A Super Progressive Movie · How we built it 86 Minutes.
Under a Year.
One Pipeline.
A feature-length adult animated satire — fast, loud, and unmistakably Australian.
Most animated features take five years and a few hundred people. We wrote, designed and delivered ours in under a year — with a team of twenty.
Minutes · Feature Length
First Word to Delivery
In Production
Features' Worth, Before This One
The Reaction
National news coverage of the premiere, wrapped around the film itself
How
We'd Been Making a Feature a Year — and Never Knew It.
The film isn't a departure from how Stepmates works — it's the proof of it at feature scale.
A Pipeline Already at Full Speed
A Pipeline Already at Full Speed
The film came from the maths. For three years we shipped a 3–5 minute animated short every single week for broadcast — same cut-out style, no week off. That is more than a feature’s worth of animation a year. So when we set out to make an actual feature, the machine was already built and battle-tested — there was no ramp-up.
Parallel, Never Waterfall
Parallel, Never Waterfall
Write, design and board — all at once. Writing and pre-production asset design ran February to June 2025, every track moving in parallel. The same no-bottleneck model that lets us turn client work around in weeks meant nothing sat waiting on the step before it.
Six Months, Heads Down
Six Months, Heads Down
Then six months of animation production, every stage moving in parallel on the same fast pipeline that drives the weekly work. Written, animated and delivered in under a year — January 2026.
The Studio
The Studio That Made a Movie Between Deadlines.
Stepmates has been making fast-turnaround 2D animation for Network Seven, Sportsbet, Millennium Pictures and others since 2012. We didn't bet the studio on the feature — we ran it on a machine already at full speed. The pipeline is the product.
For Press
The Facts.
- Title
- A Super Progressive Movie
- Format
- Feature-length 2D cut-out animated satire
- Runtime
- 86 minutes
- Written & pre-production
- February–June 2025
- Animation production
- Six months
- Delivered
- January 2026 — under a year, start to finish
- Studio
- Stepmates Studios — Melbourne, founded 2012
- Written & created by
- Mark Nicholson & Sebastian Peart
- Starring
- Pauline Hanson, Mark Nicholson, Sebastian Peart
- Original end-credits song
- Holly Valance
- Directed by
- Sebastian Peart
- Watch
- asuperprogressivemovie.com
Press & interviews — email the studio. Interviews available with co-creator Mark Nicholson and the team.
See It
See For Yourself.
The whole film, start to finish — the proof the speed never cost the craft. Streaming now at the film site.
Got a project that needs to move fast? Commission us →
Behind the Build
Production notes, what we cut, and what we're building next.
Straight from the studio floor. No spam, just the work.