Before he ever stepped into a studio, darkroom, or classroom, JMC Animation lecturer Sean Callinan was constructing entire universes in his imagination: alternate realities, otherworldly landscapes, impossible cities and characters held together by mood and metaphor.

Today Sean has credits as a designer, filmmaker, motion-graphics artist and long-time lecturer, shaping new worlds with the same fascination he has had since his youth. His career has moved through many stages and mediums from photography, music videos for some truly iconic bands (INXS, Crowded House, Fleetwood Mac and more!), cult classic feature films, motion graphics, and decades of teaching the next generation how to see the world differently.

In our conversation, he reflects on the imaginative instinct, the beauty of imperfection, the organised chaos of creative collaboration, and why the best worlds (even the fantastical ones) are born from real life.

Sean’s creative beginnings came from curiosity, ink drawing and a lot of books. As a kid who felt both shy and slightly out-of-step, sci-fi, fantasy and experimental fiction shaped his early sense of what a “world” could be and every book became a portal. 

Classics like Samuel R. Delany’s 1975 sci-fi novel Dhalgren, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy and Frank Herbert’s well known epic Dune captured Sean’s imagination (even so far as doing an illustration of Dune for his trial HSC exams), providing an early lesson in world-building: the power of ambiguity, the invitation to imagine what isn’t explicitly shown. “It’s unpredictable, unreliable, strange” says Sean of Dhalgren. “I didn’t fully understand it at first, but it stayed with me. That book influenced me more than almost anything.”

“I’ve always read a lot, still do,” Sean says. “Reading is powerful because it stimulates your imagination. It doesn’t give you the visuals. You have to build the whole world yourself.”

Before stepping into the world of film, Sean worked as a cadet photojournalist for a local newspaper, shooting on film, developing in darkrooms and learning to compose images quickly and instinctively.

From there, life’s coincidences nudged him deeper into the creative community. At one point he worked in the darkroom at the Summit Restaurant in Sydney, surrounded by musicians, composers, DJs, and retirees who had once played in orchestras and run production houses. “It was this whole world of creative people I had never met before,” he says. “I’d moved from the country to the city, and suddenly everyone around me was doing something imaginative.”

This widened world eventually led him to the Sydney College of the Arts, where he initially applied to fine art, only to be told, kindly but firmly: “You’re not an artist. You’re a designer.”

It was the exact push he needed.

“That introduced me to design thinking… fundamental to all and everything we do.” Sean says. “It's one of the things that's really important to get across to the students now. A lot of them, they come in with this sort of starry-eyed vision of “l’m an artist”... And it's not that they're not artists, but they're not fine artists. They're not going to have, you know, a gallery career per se. They're going to be doing design work…. art in the service of communication, problem-solving, emotion, storytelling. Everything has to be designed, and if it isn’t, it ends up designed by accident.”

After meeting collaborators through friends, Sean co-founded a production company with the unforgettable name Meaningful Eye Contact (MEC), borrowed from a high school drama-class memory about holding the attention of a room. The team began as many creatives do, working on projects for friends, experimental music videos, and tiny budgets fuelled mostly by enthusiasm. All vastly different projects with the breathing room to get truly creative (and to overcome the obstacles that arise in the flurry of production). 

“People are willing to give you all sorts of freedoms to experiment with stuff that would be very difficult to figure out in a conventional feature film setting,” says Sean of his work in music videos. “You can, you know, you can get a weird lens or use some strange type of imaging or build some bizarre world, all that stuff is doable in that environment. So music videos are a great training ground for all kinds of people in the industry.”

A chance meeting with prominent music industry figure Philip Mortlock, then at WEA Records, changed the trajectory of MEC. Sean found himself doing production design on major videos by some epic artists including INXS, Crowded House and Fleetwood Mac.

Working with Crowded House as a production designer for their ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’ music video remains a highlight in Sean's music video repertoire. “They were full of ideas, completely collaborative. They’d sit on the floor and help with the set dressing. Total trust.”

He laughs describing the other side of collaboration: “There’s no correlation between whether you like the music and whether the band is easy to work with.” But these projects taught Sean something essential: world-building isn’t just limited to fantasy. Any environment can be a constructed reality, even a kitchen sink drama.

“Everything you see on screen is a choice. And those choices are world-building.”

