GDC: 20 Years of Industrialization and Exploration, Create China Animation Stories

Tony Neoh: chairman of the Hong Kong Police Regulatory Commission, former chairman of the Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong and former chief adviser to the China Securities Regulatory Commission

Raymon Neoh: President of International Digital Culture and Technology Alliance, President of Krystal Institute

Wang Hongpeng: Managing Director, GDC

In 2006, a report titled “China’s first 3D animation feature Thru the Moebius Strip shocked the world” attracted much attention, which also indicated that Chinese animation had officially crossed over from the two-dimensional era to the three-dimensional era. According to report,  that the project has trained the first group of backbone talents for China’s CG industry, who have been active in well-known CG circles at home and abroad. The birth of the film has also played an important role in the cultivation of Chinese CG talents and the development of digital media industrialization.

Talking about Thru the Moebius Strip, the first 3D animation feature in China, we have to mention the production team behind it, Shenzhen-based Global Digital Creative Holdings Limited (hereinafter referred to as GDC, stock code: 08271.HK).

Recently, the founder of GDC, Mr. Tony Noeh and Mr. Raymond Neoh exchanged the ideas and discussed with the managing director of Mr. Wang Hongpeng. They mentioned GDC has always been positioning itself as the digital media industry “pioneer”, the company was founded to fill the domestic industry gap. Mr. Wang also said that ” Create China Animation Stories ” is the original intention of GDC. In the future, GDC will open up a new route for the development of cultural enterprises, and promote the innovation and development of cultural enterprises through the strategic policy of developing the first curve to drive the second curve.

Committed to the industry to serve the country needs the right seeds and soil

GDC was founded in 2000 by brothers Tony and Raymond. Raymond’s vision is to “build an industry, an Asian dream factory for digital media”, which means to “build an industry, not run a company”.

During the 2-year development, GDC started from the three storied building in Shenzhen University, experiencing the hardship in building China’s digital media industry chain, has faced a serious shortage of the capital, until August 2003, it’s successfully listed on the stock exchange of Hong Kong, becoming the China’s first and most successful 3D animation company, with financing over 100million RMB in digital technology and complete the capitalization. And now, with the development of high technology and the outbreak of content industry, the competition in the animation industry has become more and more intense and complex. GDC has witnessed and participated in the development and change of the animation industry in China

Talking about the founding process of GDC, Raymond said that at the beginning of 2000, the digital media industry in China was still in the blank, so it was completely impossible to carry out normal market analysis in the early stage of the start-up. “We founded GDC with the goal of building the digital media industry in China, not just as a company, but as an industry.”

Mr Tony Neoh believes that the birth of every new industry needs two conditions. One is that there is soil; the other is enough seeds. Back in the early 2000s, animation industry was still on the stage of hand-drawn. So creating an animated film was time consuming. “China’s huge population, people’s increasingly urgent cultural needs, the rapid development of new technologies and professional creative talent are fertile soil for the birth of digital media industry in China. What we need to do is to build platforms and bridges with new technologies.”

“A lot of investors looked at China’s cultural industry when they saw its huge population and cultural needs,” says Mr. Tony Neoh. When my brother (Raymond Neoh) told me his dream; as a professional legal and financial practitioners, I think this is a very promising and are worth the investment industry, because I saw the soil of the birth of digital media industry, so I’m actively involved and got connection to investors. Without the soil, there is no way to germinate seeds.”

Because of this “right place at the right time”, GDC has grown steadily since its inception and has further expanded to become a leading digital content and cultural industry company in China and Asia. DGC starts from the production of 3D animation creation and development,, production, VFX, game, CG training to production, distribution, development of derivates, cloud platform and digital industrial park, etc. It enriches the industrial chain within 20 years, and found the more accurate positioning. The company has participated in more than 20 original and global animated films, more than 60 animated TV series, and has cooperated with more than 10 international famous companies such as Disney Company, Hasbro, Nickelodeon, Warner Bros, Lionsgate, Danish Lego, France Gaumont Pictures and so on.

Build an industrial system to lay a talent foundation for the development of the industry

When a company takes an industrialization path, it choose either a convenient road, or the road that others have not traveled, or even to open up a new road. GDC could have chosen the trade road of providing service to other companies, but it has firmly chosen a long and rugged road of industrialization, building up a domestic first-class 3D animation production and management system that can be in line with Hollywood.

As for the industrialization, Raymond talked straight “In the first three years, we could only do 18 seconds of animation. My goal was to do two minutes a day. To achieve this goal, we must establish the whole CG pipeline system, only with the pipeline and system to form a production line, our CG animation production efficiency can be greatly improved.”

It is reported that GDC mainly carries out three business lines. The first is talent training. Because talent is the core of the industry development, the company has hired many foreign professionals to help train Chinese CG talents. The second is the construction of the production pipeline. GDC has a relatively mature production chain since the completion of Thru the Moebius Strip, and can produce full-length films on its own. The last is the business line of publicity, promotion and intellectual property protection, because after a successful film production, effective promotion, distribution and publicity are also crucial. The establishment of these three business lines has laid a solid foundation for the company to build an industrial chain.

Tony pointed out that GDC invited well-known network engineers, system architects and CG experts from home and abroad to create the latest system and components for the company. “Developing a production line is a very detailed job. We invited many professionals to give us technical support in terms of technology, and then we continuously optimized and improved our production line through project step by step. We have built the foundation of an industrial system, which is now much better with 20-year’s of hard work and sweat .”

In addition, according to Wang Hongpeng, GDC is still using this system, and gradually marketizing the industrial process system and sharing with other industry partners, which is also got unanimously recognized by the partners. This also shows that through 20 years of industrial reserves, the company has made a rigorous the entire pipeline of industrialization.

It is worth mentioning that, as China’s leading digital vision integrated operation group, GDC has been focusing on computer graphics and image segmentation for 20 years, and continues to provide animation production talents to the industry. In recent years, many famous animated films, such as “Nezha” and “Monkey King: Hero is Back,” had been produced by the core members of GDC. According to the incomplete statistics of the company, GDC has delivered more than 10,000 outstanding talents to the whole CG industry, accounting for 50% of the professionals in the market. From these data, we can feel the full feelings of GDC.

Looking ahead to the next 20 years, the company’s managing director, Wang Hongpeng, said that “creating China’s animated stories is the company’s original mission. Relying on the strong industrial resources of Shougang Group, GDC will open up a new route for the development of cultural enterprises in the future; and promote the innovation and development of cultural enterprises through the strategic policy of developing the first curve to drive the second curve.

According to the introduction, the first curve is to take animation and film business as the core, to create more culturally meaningful animation works around the national cultural confidence and children’s education and popular science theme.  The second curve is the new space, offline industrial park and virtual human industry, including the Macau branch of GDC and Macau tourism agencies are discussing whether to create a virtual spokesperson of Macao. GDC said it believes there will be more development opportunities for the company in the future. It hopes that with the rapid development of emerging technologies, the company can create a new and interactive way of cultural entertainment, which will bring more convenient and meaningful experience to people.

Source：EastMoney/GDC