Michael Cusack
Director/Animator

Michael Cusack, quite simply, is the most gifted, warm, generous, talented and humble person on the planet.

Starting life, like so many before him as a foetus with no particular skills other than the ability to breathe underwater, he has gone on to become a multi award winning animator. Not bad for someone who spent a full nine months simply wasting time floating around in amniotic fluid.

As a child, he had a rather unnatural attraction to monsters of all types and can still remember blubbering as King Kong plummeted from the top of the Empire State building (the rubber one, not the collection of coloured pixels) or being enthralled as Jason fought a bunch of stop motion skeletal warriors. From the moment he first saw those films, he knew that he was destined to be a teacher.

Teaching turned out to be crap because there were too many children involved, so from there he stumbled into the wonderful world of animation.

Since then, Michael has developed a great reputation as an animator, based mainly on his uncanny ability to create memorable characters and some bribery.

Testament to this is the fact that he has won the AFI award for best short animation twice and the IF award once. For commercials and short films, he has either won or been nominated for Cannes, The London Internationals, The New York Festival, The One Show and has won a couple of Award Pencils.
He has also won the Master’s Chair at the AADC a record (count ‘em!) 5 times and, together with his partner Richard (business partner that is…not that there’s anything wrong with the other…Oh! Forget it) has been awarded the AADC President’s Award.

Many think it is the fact that Michael started as an actor and writer that has given him such a superb understanding of timing and movement. This in turn has given him the ability to put such warmth, personality and life into his characters, but frankly it’s more likely that he just flooks it.

He is currently working on a feature film concept, but hey, who isn’t? He is also working on three short film scripts. One of them might win an Oscar…but probably not.

Email: michael@anifex.com.au





Richard Chataway ACS
Producer/Director of Photography

Imagine if you will a man wearing two hats. One has “Producer” written on it, the other has “Cinematographer.” Now imagine someone wearing both those hats. It doesn’t matter if it’s two small hats, one on either side of his head, or two normal sized hats, one on top of the other (although that might make one of them hard to read) because this is a hypothetical hat wearing exercise. The person with two hats is Richard.

Better still, imagine a pair of conjoined twins, fused at the head, but sharing the same brain. One mind doing two jobs…this too could be Richard, but without the hideous deformity. (Although interestingly, he does have three buttocks.)

Richard has a grand plan and that is to win as many Gold cinematography trophies as possible. He then intends to melt them all down and retire on the proceeds. He is well on his way to his goal, with more trophies than you could wave a hypothetical stick at. No one has yet had the heart to tell him that most of the awards are Perspex and any attempts at melting them will only result in a black toxic cloud of death…still, it’s nice to have a goal and if it means that he keeps winning awards we’re all for it.

He has produced for some of the largest Advertising Agencies in Australia and Asia, but his first love is cinematography. (Actually, his first love was a long necked turtle called Norman, that he had as a kid but that’s another and largely superfluous story.) As well as the above mentioned trophies, he has been accredited by the Australian Cinematographer’s Society which allows him to put ACS after his name, so it would appear that he knows what he is doing when taking light readings and is not just doing it to impress the chicks.

Email: richard@anifex.com.au





Greg Holfeld
Director/Animator/Illustrator

Despite persistent rumours that his best work is actually done by a room full of barely trained monkeys, Greg continues his endeavours in the fields of animation, illustration, and comics.

Some scurrilous scuttlebutt insist there is the stench of primate to his highly regarded animated short films such as "Heartbreak Motel", "Barflies", and "Get in the Car" (and there is an entirely different sort of stench to the Annecy-awarded "Tom's Toilet Triumph"). His direction of award-winning commercials has been described as "tree-swinging", "howling", and "picks all the nits".

His current pursuits include the children's comic book series "Captain Congo", the ongoing penguin-noir graphic novel "In for the Krill", several animation and publishing projects, and a campaign to make bananas tax-deductible.

Contact Greg at: Panic Productions





Darren Burgess
Director/Animator

“Clever, talented, artistic and gifted.” These are all words that Darren Burgess has used in his lifetime. Fortunately, they are also the same words that other people have used about Darren.

Darren or Dazzle as he is sometimes referred to, lives to animate. He also animates to live, for without the occasional pay cheque, he could not buy food which would result in him starving to death, unless he took up stealing or sold his body for sexual favours again…but that’s another story. Fortunately, he is really good at animation, so people are quite prepared to part with their money for his services … animation services…not the sexual favours stuff.

Darren, like most of us, enjoys his Creature Comforts and has worked for Aardman animations in the UK and so has been up close and personal with both Wallace and his offsider, Gromit, (even though Gromit’s not very talkative.)
He counts Bob the Builder as one of his best friends and still catches up for drinks with his old mate Harvie Krumpet, even though the conversation inevitably turns weird when Harvie drags out his little book of “fakts.”

Darren got the opportunity to “hang out” with his mates for an extended period while working on the feature films, “Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” and Adam Elliot’s “Mary & Max” and the short film “Harvie Krumpet” which won an Oscar for Adam, which is a good way of including the phrase “Academy Award” in this biog.

Darren shares much in common with some of the great animators of the age. Exceptional animators like Nick Park (Wallace and Gromit, Creature Comforts) Ray Harryhausen (Jason and the Argonauts) and Phil Tippet (Jurassic Park.) They are all fabulous animators and all four of them still have the majority of their own teeth and they all sometimes wear socks with open toed sandals.

There is so much more that could be written about Darren and I surely will once the court bans have been lifted.

Email via: darren@anifex.com.au

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