Maik Hempel – Mollusks
Maik Hempel graduated from the Queensland College of Art’s Griffith Film School in 2005 with a Bachelor of Animation (Honours).
Across his final undergraduate year and his honours year, he co-wrote/co-directed two episodes of a short animated series called Rashman with high school friend, Adam Leigh.
After graduating from GFS, the two went on to make a few further, self-funded episodes of Rashman, before Maik worked on a couple of music videos for the Sneaky Sound System track ‘It’s Not My Problem’ and Moby’s ‘Wait For Me’.
In 2009 Maik moved to Melbourne and worked for 14 months as an animator on the second series of an Australian animated children’s series, Dogstar.
Towards the end of Maik’s Dogstar contract in September/October 2010 he heard about the inaugural Movie Extra Webfest competition, a contest run via Facebook that offered a $50,000 production budget to the best concept for a webseries. Entrants had to submit a 1 minute trailer for their potential series and generate as much social media hype as possible around their entry. He entered an animated trailer for ‘Mollusks‘ and was lucky enough to get comedian Bob Franklin on board to help promote the trailer. Franklin also agreed to supply a voice for the series if it was picked up. Although Mollusks was not the eventual winner, Movie Extra decided to commission the 7-part short series anyway.
Not only did Bob Franklin return, Maik also had the fortune of securing the talent of comedians Shaun Micallef, Roz Hammond, Dave Callan and Adrian Calear to record character voices. Joining this cast was Maik’s good friend Benjamin Drake, also a QCA animation graduate. Further QCA animation graduates, Maik’s girlfriend Adele K. Thomas, and one of his best friends, Keke Robertson, also worked on the series as background artist and special effects artist respectively.
The official trailer is now online and the entire series will be available from December 15, 2011.
For more information about Maik, visit his website www.maikhempel.com.
Congratulations Maik. Everyone at QCA and GFS wishes you all the success in this endeavour and for your future projects.
