About Michael Lucas
Michael Lucas grew up in Brisbane, Australia. After graduating from high school in 1990, he enrolled in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Queensland, mainly because of his love of design, developed through years of playing with Lego and drawing. His interest in computer graphics and animation started much earlier, when at the age of 9 (1982) he programmed the Dick Smith Wizzard "computer" to show an animated landscape and also developed a simple joystick controlled car racing game using a limited form of Basic (the computer had a whopping 17k memory to play with - an exercise in compact and efficient coding!)
While at University, Michael won the Comalco Minerals & Alumina Scholarship for Mechanical Engineering, which he held for the four years it took to complete his First Class Honours degree majoring in design. This required Michael to spend his vacations in various mining towns, notably Weipa in far North Queensland and Tahmoor in the NSW Southern Highlands. In his final year, he started the successful Sunshark Solar Racing Car team with Lauren Battle, a fellow Comalco Scholar. It was this year (1994) that Michael first became involved with Engineers Australia's "Young Engineers" group, which he went on to lead as Queensland Chair in 1998 and later National Chair in 2000/2001. Through YEA, Michael was elected to various senior positions within Engineers Australia, including the National Congress, the Mechanical College Board and the National Committee on Automation, Control & Instrumentation. In 1995 Michael was runner up in the Young Engineers National Public Presentation Competition, and used these skills again as the closing keynote speaker at the 2001 Engineering Conference "Emerging Leaders" and in 2002 as the Summit Chair of the inaugural International Young Professionals Summit on Sustainability, the Environment, Poverty & Social Capital . The summit attracted young professionals from every inhabited continent, and its resolutions were presented to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in 2002.
Given his vacation mining experience, Michael found himself working for Minenco (now part of global conglomerate Bechtel, but then part of Rio Tinto) as a project engineer after graduating from University in 1994. He was based in Melbourne for some months, then Brisbane, but managed to spend most of his time on site, again mostly in Weipa. While on a vacation in early 1996 in North America, Michael acted on his long held desire to combine his technical and artistic skills in the world of animatronics and creature effects for the film industry, contacting some of the worlds bigger visual effects houses, most of whom had very strong animatronics departments at the time. Advised by many to come back "with a PhD in robotics", Michael returned home to embark on his PhD under Professor David Radcliffe, combining design, robotics and some "industrial sociology" in his thesis "On the Nature of Modularity in Mechatronic Prototyping". (it would ultimately take 6 years before the final manuscript was published!) Simultaneously, he began the first Mechanimation business (see below) to supplement the meagre income provided by a University Scholarship. Ready to leap into visual effects, Michael discovered that fate had dealt a cruel blow - while he had been becoming the best robotics engineer he could be (winning the 1999 National Young Professional Engineer of the Year Award amongst several other awards along the way), the effects industry had moved on to primarily computer generated imagery - something that Michael had dabbled in, but not to the level required by the now booming VFX market.
With this in mind, Michael moved to Sydney, taking his businesses with him, to take up a senior R & D role with CHEP, a division of Brambles, where he was responsible for product design and prototyping across the automotive, beverage and FMCG markets in addition to his main role helping to develop the world's first (and only) fully automated timber pallet inspection and repair system. A natural leader, Michael soon found himself on the Brambles Global Leadership Development program. The R & D completed and the first factory built, Michael moved back to full time work on the latest Mechanimation business, Mechanimation Studios, where he is finally doing animation & effects work! At Mechanimation Studios, Michael finds himself using his artistic skills to help technical people present their ideas and inventions to a wider audience, while simultaneously using his engineering skills to help creative people infuse their art with practical reality. A rare combination of engineer & artist, Michael also finds time to indulge his entrepreneurial flair as Executive Chair Man of Velafo Seating Systems, a manufacturer of luxury polymorphic seating products (designed & prototyped by Michael, of course!)
Stay tuned for the release of Michael's new book "Changing Palettes", his inspirational story of optimism and following your dreams in a changing world (and, yes, the pun on Pallets was intended!) An excerpt from Chapter 5, "How 15 planks of wood nailed together took me around the world" will be available here in PDF form shortly.
About Mechanimation Studios
Mechanimation Studios began life in 1996 as Mechanimation Technology Services Australia in Brisbane, Queensland. Back in 1996, we covered a range of technology implementations across very diverse industries (Aged Care, Agricultural, Mining, Product Design & Manufacturing). It was the early days of the Web, but we managed to bring the world to remote properties across rural Australia via the computer. Occasionally we provided mechanical design and manufacture services for some of the earlier reality TV shows and game shows, and along with the University of Queensland, Mechanimation was the driving force behind taking Australian robots to Japan for the Robocon World Robotics Championships in 1998 & 1999. Our staff ranged from 1 (Michael) to 4 depending on our projects.
Later the business spawned a second incarnation as Mechanimation Robotics Technology, where we shifted focus to providing mobile and field robotics solutions. MTSA continued, to provide product design consulting services to our ongoing customer base, particularly in SE Queensland.
Both Mechanimation businesses moved to Sydney in late 2000 as Michael took on an R&D role with one of Australia's best known companies, and in 2005 they were combined into the new Mechanimation Studios, which brings together the artistic and the technical to provide visualisation services for the engineering and industrial design community, and technical services to the animation community. We find that having a foot in both areas helps us to bring new ideas to all our customers... The business is currently based in Sydney, and we have helped customers all over Australia and more recently globally. We're working on projects for external customers as well as a few of our own...
Join us as we explore, blurring the boundaries between the artistic and the technical.
Design. Visualisation. Animation.
Bios of our part time and contract staff will appear here shortly.
