Episode 11 - Bonus

Growth often comes from our most challenging moments. Risk. Failure. Consequences. Humility. What then? What does a leader do next?

In this episode, we journey through the peaks and valleys of Colum Slevin’s career, from the animation studios of Dublin to the cutting edge of player safety at Electronic Arts.

Colum's story is one of curiosity-driven evolution, peppered with moments of triumph and humbling failures. He shares with raw honesty his hubris and the weight of decisions that shaped not just his own path, but the lives and careers of those he led.

We explore the transition from being the 'utility player' - always ready to be useful - to becoming a leader who understands the delicate balance between taking risks and protecting his team. Colum's journey teaches us that true leadership isn't about having all the answers, but about the courage to be transparent when you don't.

Join us as we unpack the lessons learned by skinning knees and dislocating shoulders in the world of creative management. This is a story of how failure can be the crucible for authentic, empathetic leadership - a reminder that our greatest growth often comes from our most challenging moments.

About Colum

Colum Slevin has over thirty years of experience in leadership roles at the intersection of technology and creativity. He began his career in animated TV and features, eventually serving as Director of Computer Graphics at Industrial Light & Magic and later as Vice President of Studio Operations at Lucasfilm. At Lucasfilm, he oversaw animation and game development teams in California and Singapore, including the award-winning _Clone Wars_ animated TV show.

In 2013, Colum became Studio General Manager at Telltale Games before joining Meta in 2015. At Meta, he led media and narrative VR content development, overseeing products like Oculus TV, Media Studio, and Oculus Venues. Under his leadership, the team produced award-winning VR experiences, including Vader Immortal, The Wolves In The Walls, and The People's House, earning 15 Emmy nominations and 7 wins.

More recently, Colum led the Positive Play experiences team at Electronic Arts, developing products that promote safe and inclusive gaming experiences. He resides in San Rafael, California, with his wife Marie and remains obsessed with technology in the service of creativity and storytelling.

Belinda Brummer (host): Welcome to a bonus episode of The Managers Moment. I am your host, Belinda Brummer. In the world of animation, change has been the only constant. From hand drawn cells to CGI, artists have continually adapted to new technologies, pushing the boundaries of their craft. Colum Sleven, a creative industry veteran, witnessed and shaped these transformations firsthand. In this bonus episode of The Managers Moment, he reveals the artistry behind the pixels and ponders the age-old question that characterised the digitization of the animation process. How do we use a machine to make art? Today too, we have tipped over the precipice of another technology revolution, artificial intelligence. How will this new tool reshape the landscape of animation? Prepare for a fascinating dive into the past, present and future of animation, as Colom takes us all the way back to his first job as a cell painter.

Colum: So my first job was straight out of secondary school in Dublin and I was at an animation studio called Sullivan Bluth Studios in Cunningham Road in Phoenix park. And when I was studying for the leaving cert, I was working a part time job, Saturday job as a cell, painter at this studio - at the time, it was in Balgriffin before they moved the whole studio over. I was painting mice and effects and little creatures for a film called An American Tale. I got that job, as I recall, through a school friend of mine. His sister was, was working at this company and she got me a Saturday job and I worked that job and I absolutely hated school. I had a great primary school experience and I didn't enjoy secondary school at all. I hated it and I couldn't wait to get out. To the extent that the idea of going to college was completely abhorrent to me. But the idea of more school after secondary school was unthinkable to me and I was at the time lucky enough to get hired full time by this animation studio as a cell painter. That was in 1987 and that was my first ever job. An absolute dream job. Just, uh, a lot of fun. Um, a lot of other people my age, I don’t know how we ever got any work done. We had a great time. That was a very fortunate introduction to what became a career in working adjacent to and alongside with creative people and creative industries for decades.

Belinda: If I may go back to “I absolutely hated school and I thought college would be more of the same. Do you know what you hated about school? Do you recall that?

