Animation Lead Jobs

We are looking for an Animation Lead with a passion for character-driven narratives to join us in bringing a script to life. You’ll work with a cross discipline team to build environments and action that will be shot by the filmmakers themselves using our virtual cinematography volume. If there’s a character or asset that moves in the scene, it’ll either be created by you or captured via Mocap. You’ll be leading a growing team of animators while still spending the majority of your time on the box. Strong input into the standards, practices, and overall structure of the animation team is a given, but creative leadership and vision, backed by the ability to demonstrate not just direct, will be a key part of success here. This is a leadership position, and teamwork is essential.

Responsibilities

• Working with filmmakers and creative supervisors on designing animation sequences and action to work within Master Scenes
• Is active in the creative process and communicates goals and objectives to the team

• Augment motion capture data of character animation for creative purposes
• Leverage latest advancements in Unreal Engine to expedite animation process
• Deliver and integrate animation into Unreal scenes based on an adjustable quality level determined by many factors including available development time during the visualization process
• Ensure that standardized practices are developed and implemented across projects to meet high quality and aesthetic standards
• Providing long-term strategic planning and inspiring technical solutions regarding animation

• Ingest character meshes from external parties and analyze technical requirements for assets to work in our realtime system
• Lead, coach, and mentor animators to create a unified vision for projects
• Work with production support to plan schedules, commit to deliveries, and inspire animators to deliver great performances
• Create and utilize packaged default rigs for characters, skin meshes, and apply rigs to character skeletons

Baseline

• Can work in a range of styles from stylized to realistic and can maintain a consistent style across characters over the course of a project
• 7+ years of leading character-driven animation with excellent credentials on high quality AAA games (The number of years isn’t mandatory, but it’s an indicator of the seniority and experience expected)
• In-depth knowledge of Maya & Unreal, including FK and IK techniques and rigging methodologies
• A strong portfolio which demonstrates a diverse background with real-time animation systems (both pre-scripted and animation trees for state machines)

• Interest in simulation-based real-time animation controllers with neural-network powered style transfer
• Experience with hand-animation, Mixamo pre-canned animations, and motion capture systems
• Experience animating in Unreal Engine