Stepmates Studios · Melbourne
DEADLINES
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- Next drop soon
- 100+ episodes
- New episode every second Friday
- Season 4 in production
Selected 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.
Then came Please Explain. What began as six episodes for Pauline Hanson's One Nation became more than a hundred — a fortnightly satirical series delivered on a six-day production sprint, broadcast on Sky News Australia and now a feature film. It proved the studio could hold a national release schedule indefinitely, and it built the pipeline everything since runs on.
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.