Colum: Yeah, I do. What I didn't enjoy about secondary school was that was a couple of things. Like, it was, uh, a percentage of it was my own issues and my own bias, like as a teenager, some of it was the fact that I had spent my primary school years at, uh, all Irish speaking school in Harmonstown called Scoil Neasáin. I remember a former schoolmate of mine who I met in recent years saying it was sort of like a technicolour 1970s Muppets experience. It was just, uh, it was just a really fun place to be in school. Really, really caring, lovely teachers, a very small environment, and it's just great fun. Like, primary school is great fun, then. Secondary school is also not all our speaking school collection. We're just, uh, now gone in Parnell Square in Dublin, obviously a much bigger school, lots of unfamiliar faces and people I didn't know. And I was very introverted and nerdy and into art and, you know, drawing comic book characters and stuff like that. So felt very much like fish out of water. There also was a Christian Brothers school for reasons most people who went to school with religious orders in the 1980s would understand. Uh, that wasn't floppy, um, but it was just, it felt like, I think I would sum it up by saying it felt like a very, um, abrupt coming of age. It felt like coming out of this comfortable, rosy experience to this very, very shocking grown up experience of being in big hit school that I just didn't enjoy. I didn't feel like I was ready for it. I think I was also a very below average student. I was and am creatively, um, inclined. So I enjoyed, um, literature and language, uh, and art. Did not enjoy science or maths or those more empirical subjects. But I was also really lazy, even though I love the reading. I remember reading, studying Macbeth. Can we say Macbeth in a podcast? That's not bad, look. Right? And, uh, reading bright expectations. I remember loving the literature, but hating the setting in which I was Learning. I wanted to be pretty and I wanted to, uh, chart my own force. I wanted to do my own thing. And I didn't, didn't really want people telling me what to do, which sounds really, uh, elementary and naive, which I was. But I just, uh, couldn't get charlottes enough.

Belinda: If I can tell you what I hear a little bit. There you go. From this wonderful primary school experience, you have this glitch of an experience in high school, and then the first job you have seems to capture your imagination and your creativity in the same way that the primary school situation did. Is that fair to say?

Colum: Yeah, you know, I've never thought about it that way before, but, um, that's absolutely right. Yeah. My first job was a. Felt like, I felt like I found my people, you know, I felt like I was coming home. The idea that you could sit for eight to 12 hours a day and paint cartoon characters and listen to audiobooks and music and talk to your friends who are sitting all around you ah, was um, you know, unthinkable to me. It's like, like I thought it was a clerical error. It's something I've repeated over the course of my career where I'm like I keep waiting for someone to show up and tell me that this has all been a massive mistake and I need to go back to the coal miner or back to secondary school or something. It just didn't feel, it didn't feel real.

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Belinda: And so you then made this career in this. So you're still so embedded in that environment, you're still embedded with the creative arts, although it sounds like you're in a slightly different context now.

Colum: Yeah, I mean so the whistle stop tour is when I started working in animation again in the, the mid to late eighties in Dublin. Um, it m was pre digital right? We had, we had um, it was an entire, it was an analogue process, it was photochemical and you know, started out with pencils and paper and paint and um, it ended up in, in a film lab. You know it was, everything was physical, you know, you could touch everything that contributed to the final product. So I mean there were computer graphics but they're very, very minimal and scant and really expensive to do and you know, maybe, maybe one or two shots in a film would include computer uh generated imageries. So. But um I started out there uh in this, in this analogue setting and I was still fascinated by the technology because even though it was before computers were a ubiquitous platform for the creation of art, um, there was still technology. You had to understand how an animation camera stand worked. You had to understand um how computer instructions that people would physically write would, would uh command that camera to shoot the scene. Um, you had to understand how everything came together. Um, and that was a fascination for me. I started out as a cell painter which is you're colourizing the cells celluloid. Um, and I was fascinated with how the thing I was doing ended up in the final product, which is something I've always been very drawn to. This idea that I’m working on, this jigsaw puzzle piece, how does it fit into the larger piece? And part of that was just natural, as I said before, nerdiness and curiosity about how it all fit together. And part of it was a survival instinct, which is, hey, if I’m working on this small sliver of the manufacturing process, what does the rest of the process look like? And are there ways to move, move up and down the value chain of this process? I was just interested in how to be more involved, I suppose, was the thought. So that's what I did. I got different types of jobs, um, um, uh, as parts of the production process in animation. And then gradually, basically what happened was it compressed down the time scale. From 1987 until 2024, uh, in the mid nineties, I ended up working at a studio that was making a transformation from analogue to digital. That studio was being built as a digital studio from the ground up. And that studio was in the US, was in Arizona, and that's how I ended up here in the US. Um, we moved there with my wife in 1994. And um, 1994 is right on the cusp of the sort of computer graphics revolution in filmmaking. So um, Terminator Two just had come out a couple of years before Jurassic Park, The Abyss. All of these sort of seminal, um, cinematic storytelling experiences that had these never, um, before seen visuals at their core. And um, so, uh, that's what fascinated me. I was working at this studio that was actually a whole collection of, um, a big chunk of the people who worked for the Sullivan Bluth studio in Dublin ended up, uh, migrating over to Arizona to be part of this studio that 20th Century Fox were setting up in the mid nineties, again with the same filmmakers with Don Bluth and Gary Goldmand. And um, so about, as I recall, about 60 to 80 of us at the time all sort of moved over in a block. Uh, and we were all people with animation production experience in an older medium and we were learning how to make things in a visual medium. So I was just voraciously curious about, does this all work? How do I learn this stuff?

