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Animation Director

Create Animation is one of EA's central teams, responsible for bringing characters and performances to life across all of EA's franchises. Led by industry veterans from film and game industries, we work on award-winning franchises in partnership with teams like BioWare (Mass Effect, Dragon Age), Respawn (Jedi: Fallen Order, Apex Legends, Medal of Honor), EA Sports (FIFA, Madden, College Football) and other high profile game teams!
Our team collaborates with many teams across Create and EA, such as Motion Capture, Rigging, Scanning, and more. We work on a diverse catalog of games across many different animation styles, from realistic to stylized, from humans to creatures.

As an Animation Director, you will ensure AAA quality performances across all types of genre and styles in EA’s catalogue. You will accomplish this by managing the work of the animation team on projects you direct, working directly with the senior leaders of the studio and across EA, and ensuring the appropriate technologies, methodologies, and skills are being used to maximum effectiveness.

You will:

• Determine, direct and accomplish the vision and quality bar on projects
• Oversee a team of animators to deliver the creative vision for all performances
• Direct the animation, balancing performance, quality and continuity
• Work with the Development Directors on projects to achieve all technical, schedule and budgetary requirements
• Provide daily feedback and direction to the animation team
• Guide the evolution strategy of the animation pipeline
• Establish efficient animation procedures
• Collaborate with Development Directors and Technical Art teams to deliver projects that meet technical and production needs

Working directly with:

• The creative and visual leadership to establish the animation direction, style, quality, and execution
• Designers and engineers to achieve compelling performances that match the overall game quality and expectations
• Technical animators, character riggers and modelers to ensure our characters move & deform beautifully
• Graphics engineers to ensure characters are grounded in the world with VFX, such as grass, weather, shadows and lighting
• Physics engineers to ensure characters align with the physical limitations you determine and work with other characters and the environment in believable ways

Skills you have:

• 8+ years of directing animation with excellent credentials on high credibility AAA games
• A great eye for style and quality, combined with a deep technical skill set
• Team leadership, people and mentoring skills
• Experience in visual and technical innovation
• Able to inspire and lead teams to accomplish high quality within time and budget
• Able to guide a team to balance creative goals with the requirements of production
• Direct actors and other motion capture talent
• Knowledge of common practices and the understanding of industry trends
• Setup and work with animation blending trees and state machines