Sean’s first feature project, Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds, remains a cult piece of Australian cinema. Shot on the vast, surreal landscapes of the Mundi Mundi Plains, the film featured a corrugated-iron house originally built for a XXXX beer commercial… a prop that still remains standing decades later. “It was a tiny budget. Really tiny. But the world was big. The ambition was big,” says Sean. 

The shoot had its moments: harsh desert conditions, a skeletal crew of skilled friends, enough passion to power a small generator and almost enough funding to get everything across the line. Critics were divided at the film’s release, but overall the project was regarded by those involved as a triumph. “David Stratton mentioned it in one of his books and basically said he didn't much care for it, except for the production design,” Sean laughs. “I was really chuffed.” The production design, particularly, that earned the film, and Sean, an AFI nomination (a rare honour for a first feature!).

Ask Sean about collaboration and he doesn’t romanticise it. He respects it. “You want creative tension,” he explains. “That’s a good thing… You need somebody who pushes you and needles you a bit and gets you to rethink stuff sometimes.”

It’s a practical truth he carries into teaching: creativity needs space, but it also needs structure. Freedom and constraint aren’t opposites; they’re a working relationship. He sums up the balancing act simply: “The people you work well with are not necessarily the people that you always agree with.”

After years of production design, commercials, music videos and features, the industry slowed and Sean began to seek new opportunities. Sean delved deeper into motion graphics and animation, studying at UTS (while also teaching there, occasionally sprinting between classes in both roles). This chapter sharpened one of his core strengths: synthesising mood.

Across title sequences, web animation, and interactive work, his approach to animation stayed the same: “It comes back to being a design discipline. And that’s about understanding the brief and then bringing your own creative interpretation for that brief... It’s about shaping a creative work around the need to express certain things.”

Design thinking is the throughline to Sean’s work throughout time and mediums. Every project is a communication challenge.

In his classes at JMC, Sean often talks to students about the danger of perfectionism, saying “over-perfectionism is a kind of protection against the fear of making a mistake… perfectionism is death.”

To explain this, he draws unexpectedly from outer space: “If you look at the cosmic microwave background, which is the remnant of the Big Bang, it’s incredibly evenly distributed across the whole of the universe down to a minute level, but there are little bumps… little kind of flaws. And if those flaws weren’t there, we wouldn’t be here.”

During his studies in the late ’70s, Sean saw whole movements pushing back against rigid design ideals. He explains “when I was a student… we were all tearing up paper and flinging ink around and all this sort of stuff… whereas a lot of our teachers were classical modernists… everything was totally minimalist and perfect.”

These experiences shaped a philosophy he still repeats today: “You’ve just got to let go of that perfectionist thing.”

Sean isn’t precious about analogue vs. digital. What matters to him is intention.

“Digital tools are good! No one thing allows for more combination and experimentation” says Sean. “What digital tools allow you to do is combine all kinds of things in all kinds of ways… you can do a bit of handmade animation and you can shoot a bit of super-8 and then you can do some 3D and you can put it all together in the same thing.”

But he also stresses the importance of giving your imagination space, saying “you’ve got to feed your imagination with stuff. Otherwise, if all you ever do is look at the work you’re a fan of, then you’re just going to be reproducing somebody else.”

Sean cautions his students regularly about this distraction: “If you’re on your phone the whole time, then you never stop. Your brain doesn’t have time to process...”

When the topic of sourcing creative inspiration comes up, Sean is clear. “The thing about being a professional is you can't wait for that” he says. “You can't wait for some flash of inspiration or getting into the flow. You've got to make work… you've got to produce something.”

The ability to reach those states is no mystery to Sean either. “You get more able to hit those states through practice. You know, the more you do it.”

Meditation, for him, is part of that discipline. “I meditate every day. That's really valuable… It's like any other kind of training. You’ve gotta keep it up if you want to get benefits.”

When our conversation turns to what students should take away from their time at JMC, Sean says “It is the connections you make and the people you meet… You have to be alive to what’s around you… observe and see those opportunities when they come.” He connects this directly to creative practice, saying “if you're caught up in your own little world all the time, that doesn’t happen.”

He also emphasises the role of discipline and structure in turning creativity into a career. “The other side of being somewhere like JMC is that it gives you the discipline… The skills to actually take creative skills and turn them into an actual career that you can make a living out of.” And, as someone deeply invested in world-building, Sean reminds students that imagination is not separate from reality. “Everything imaginative… is a product of the world. You know, it’s not separate.” 

“Imaginative worlds are the best when they’re imbued with a sense of truth that comes from the real world.”