Its been MANY months in the making, but The Penguin Empire is happy to announce their latest TVC is now ready to be unleashed on the world.

The Marketforce campaign, directed by Grant Sputore is entitled “Horsepower” with good reason. The shoot itself involved 40 horses that were trained explicitly for the production and that number was then increased in post by the talented lads at Last Pixel.

Check it out, but be sure to turn the volume up!

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!

If I’d only had the dreams of a 15 year old girl, I could finally die happy – I’ve been on the cover of a magazine.

The industry rag Campaign Brief was kind enough to feature The Penguin Empire on the cover of its latest issue.  If you take a look inside you’ll see there’s even a feature about us, full of kind words from fabulous people like Adam Barker and the article’s talented author Martin Trevaskis.

With all this love flying around, its now my turn to say kind things about Thom Perry – the photographer who took the cover image.  Thom is an amazing guy/photographer/owner-of-t-shirts.  You don’t have to believe us though, check out his amazing work for yourself.  His portfolio doesn’t really confirm the t-shirt thing, so you’ll probably have to trust us about that – unless you hire him to see for yourself.

We’ll try post the article online in the near future but in the meantime subscribe and get a copy!

Another side of this Penguin Empire of ours is long-form drama – aka. feature film making.  We Penguins love our storytelling – regardless of whether its 30 seconds or 90 minutes.

In February we blogged about Grant’s trip to the US to develop a feature project with an American writer.  We are happy to announce that project – entitled The Rot – has just received major development funding from Screenwest.

The screenplay was written by Michael Lloyd-Green from a story by Grant Sputore and Michael Lloyd-Green.

A minute detail we’ve yet to make public on this blog – or anywhere for that matter – is the exciting level of talent the project has attracted behind the scenes.  The project is blessed to have Academy Award winner Ed Saxon and local super-producer Sue Taylor as executive producers.

Ed Saxon was the producer on such classics as The Silence Of The Lambs, Philadelphia and Adaptation, while Sue Taylor is responsible for many landmark Australian productions, including The Shark Net, 3 Acts of Murder and last year’s closing film at the Cannes film festival – The Tree.

Watch this space for more info as the project develops.

For those of you who don’t know (or who can’t bothered heading over to wikipedia), Pecha Kucha is a world-wide phenomenon, now running in more than 260 cities in almost every corner of the globe.

The Penguin Empire was lucky enough to be invited to present at Perth’s most recent edition of the event, hosted at the amazing new inner-city venue – VENN Gallery.

The evening consist of around a dozen presentations by artists from a wide array of disciplines.  Each presenter is allowed 20 slides, each to be shown for exactly 20 seconds.  The Penguin Empire presented along side such talent folk as the guys from Kerry Hill Architects (responsible for the new Perth Theatre Center), Space Market (responsible for teaming disused space with useful people) and amazing artists like Simon Boxer and Jeffrey Phillips.

The event sold out in record time and left many sad faced people standing out in the street.  To avoid that kind of disappointment at the next event, keep an eye on the Pecha Kucha website.

“Questions”, the Alcoholics Anonymous campaign that was directed by Grant Sputore and was a finalist at AWARD had the honour of winning “Television Campaign of the Year” at Western Australia’s Campaign Brief Awards on Friday night.

The awards were decided by an impressive list of international ad folk, so winning is a big compliment, especially against such tough local competition.  ”Shame”, one of the three spots that comprise the “Questions” campaign, was also listed as a finalist for the Television Single Award, ultimately losing to the smart “Ribbid” spot from The Brand Agency.

It seems like an appropriate time to send out a big thank you to everyone who worked on the campaign – in particular Adam and Lori from Gatecrasher and Ryan Hodgson from Factor 30.  Other thanks-deserving people include:  Allan Myles, James Hawkes, Louise Brady and the guys at MDS.

Following on from being listed as some of the best work of last year in Campaign Brief, the Alcoholics Anonymous spots directed by Grant Sputore continue to gain attention and praise. The spots have been selected as finalists in the Asia/Pacific region of the prestigious AWARD awards.  The big night is Feb 25, so cross your fingers for a Penguin victory.

The spots were produced by The Penguin Empire and Factor 30 for Gatecrasher Advertising and aired nationally late last year.

So 2011 adventures continue.  While Paul holds down the fort at home I’m in LA to work on a drama project thats happening in part over here and I’m similaneously take the chance to over indulge in American fast food. For those of you who have never tried it, Chipotle is a must.

I don’t want to blow too hard on the hype horn, but there’s a couple of other exciting LA possibilities that might come out of this trip… I shan’t say more for the fear of jinxing them.  Perhaps the return blog post can reveal more.  Fingers crossed.

A New website! A new look! A new year! Very exciting times at The Penguin Empire.

If you look hard enough you’ll also find our new showreel on the site.  Everything is so shiny.  Try not to mess up the joint while you poke around.

You’ll find our latest showreel/montage in the showreel section of the site, but full examples of our work can now be found associated with the relevant director.  At this stage that’s just me… although that might be changing soon enough. Stay tuned.

Big shout out to the guys at Nude Design Studio for coming up with the design and the hard working guys at Lab 55 for building the thing.