Tom Mackellar.
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The work, finished and in full.

Four finished films, shown start to finish, with how each one was made. None were commissioned. Two are product ads for invented brands, one is a technical showcase for an invented product, and the fourth is an unofficial spec test using a real brand, not made for PepsiCo and not connected to them. Every piece carries its own spec line, so what it is and how it was produced sits on the piece rather than buried. What a piece like this costs.

Kindred: Renew Facial Serum

Self-directed · invented brand, no client · generated · 15 seconds · 1920×1080 · 24fps · with sound

A product ad for the invented skincare brand Kindred, shot as a warm stone still life: the amber dropper bottle on sunlit travertine, olive branches, and leaf shadows moving across a bare plaster wall. There is no face and no hands in it, so the product and the light carry the whole piece, and it closes on the wordmark.

How it was made

It is built as a run of held still-life setups rather than one continuous move: the bottle upright on a travertine plinth, a macro on the dropper and its gold collar, then an overhead of the bottle laid on stone beside an olive branch and a smooth pebble, cut together and closing on the wordmark. The whole piece stays inside one narrow palette, warm sand and cream against the olive green, so nothing in frame competes with the amber of the glass. It carries its own sound.

Generated frame: the amber Kindred bottle standing on a round travertine plinth, leaf shadows falling across the pale wall behind it.
The bottle on the travertine plinth.
Generated frame: an overhead view of the bottle lying on sand-coloured stone beside an olive branch and a smooth pale pebble.
The overhead setup.

Rodgers: Coffee

Self-directed · invented brand, no client · generated · 10 seconds · 1920×1080 · 24fps · with sound

A coffee ad for the invented roaster Rodgers, built as the obvious sequence done properly: beans, the grind, the portafilter locked in, extraction, and a long hold on the finished shot. Warm natural light on brushed steel and walnut, with the light doing the selling rather than any on-screen claim, and it closes on the wordmark.

How it was made

The order is the point, and so is the hardware. This is the sequence every coffee ad runs, so the only thing left to compete on is whether each beat is a real thing happening. An earlier cut of this film was not: it had a stack of three chrome collars where a machine has one group head and one bayonet joint, a hook where the twin spouts should be, and no grinder in it anywhere. None of that is a rendering problem, it is a drawing-it-wrong problem, and anyone who has made a coffee reads it in a frame. So it was rebuilt against real photographs of every part, one rim and three flat lugs and two tapered spouts, with the grind shot re-blocked to what the machine actually does, grounds falling from the chute into the basket in the cradle. Two shots came out with it, both of them milk, because with no one in frame the jug would have had to pour itself. What that bought went into the hold on the finished shot, which runs longer than anything else in the film, and the wordmark rises out of the crema rather than cutting to a card.

Exo Hand: Hypermotion

Self-directed · invented product, no client · generated · 10 seconds · 1920×1080 · 24fps

A technical product-showcase piece for a cable-driven hand exoskeleton, built to demonstrate its precision, articulation, and dexterity. Nine shots in ten seconds, cut hard and fast, on a clean, cool-lit studio void, with the mechanism as the hero throughout.

How it was made

A nine-shot, ten-second hypermotion reel, every shot image-conditioned on the same reference hardware to hold it identical throughout. It opens on an extreme macro of the wrist actuator and a taut cable, then runs a set of grip demonstrations (a power grip on a bottle, an envelope grip on a ball, a precision pinch on a thin peg) intercut with a bullet-time freeze on a single knuckle joint and a speed-ramped rotation reveal of the full assembly. Kinetic, HUD-style readouts (“15 articulated joints,” “full range · 1:1 tendon drive”) snap on and off with the cuts, and the reel closes on a locked pack shot under the end card “Engineered dexterity”, cut to exact timing with two whip transitions.

Pepsi Max, unofficial spec ad

Spec test · not commissioned, no connection to PepsiCo · generated · 7.46 seconds · 1920×1080 · 24fps · with sound
Read this before you watch it

This is a spec piece. It was not commissioned, briefed, paid for, approved or seen by PepsiCo, it has never run as advertising anywhere, and it is on this page for one reason only: to show what the technique does when it is pointed at a brand you already know, instead of one I invented. Treat it as a test, not as a client.

PEPSI, PEPSI MAX and the Pepsi Globe are registered trade marks of PepsiCo, Inc. I don’t own them and I’m not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to PepsiCo in any way. They appear here purely to demonstrate craft, no sponsorship or approval is implied, and if PepsiCo would rather this weren’t up, it comes down on a single email to [email protected].

Everything on screen is generated. The bottle is not a photograph of a real bottle, the pack is not real Pepsi packaging, and the label copy is invented nonsense that falls apart if you read it closely, which is exactly what you would expect because a model made it up.

Seven and a half seconds of cola built as one hard whip through the pack: a close spin across the label on red and blue light trails, condensation standing on a cold cap, a burst of chilled mist off the bottle, an ice-and-cola splash exploding around it, a pair of bottles set side by side on a reflective floor, and a close on the Pepsi globe.

How it was made

A pack everybody knows removes the excuse. With an invented brand nobody can tell you the bottle is wrong, and here they can. It runs as one hard whip through the pack rather than a set of held setups: an opening spin across the label on coloured light trails, condensation on the cold cap, a burst of chilled mist, straight into the splash, a pair of bottles on a reflective floor, and a close on the globe. No beat runs long enough to become a showreel, each one earns its half-second and moves on. Generated in Higgsfield, cut and graded in DaVinci Resolve, same as the rest of the set, and it carries its own sound.

Four films, none of them commissioned, and the Pepsi one is a spec test with no connection to PepsiCo. That is the whole body of motion work I am showing and I am not going to pad it out. The Motion page goes through what that means for a piece of your own.

Also

Two other things I do.

Same person, same honesty about what is a client and what isn’t.

The redesigned S.H.I.P.S. Physio homepage: a photograph of a physiotherapist working with a patient behind a deep green overlay, carrying the heading ‘Physiotherapy for: Stroke, Head Injury, Parkinson’s, Spinal cord injuries’.
Websites S.H.I.P.S. Physio · Devon · real client, before and after

A specialist home-physiotherapy practice whose old site was a template with a five-field contact form eating the first screen. The redesign leads with what the practice treats instead. The before and after, and what a site costs.

The Tom Mackellar logo: a TM monogram in dark ink, a vermilion horizontal rule beneath it, and the words GRAPHIC DESIGN set below the rule.
Branding Self-made · full identity system

The mark this whole site runs on, built the same way a client one would be: outlines rather than live text, every lockup and file format, and rules that keep it consistent wherever it turns up. The full identity, and what it costs.

CUT 05 / 05

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