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Animation Supervisor - Permanent
1 year ago
OVERVIEW
At PlayStation London Studio, we are on a mission to make award-winning, landmark games. Our upcoming PlayStation 5 online multiplayer game will be focused on a brand-new IP we are extraordinarily excited about.
Our new game is close to our hearts, as the whole team collaborated on coming up with the concept from the very beginning. We’ve seen this idea grow from a seed, and now we’re looking for new starters to continue our journey on shaping our plans for this AAA project.
We’re also a part of the PlayStation Studios family, a collective of teams - from Insomniac to Naughty Dog and many more. As such, we have solid support system – often knowledge sharing industry advancements so that all our studios, individually lead the way to create memorable gaming experiences.
About the Role
We are looking for an Animation Supervisor! In this role you will run our Animation team, orchestrating our animators, schedule and maintain the production and be the main point of contact for our animation production partners to ensure amplify our value, quality, and impact at scale through building an environment of excellence, teamwork, and growth.
The ideal candidate will understand modern game animation production process, from concept to design, animation, and technical fundamentals, so that they can set up production plans, considering all the risks and dependencies, providing, or seeking solutions to resolve creative and management issues so that it aligns with overall project goals. These unique abilities allow you to be the individual empowering our teams, and who our talent turns to for growth, mentorship, and inspiration to do their best work.
It's a key management role reporting directly to our Art Manager but supporting our Lead Animator on a once in a lifetime opportunity to be at the heart of bringing to life the next PlayStation icon/s in a sophisticated, fast-paced, and exciting environment.
Scope of Work
- Accountable for the delivery of Animation to both time and budget across our projects.
- You'll evaluate and maintain the animation production and external development schedule with the Production Team, Lead Animator and Art Management teams. Ensuring our scope, schedule and approach is scalable and flexible to meet our global development demands. Supervising and communicating project progress in your area.
- Be directly involved in external development of animation, ensuring stable long term mutually beneficial partnerships for our teams.
- Alongside the Lead Animator, you are accountable for building a long-term strategy for your area, ensuring your team are aligned and feeding into the overall strategies.
- Responsible for improving or even establishing our processes for Animation. With the Animation Lead establish standard methodologies, and continually optimise, automate, identify risks and issues across pipelines and workflows; proactively seeking and supervising the implementation of solutions.
- You will manage, mentor, and develop a specialised team. Handling their personal and career growth. It is required to:
- Understand the animation process for games and cinematics and be familiar with animation team needs to support them to excel
- Meet regularly with you team to mentor and offer expert guidance, provide constructive feedback, conduct performance reviews, and facilitate the team’s best work.
- Develop training opportunities to support the development of team members at the department, field, or team member level
- Evaluates team members’ goals and objectives and ensures that department goals are being met
- Participate in setting wider Art department strategy, processes, best practises, and goals crafted to improve our teams year over year as a member of the dept’s management group.
- Collaborate with Art Management on project staffing, hiring, and onboarding. Anticipating skills and resource needs, developing your team recruitment, as well as acting as a consultant on wider department level gaps and solutions.
- You will prioritise and assign bugs, and ensuring they are resolved by the required dates.
- Regularly play the game in development and participate in reviews of content to inform and advise on production status, look ahead, adjust and feedback on any production changes to the team.
Essential Knowledge & Skills
- A creative at heart, the candidate must have experience in planning, running and delivering high-performance, high-quality animation for AAA titles.
- Excellent communication skills (both verbal and written), with an ability to engage with a multi-disciplined development team, production partners, and wider Sony Interactive Entertainment business and understand when pushback is required.
- Will be required to present production plans clearly and work well within a large team environment
- Shown to possess excellent animation production management and organisational skills
- Has experience, foresight and confidence to construct production plans that support the delivery within an evolving studio or outsourcing timeline, budget, and expectations.
- Someone with a pro-active and nurturing mentality, conducive to the mentoring and objective critiquing of a growing Art Department.
- You can arbitrate sensitively between creative desires and production requirements.
- Ability to recognise quality and excellence and be able to support animation content that meets the highest standards of quality, performance, and polish.
Desirable Knowledge & Skills
- Experience in educational growth and leadership training
- Strong proficiency in JIRA or Shotgun / Shotgrid
- A robust understanding of Mocap and Animation pipelines, able to spot weaknesses in the efficiency and support developing solutions to maintain and improve our workflows
- Motion Capture planning and production experience, for both internal and external sessions
- Experience in gameplay animation as well as cinematics production
- Passion for games, game animation and production techniques
Impact and Complexity
High quality, captivating characters are a signature of PlayStation Studio titles. Our Animation teams are fundamental to bringing our characters to life, bridging creative, technical and design fields they marry together art and science to allow us to deliver on this expectation.
That is why our supervisors are essential roles that are uniquely complex in that they balance directly supervising our animation team and its partners, but also ensuring that the schedule of work and its scope is delivered on budget, time, and quality.
Supervision
This role carries out supervisory responsibilities which can include interviewing, hiring, and training employees; planning, assigning, and directing work; appraising, rewarding and managing performance; ; addressing complaints and resolving problems.
It also involves evaluating the schedule and structure of our project and keeping their team and partners accountable for the project’s timeline and landmarks.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
We encourage you to bring your best-unaltered self to work. Inclusivity is one of our studio values, which means we embrace different perspectives to fuel our creativity and we know that our games are stronger for it!
It is important to us that our teams are passionate about diversity and inclusion. They must understand that these words speak to people’s lived experiences that may differ to their own. We encourage our teams to educate themselves and show support and their commitment to DE&I (diversity, equity, and inclusion). As an example, some of our outreach activities include giving talks, mentoring, speaking at schools, running roundtables and much more.
We therefore welcome applications from all groups who are underrepresented in the games industry. We can offer training to upskill our team, so if you don’t feel you meet 100% of the job criteria, we still strongly encourage you to apply and look forward to hearing from you.
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Our roles can be flexible in terms of work location in the UK. We will consider the individual’s preference for hybrid, remote or onsite working. We may be able to support remote working from a selection of other countries depending on location and the role you're applying to, so please reach out to see if that could be a possibility. If you wish to relocate to the UK and require sponsorship, we can support you with the visa process.
We have so many benefits, and we felt that if we listed them all out here it might look like we are bragging! What we can say is that we have you covered, from health and wellbeing, to finance and personal development, there is something there for everyone! If you would like to know more head to our benefits and perks page!
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