b. 1975 Charleston SC.
Thesis film at Northwestern University won the Special Jury Award at South By Southwest.
Spent six weeks in Gobi desert photographing Buddhist cave paintings to create virtual reality archive of ancient religious site.
Moved to Los Angeles in 2002, landed in post at Miramax, assisted Pietro Scalia, worked with directors Danny DeVito, John Dahl and Wes Craven. Shifted to editing then directing commercial work.
In 2015 co-founded Effie Studios, which produces commercials and original content.
Directed projects for Amazon, Marvel, LG, NFL and NASA.
Made Alien Anthology entry Last Signs of Life, released by 20th Century Fox August 2019.
Latest film One of Their Own combines motion capture and live action to tell the story of a digital boy who gets into trouble trying to fit in with the human kids.
Shot on a walnut farm with six kids and a crew of three, the film was created using a mocap pipeline developed in-house at Effie, and was written, directed and animated by Colombo (and to paraphrase Slaughterhouse-5 “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this bio”).
Director Statement
In August 2010, Microsoft released the Kinect, a desktop motion capture device with a price of $100. It was designed to work only with Xbox games, but within 24 hours a worldwide hacking contest produced a digital patch to hook the Kinect straight into your Mac. Blogs like KinectHacks.com popped up, showing people interacting with digital models in real time— a puppeteer controlling a digital parrot with hand gestures, a programmer spinning a digital teacup on his finger. My mind boggled. What if you could puppet digital humans in the same way– for $100 on your desktop, using open source software? I’ve spent the last decade learning how to do this, and this film is the result. Thank you for watching.
Fantasy/Sci-Fi FILM & WRITING FESTIVAL 