The Penguin Empire is pleased to announce its newest director – Stephen McCallum – has had his latest short film selected for the Cinema Antipodes as a part of the Cannes Film Festival.



McCallum’s short entitled “Inferno”, is an Australian colonial thriller. It follows three Irish convicts, trapped in a hellish island prison that have to commit murder in order to be free.


The film’s selection at Cannes is the latest in a string of accomplishments for McCallum who’s viral video “Its Time” was recently picked as Viral video of the year by Ad News.

The Penguin Empire are very excited to present their latest collaboration with creative powerhouse and group of all-round-nice-guys, Gatecrasher Advertising.

The campaign above, directed by The Penguin Empire’s Grant Sputore, marks a new approach to getting smokers to quit. For the first time, anti-smoking advertising is looking at how smokers are seen by those closest to them, and how smoking ostracises smokers from the ones they care about.

We owe a big thank you to the kind people at Gatecrasher and the Cancer Council for giving us the opportunity.

Usually we’d finish a post like this with some kind of joke, but there’s nothing funny about smoking, really. Recognising that, we’ll finish with a funny sounding word instead. Callipygian. Hehe. Look it up.

The Penguin Empire is excited to announce that award-winning director Steve McCallum has joined our roster of local directors.

Born and raised in Perth, cutting his teeth on celebrated music videos for bands like Snowman and End Of Fashion, Steve has been away for a couple of years completing the directing course at AFTRS. While at AFTRS, Steve won “The Exceptional Talent Award” & “The AFTRS EU Scholarship”. He also made several acclaimed short films and directed his first TVC.

You may have seen that spot – 5.3 million people around the world certainly did. Steve’s commercial in support of gay marriage, entitled “It’s Time”, was a viral sensation, receiving blog and news coverage around the world.  Since then the spot was selected by Ad News as THE viral campaign of 2011.  Fairly impressive for his first ever TVC gig.



Steve is now back in Perth and jumped straight into TVC work. You can see “Its Time” and his recently completed ORS spot for Marketforce below.



Steve’s reel is already showing a gift for natural performance, cinematic visuals and an unparalleled instinct on how to use music.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be taking Steve around to agencies to show him off.  If you’re interested in seeing more of Steve’s work or organising a meeting at your agency, drop us a line!

So we’re slow on the uptake around these parts, but if you hadn’t heard The Penguin Empire’s commerical “Horsepower” has been nominated in three categories at the prestigious AWARD awards in Sydney.  AWARD is the premiere Austral-asian advertising award show and they’ve very kindly recognised Horsepower in the best PSA category  as well as craft nods for Direction and Sound.  Most chuffed! Thanks again to everyone involved and to Marketforce for a great script.

2012 is officially here and its already kicking butt like Chuck Norris.

The big news is The Penguin Empire’s feature project “The Rot” recently received a new round of development money from Screenwest.   The money goes toward the creation of the project’s third draft and other development materials – like the concept art you see above.

This image was created by the insanely talented Perth lad Simon Boxer.  You can check out more of his insanely awesome stuff on his insanely awesome site.

Speaking of the insanely awesome, The Rot is blessed with an insanely awesome creative team.  The Rot is written by Michael Lloyd Green, based on a story by Green and Penguin Empire director Grant Sputore.  The project’s Executive Producers are Australian-film-industry legend Sue Taylor (The Tree, The Shark Net, Last Train to Freo) and Academy Award winner and all-round nice-guy Ed Saxon (Silence Of The Lambs, Adaptation, Philadelphia).

Sue and Grant are scheduled to travel to America in late February to meet up with Ed and Mike who are based in LA.  If you want them to bring you back any American candy, send an email.

Here’s hoping 2012 is every bit as exciting as 2011!

If you’re reading this in the blog view, you will find above a rather adorable picture of a dog wearing glasses.

If you’re not reading this in the blog view, you should really head on over – he truly is a dashing looking pooch.

The photo doesn’t really have anything to do with anything, but seeing as Grant Sputore is currently away in New York and was unable to be photographed at the PADC awards accepting his director of the year prize in person, a spectacle wearing dog photo seems as good a replacement as any.

Along with collecting the Director Of The Year Prize, The Penguin Empire was acknowledged for its involvement in handful of other spots that were listed as finalists or took home some metal on the evening.

Grant also took home a “Best Of Category” for his editing work on one the AA commercials.

We wanted to take this chance to send out a big thank you to everyone who helped out on any Penguin projects over the last twelve months and to the agency’s who gave us so many great opportunities to make great ads.

Thanks again.

The Penguins… and a spectacle wearing dog.

So we’d seen the commercials and we had our suspicions, but working with him for ad agency 303 confirmed our theory – Dale Alcock is a really nice guy.

He’s the kinda guy that, if he really likes the ad you’ve made him, he’ll go out of his way to courier you a carton of beer with a hand written card.

The card was touching, the beer was tasty and the courier must have been expensive – so thanks Dale!

He also builds the best homes in WA and, now, thanks to some ingenious creative and strategy from 303, he may have the best homebuilding ad to go with it.

Thank you to everyone involved, in particular: the crew at DA Homes, the kids at 303, Last Pixel (for the ad’s seamless effects work), The Office Of John Cheese, Soundbyte and Nylon for the awesome music track.

Apologies in advance if the song gets stuck in your head.

Two magazine covers back to back.  Anyone would think we’re one of the stars of Twilight.

Sadly we can’t claim having a rock-hard six pack or a newsworthy on set romance but we can say we’ve been on the cover of Campaign Brief for two issues in a row.

Earlier this year Campaign Brief put The Penguin Empire on their cover following our Alcoholics Anonymous commercials winning Best Television Campaign at the Campaign Brief Awards.  The headline was “What Next For The Penguin Empire?”  Fortunately for us, what came next was a brilliant script by Guy Howlett and Nathan Teoh for rail safety in South Australia.  The finished commercial – Horsepower – has been incredibly well received nationally and is now getting some additional PR on the cover of Campaign Brief’s latest issue.

Thanks again to all involved and in particular Guy, Nathan and Marketforce for the opportunity.

Also we need to say a big thank you to the guys at Campaign Brief!

Watch this space for Horsepower news as it comes to hand… and any scandalous on set gossip (we’re still working on the six-pack).

So things have been a little crazy in the land of Penguins.  We haven’t posted in a while, but it is with good reason. We’ve been busy!

There’s some exciting new commercials coming down the pipeline that we can’t wait to talk about and show off.  Because we fear lawyers and agency producers we can’t do that just yet, but stay tuned.

In other Penguin news our new edit suite is up and running. In fact we’ve already cut seven commercials on it! If you’re interested in taking a look don’t be shy! Drop us a line and drop on by! There’s a beer’s in the bar fridge with your name on it… assuming your name is Stella Artois.

If compliments were currency, Campaign Brief’s national blog listing SHAME as one of their picks to be recognised at The Cannes Lions this year would have made us millionaires.

In the lead up to this year’s awards, Campaign Brief are showcasing the work they hope will impress the judges and we’re very pleased to announce Shame made the cut, alongside some of the year’s best Australian advertising.

Shame, part of the Questions campaign for Alcoholics Anonymous was created by Gatecrasher and directed by The Penguin Empire’s Grant Sputore.

The Questions campaign has already been a finalist at AWARD, won Best Television campaign at the Campaign Brief awards earlier this year and Shame specifically was nominated for Best Television Commercial – single.

Winning would of course be nice, but we aren’t holding our breath, simply being acknowledged by Campaign Brief leaves us feeling warm, fuzzy and like metaphoric millionaires.  The metaphoric drinks are on us!