Belinda: So setting up a life in America outside of Ireland, that wasn't the move that you were making or that wasn't the primary driver. It was going with the studio.

Colum: It was the job. Yeah, it was the job. I mean, when I, I mean, I was, I was certainly keen and I was, I was all in on, um, us. Like, I wasn't, I wasn't reluctant exactly. I mean, I was. Let me, let me be clear. Like, I was, I was really sad to leave my family in Ireland and to leave Dublin and leave my friends and my life. But I was also really excited about the US. It was, you know, it was a new thing for me. Um, also, Marie, my wife, was six months pregnant at the time, which was, in hindsight, an insanely foolhardy thing to do. Um, but it's something I think about a lot. Like the consequential decisions you make when you're younger with almost no information and you sort of leap into the void and go, uh, I'm sure it'll work out fine. And I think over time, I've always.

Belinda: Said, Colum, that bravery is leaping into things because you really don't know what it is you're leaping into. Retrospectively we call that brave. Retrospectively we call that know, being the hero, whatever it is. But it's because we don't know.

Colum: Right.

Belinda: We haven't a clue. And it sounds a little bit like this.

Colum: Exactly.

Belinda: Pregnant, new country, new job, new studio.

Colum: Yeah.

Belinda: That's phenomenal.

Colum: Yeah. Crazy stupid. Um, but I mean, it worked out, but it didn't have to. Um, so, yeah, so a big chunk of people moved over and we all sort of collaboratively started trying to figure out like, how do we use these, how do we use these machines to make art? Um, and that was a fascinating Learning process. And I, throughout that process, I was just sort of walting down information constantly and trying to figure it out with learn. Um, we made a few movies there. Three movies total, basically back to back. First was a film called Anastasia. And um, again, in sort of mid nineties, I'm trying to remember what year Anastasia came out. Probably 97, I think. Can't remember. Um, and then we made a directed video sequel to that movie. And then we made a film called Titan Ae, which is a Sci-Fi movie. And um, as the studio wound down after a few years, we had, I suppose you call it moderate success, certainly strong success with the first movie. And the movie sort of performed less well over time. Um, and as part of the third movie we made, the studio had given some notes about um, the movie being insufficiently, um, having insufficient action, lacking some pacing. And they did, they wanted more spectacle in the movie. Back to my point about like this was in the heyday of computer graphics when it was first started. So they wanted more. Wow. And um, we ended up hiring two studios or two teams to help us put more cg into the movie. Uh, one team was a, ah, studio called Blue sky, uh, which at the time is in New York and very sadly default to no longer around. But the studio made ice age and, um, robots and, um, so many great movies. We hired them in between, um, projects to work on one sequence. And we hired another team who were on furlough from Lucasfilm in between Star wars projects, uh, to do, uh, some other sequences. Um, and I ended up, uh, working really closely with those studios as a production manager. I was flying back and forth between the east coast, from Arizona, East coast and then to the west coast to help them get those, um, shots done. And I got to know some people at ILM and lucas them through that process. And as the studio in Arizona was, it became clear that we weren't going to make another movie. And they were closing things down. Uh, in, um, around 1999, um, I was hired to come to California and, uh, work in the software department of ILM to basically be the glue between the software engineers who were designing the computer graphics, uh, tools, and the producers and artists and production staff were working on the movies. Um, the other Hallmark, I think, of that time was from the mid nineties until the early two thousands, and actually a bit beyond that inference from mid nineties to the mid two thousands. Um, the software that was used to make movies was, um, critical. There was no way to make the wave in perfect storm with something off the shelf. It needed a lot of PhD brains to figure out how to create and animate and simulate and render something like that. And that was done by brilliant people. Um, but the people who made the software and the people who were responsible for producing and executing the visual effects often spoke really different languages, not literal languages, but yeah, um, they were focused on different things. And what I had learned in my time at Fox, uh, was how to communicate and be a translator between artists and technologists. And, um, an artist would always essentially be asking some