Bridge to Industry – Chris Colman

Continuing in the series of talks to help us bridge into industry and learn more about the animation world, the next talk I documented was from Chris Colman. Chris is a CSM graduate back when our MA Character Animation course was only 1 year long, and is based in Shanghai. Chris initially joined an animation studio set up by ex CSM students in China after graduating (the name of which eludes me) and he was happy staying in China when it was originally meant to be a temporary stay.

Chris found there weren’t any particularly large networking events in China for animation, and so he founded the China Animation and Game Network, a place where Chinese animators could connect and share work. He was showing how he got onto live talk shows through this, which looked pretty cool. Eventually, Dreamworks opened up a Chinese branch which Chris joined to help scout talent. They worked on a few Chinese productions, but eventually scaled back and rebranded to Pearl Studios.

He now works at a production company called Final Frontier, which isn’t a post-production house but works in all sorts of animation media. The company has created plenty of commercial work, from mobile game 2D and 3D adverts to campaigns supporting transgender athletes. Perhaps the most interesting piece of information we learnt about this company is that they have offices around the globe set at different timezones, meaning the company can work 24 hours a day.

My notes on this are a little lighter than previous talks as I was a little more focused on animating my film at this time, but it was an interesting talk all the same, especially learning more about the Chinese industry of animation.