Andrew Holmes returns to inspire students

Wintec Bachelor of Media Arts graduate Andrew Holmes has returned to his roots in Hamilton as a creative professional to inspire current Wintec students.

As a guest speaker at Spark Festival, Holmes spoke at a presentation on August 12 to more than 100 people in the Wintec Hub.

“For me coming back has really been about inspiring the students and getting them excited about creating their foundations for their future careers,” Holmes said.

He studied at Wintec from 1997 until 2000, majoring in moving graphics. He now works at Heckler HQ as the Senior Editor, Motion Graphics Designer and Art Director in Sydney Australia.

“I’ve always been a visual person. To entice me to complete my final year of high school, the principal allowed me do five subjects of art,” Holmes said.

He felt it was a natural progression to study a media arts degree at Wintec.

“From there it’s been onwards and upwards. You never want to stop learning and growing as an artist or designer. It’s important to keep things fresh, new and exciting, I guess that’s why I love what I do, I get to create,’’ Holmes said.

A highlight of his career has been a music video for former Silverchair singer, Daniel Johns. He said it wasn’t just working on the music video, but getting to work with one of the biggest artists in Australia.

“As a kid I used to really like Silverchair, so getting the opportunity to work with Daniel Johns was unreal. Being able to work creatively with this guy that I looked up to, was an amazing experience,” Holmes said.

For the music video he drew inspiration from artist Damien Hirst. Johns was placed inside a glass coffin with sand falling on him from above. Holmes said he wanted to add another level of intensity by having scorpions falling with the sand and this also highlighted the singer’s new scorpion tattoo on his chest.

“We decided to transform Daniel in to a modern day scorpion god,” Holmes said.

He filmed the video in slow motion with a 360 degree camera circling the Aussie rock star while a giant mechanical sieve poured sand from above.

Visually everything was planned out and set in stone, but the morning of shoot came with unexpected delays.

“On the way to set I was in the cab, at 5.30 or 6 o’clock in the morning and the DJ came on the radio and he said, breaking news, Daniel Johns has been taken to hospital,” Holmes said.

He said in the early hours of the morning Johns had tripped over and cracked the back of his head.

“I was sitting in the back of the cab on the way to the shoot, thinking that my one opportunity to work with this legend of a guy had slipped away,” Holmes said.

On set, Johns arrived 30 minutes late with a large cut in the back of his head. Holmes said Johns was a “trouper” and let them cover him in sand all day and never complained once.

During his 14 years’ experience of editing music videos, commercials and short films, he has worked with big names such as Red Bull, Cadbury, Adidas, Emirates, Vodafone, BMW, Tourism Australia and more.

As a guest speaker at Spark, he presented his show reel and proudly watched the Daniel Johns music video along with the audience, as well as behind-the-scenes photos.

His advice for current media arts students is to stay creative, be passionate about what you do and work on your communication skills. “There will be always be creative differences so your communication skills are really really important,” Holmes said.

A creative block can happen to any creative professional and to overcome it he believes hobbies are important to clear your head and find inspiration.  He enjoys hobbies such as surfing, photography, painting and playing the guitar.

After his Spark presentation, he headed to his hotel room where he had a portable edit suite set up to continue his creative workload.

He is currently working on a Tiger Beer commercial, and although his latest project is still under wraps he said: “It’s going to be shown all around the world – it looks amazing, it’s going to be exciting.”