fundamental question like, I've got this, I'm used to using this thing. It's a pencil. Um, what can this computer do for me that the pencil can't do? And I would say, well, they can do this, and here's how. And how artists sort of use these tools to express themselves. And um, over time, one of the things that's evolved and ah, it took a lot like for a solid decade. That was a very, very satisfying, interesting role to be in, where I was helping these very different species understand each other. Uh, but then gradually over time, what happened was the technologists became artists and the artists became technologists. And now the creative industries of video game development and filmmaking. And, um, uh, all of the satellite work that exists around those, um, technology is no longer a mystery to those people. It's necessary. And now if you, you go to school to study animation, you are learning how, uh, you're also learning about rendering and you're learning about lighting and you're learning about, um, how digital technology, how you use digital technology to create. But that wasn't always the case. So that was my way in, um, into that field. I knew little enough about each side of the equation that I could help people bridge.

Belinda: Do you. Just a side question, Colin. Do you miss the world of analogue? Now that we know how to use these machines now, and all the software?

Colum: Um. Do I miss the world of analogue? I miss things about it, but in the aggregate, no. So the analogue world of filmmaking, it's easy to look back on it with rose tinted glasses because it was really, uh, especially now that I've also worked with a lot of physical effects creators and model makers and people who would blow shit up for a living, for real. The tactile nature of that stuff is amazing. There's nothing like it. Um, but the amount of bookkeeping and, um, very fastidious, painstaking notation you have to do, um, in the analogue world is. I don't miss that at all. The revolution that occurred was, um, essentially production became nonlinear and decentralised. Where the way you used to make a film was in a series of consecutive steps, you add it to things. So when I was working in animation in the old days, a lot of what you had to do was write a very, very, um, specific and detailed set of instructions in, say, January for a scene that was going to be shot by a camera person in December. I'm probably exaggerating, but there was a long time span between when you would make notations on the drawings and you would write up an exposure sheet saying, here's how this character is shot and here's how the next character is layered on top of it, and here's how this effect is treated. And you would certainly be onto something else by the time the camera person was shooting it. You might not even be working there. Who knows? So you needed to be able to, um, without a conversation, you part information all the way down the line. And you did that in writing. Right. And usually, um, handwritten, handwritten notes and, um, whereas, uh, and that was, um. It's an amazing way to learn a craft, because you have to learn it from the very micro building blocks all the way up. You have to learn very specific things. Um, and now it doesn't matter. That stuff just doesn't matter anymore. Digital creation has just erased thousands of needs for very specific things. Like an animator, uh, part of the animation process was certain animators had to use, um, non photo blue pencils. Uh, so that when they're, um, initially rough animating and then in between their scenes that the lines they drew could be sufficiently rough that they wouldn't be picked up by the xerox camera. So that's something that doesn't exist anymore. And there's a thousand things like that that were physical elements of the craft that mattered a lot to the final product that are just gone. Um, and the interesting thing about that, I think, was it left a lot of people behind. I know, I know artists to this day who went through that transition from physical and analogue to digital and thrived. Right? They learned, oh, here's how I orient myself. Here's how I can create. Here's the equivalent to what I used to do in physical media, um, in digital media. And to them, they transcended this sort of the process that they learned how to still create. And then there were artists who were like, if I can't hold a pencil in my hand, I don't know what I'm doing and just not that interested in it. And they ended up doing something else, or certainly not doing that anymore. So anyway, it did sort of shake up, um, the industry in a huge way. So anyway, very, very long answer to your short question, but I miss certain things about the, I miss the tactile nature, the physical nature of analogue production. But I don't miss the incredibly tedious, painstaking, um, stuff you had to do in order to make happen.

