Experienced film-maker Chris Gavin is a Producer/Director of short films, promotional films, information films, explainer films and event films.
Chris has skills at every stage of the film-making process from planning to delivery and the experience and contact list to pull together a larger production team whenever required.
Productions can incorporate animation, live action video shooting or innovative mixed-media techniques.
Chris is also a VERY experienced animation compositor with 20+ years working in this role across many TV series, feature films, commercials, promos and short films. Chris can work either as a Lead Compositor (TANDEM, Lupus Films, Acme Filmworks) or in a freelance Compositor role (Cartoon Saloon, Nexus Studios, Not To Scale, VCCP, 90 Seconds etc.).
BIO
Chris was born in Dundee, Scotland. His childhood home was near Monifieth on the Firth of Tay. At 9 years old his family moved down to England, where Chris spent his teenage years living in Cambridge.
After taking the one year Art Foundation course at The Cambridge College of Arts and Technology, Chris moved to Hull to study on a 3 year degree course in Graphic Design. Specialising in film and animation work, Chris graduated from The University of Humberside with a First Class BA honours degree. The course required students to complete individual and group projects, building good all-round film and animation production skills. The college had one Spaceward Minimat system, an early 'paintbox' system for creating digital graphics with a very basic frame-recording video functionality for creating animation. Largely through self-teaching, Chris learnt the system and began to use it in some of his college film projects.
Chris's career started out in the mid 1990s working for Cambridge Animation Systems (3 years) where he soon became an expert user, trainer and evangelist of their Animo system. In this era, most of the animation industry was working with traditional techniques but the new digital tools were rapidly becoming more and more viable. Chris's early expertise and experience with the Animo system led to postings at Warner Bros. Feature animation in Los Angeles (1 year) and WBFA London (1 year), Telemagination (2 years) and Acme Filmworks (6 months).
In 2001 Chris began working at the TANDEM Films studio in Islington (12 years). Whilst at TANDEM, in 2002 Chris began using Adobe After Effects for compositing work. Over the subsequent years, as well as compositing and art directing many commercials and short film projects, Chris also began directing some projects too. As a well-regarded animation studio TANDEM often attracted production work from top creative agencies such as M&C Saatchi and Wieden+Kennedy. At TANDEM Chris directed several projects for broadcasters and brands such as the BBC, Sky, Canongate Books, iRobot, Transport for London, The UK Home Office, Focus DIY and The Guardian. During this period, Chris would also develop his own experimental animation and short film projects. In 2010 Chris's innovative short film "TXT ISLAND" was a finalist for the Best Short Film award at the prestigious British Animation Awards.
When the TANDEM Studio closed in 2014, Chris became available again for freelance production work. Since 2014, Chris has began working directly with clients to develop commercial video content and also working with studios and agencies to work on larger projects.
In 2016, Chris was chosen to be Lead Compositor at Lupus Flms (6 months) for "We're Going on a Bear Hunt" the half hour TV special made for Channel 4 TV .
In 2017 Chris began working at Nexus Studios in London. Chris worked as an After Effects compositor on much of the animated content for the "Headspace" app. (14 months).
Since 2019 Chris has worked as a freelancer for Nexus and other companies on several projects as and when required. Also from his home studio he has undertaken many video projects directly for commercial clients.
In 2020 As a previous finalist, Chris was asked to sit on several juries to help assess work submitted the British Animation Awards.
In 2021 and 2022, Chris worked as a Senior Compositor on a feature-length animation film "My Father's Dragon": working for the well-renowned Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon, this was Chris's first job using Nuke for compositing. The film was released on Netflix in Autumn 2022.
Chris is back out in the world freelancing again, and very much available for new work.
Please have a look around this site to see samples of the work on offer. Chris now works either independently or as part of a crew, and is available to work for production studios, agencies or directly with clients. Chris is based in London and available to work either in-house or remotely from his home studio. Please email if you'd like to discuss developing video content for your business too.
