Colin Renshaw
"Like all good stories, I didn't go into advertising, but went to study economics at university and joined a local band. It's about this time that I also started a telemarketing business working for a number of finance and real estate clients. The business really took off and I was employing 45 people when I was only nineteen. Then I thought, this isn’t what I want to be doing all of my life!"
"Music is in my DNA, and the pull towards my band was so much greater than running a business empire! Both my father and brother are a professional musicians, so its pretty easy to explain why music seemed more exciting back then. So I sacrificed my business and economics degree to go on the road! I worked out pretty early on, that being poor in a band was too much suffering for my art."
"It’s just after my leaving the band that I kinda got a sense of what I could do. I was accepted into a short course on film. Fortunately, it was one of those courses where you learn a ton of stuff and could actually walk away with some useful skills."
"My next break came when I landed a job with a small video production company. At this stage I didn’t even know what VFX was. I started off doing tea and coffee and then moved up to assistant editor doing dubs. And then one day our offline editor didn't turn up, so now and I am officially the 'Avid editor'".
"This was an amazing gig for me as I could learn to do anything I wanted. Like a lot of guys my age I was so inspired by Kyle Cooper's titles on the film 'Seven' that I got stuck into motion graphics. So my company set me up with Photoshop, After Effects and a disk recorder, and over a period of 18 months I taught myself. The guys I worked for were happy for me to do what ever I could do, because it kept making their business better."
"I guess I have always thought like a compositor. When I think back now, all of the band posters, T-shirts and promos I used to do were all 'collage style and comped-up' using my office photocopier! So I guess I have been fascinated with this way of thinking since I was nineteen. Being a surfer, skater and musician as a kid, means you are heavily exposed to a load of artistic influences. I think all of these things propelled me towards VFX.”
“Animal Logic was responsible for another major milestone in my thinking. I tended to hang our with the 3D guys at Animal, rather than the other flame artists. So I got to understand what they had to deal with and their issues with workflow. I think those relationships and friendships really helped shape the vfx supervisor I am today. Gave me a much broader view. We were kind of creative cowboys back then - we started a creative group where we would look at all the work that inspired us, deconstruct it and discuss different ways of achieving a better result. There was lot of sour grape bitchiness but it was still great fun. Thats always been where my head is at. How can we be more creative."
"When I joined Cutting Edge, I tried to replicate what I had with the VFX guys at Animal Logic. What I really wanted to do, was develop the same tightness we had as creatives. Its at this time, my work is really starting to get noticed, and a big OS VFX company gave me a call. They were looking for fresh new talent - and that really excited me. However, as a family, the timing was all wrong for us. That was when I really started questioning my future and the kind of work I wanted to be doing. I decided right there that if i couldn't go and work for that company in LA who I really admired, then I would create my own. From the start, we created Alt.vfx to do the sort of innovative work we admired so much. I realised I have been trying to create a place like this for years. A place where we don’t focus on the business stuff, we just do the very best creative work possible."