frame is stress-tested before a single animation pass.
Black-Ops Production
Black-Ops Production
Skip the red tape. Directors ride every frame from rough pass to final polish, pushing real-time comp tweaks while competitors are still buffering. A lean command unit drives a plug-and-play artist network: scale to thirty hands on Monday, back to five by Friday — budget stays lean, quality stays lethal.
Episodes Delivered
Production Sprints
Missed TX Dates
The Studio
We Began In A Shed.
We pooled our savings to buy our first camera, only for fate to send it flying off the back of a speeding car. Broke but undeterred, we went all-in on animation. Self-taught, self-funded, and utterly relentless.
We woke before dawn every day, animating furiously before clocking in to soul-sucking day jobs. Slowly, they began to notice. Then came a call from Channel Seven — a shot at primetime. Despite impossible deadlines, shoestring budgets, and network bureaucracy, we delivered Regular Old Bogan — and got a crash-course in delivering broadcast animation under fire.
Next came our most dangerous gamble: Pauline Hanson. Friends warned us away; industry gatekeepers shook their heads. We ignored them all. Six episodes became a hundred. Our show Please Explain ignited outrage, headlines, and acclaim. We lost friends, gained enemies — and the studio thrived.
Now: feature films. Our debut, A Super Progressive Movie, is streaming now.
Fast, ruthless, and wildly efficient — our method isn't conventional, but neither are the results.
Signed
Mark Nicholson
Co-Founder · Director
Sebastian Peart
Co-Founder · Director
Melbourne · June 2026
Commission Enquiry
Currently in Production Through 2027.
Enquiries for 2028 welcome. We work with broadcasters, agencies, and production houses on projects that matter.