Belinda: Earlier you said you were fascinated with how to use these machines to make art. And then you've just described that a lot of people were left behind. A lot of people had a change. We enter into a world, uh, the future of AI is having that same impact, I'm sure, on the creative industry. Not to necessarily have a big AI conversation here, but can you see parallels between what the people in your industry or the people that you work with may or are experiencing now and back then?

Colum: Yeah, 100%. So I think the only difference is. The difference is that the change is more seismic with AI. Um, but it didn't feel that way back in the eighties and nineties. Um, I remember people. Here's the thing is that everyone always says, based on our prior knowledge and based on our expertise, x, y or Zenith is possible, but nothing else is. And what I mean by that is people will say, I remember back in the, um, late eighties and early nineties, people would say, look, computers are great for rendering a physically rigid object like a spaceship or, um, a building. Um, but you can animate characters with computers. That's unthinkable. Um, they don't look good and it looks computer generated and looks fake and it looks, um, uh, it's soulless. Like that was. This is something we just talked about a lot. Um, and then Pixar can only be the toy story. And people were like, oh. So they took the limitations of this medium, which is, it's not particularly expressive. It's not as easy to do motion and emotion you can do with hand drawn stuff. And they said, let's make it a bit toys, because toys are rigid and they have limited facial expressions, blah, blah, blah. And they said, let's lean into the limitations of the medium. And ultimately they created something that transcended the medium and had everyone going, oh, so that is what you can do. Um, and then we're off to the races, right? I think we're at a similar Moment with AI, but AI is so much scarier than computer graphics. Um, uh, but yeah, there are definitely parallels there. And what I mean is, um, computer graphics was mysterious until you cracked it open and understood, all right, here's what it is. It's a toolkit and it allows you to do the following things. And I'm in control and here's what I'm going to do. Um, AI, I think, is, ah, machine Learning. And all of these technologies are similar in the sense that it's a tool or a piece of a toolkit or an entire toolkit. But, um, it is harder, I think, for human beings to understand the output, uh, and to understand what is contained in that tool than it was with computer graphics. It's just orders of magnitude more complex and more sophisticated. But yeah, it's the same thing. I mean, it is going to have, I think, a seismic impact on creation. I was speaking at a conference last year in Dublin, the culture Crush conference, actually, with Captain Parks, formerly of, uh, electric paper, and there was a couple of really brilliant people on the panel with me who really know AI a lot better than I did. But I had this thought when we were talking about it, and someone in the audience asked a question like, is there any room for a Rembrandt anymore? Because who are going to be these individual creators like Rembrandt. And I said, you know, Rembrandt wasn't one person like Rembrandt. Van Ryn was a man, but he had a school and his students. A lot of those paintings that you look at, you say, that's a Rembrandt, were painted by one of his students. So the notion of algorithmically created art is hundreds of years old. Um, and, uh, uh, the notion that you can say, hey, people like this thing. Let's figure out how to weaponize that thing that they like so much that they like it even more, that that predates AI by, as I said, hundreds of years. So I think the goal is the same, is to create, uh, a commercial endeavour that creates content that people love to consume. I hate the word content, but creates stuff that people love to consume. Um, I think AI is scary to people because, uh, it's a bit of a black box, and the output is so, at least at first glance, human. Um, uh, that is troubling.

Belinda Brummer (host): We've come to the end of another episode of The Manager's Moment. Thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed it, there are three things you could do. Let your friends and colleagues know about it. Follow the show and be a part of the conversation and make connections by joining The Manager’s Moment club on LinkedIn. The Manager's Moment, seeing the person in this and every moment.

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