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Character Animator

EA SPORTS is one of the leading sports entertainment brands in the world, with top-selling videogame franchises, award-winning interactive technology, fan programs, and cross-platform digital experiences. EA SPORTS creates connected experiences that ignite the emotion of sport through industry-leading sports video games, including Madden NFL football, FIFA soccer, NHL® hockey, NBA LIVE basketball, and EA SPORTS UFC .

Animators portray movement and behavior by building their animations from concept through production, at multiple points in the asset pipeline. In EA SPORTS, most often their skill is used to give life to the human characters in the game, but sometimes, animations are also applied to objects, scenery, vegetation, environmental effects, and other objects. Animators will create emotionally believable characters that allow gamers to work with the game, in a realistic and believable fashion. In a game like Madden, the gamer expects the animated action to be a realistic representation of the action they would see in an actual football game. They also believe that the narrative moments should be true to the sport that is represented.

EA Animators use specialized software packages, including Maya, Motion Builder, and our proprietary animation engine to create the animations for in-game behaviors, predefined sequences (or cut scenes) and narrative cinematics. Other responsibilities would include creating animation blending, tagging, state transitions, compression, prop integration and camera authoring.

What skills does EA look for?

EA looks for Animators who demonstrate proficiency in animation packages including Maya, Motion Builder, and experience with proprietary or commercially available game engines such as Unity or Unreal. You will work with proprietary animation run-time integration tools. We also look for animators that are knowledgeable in the technical aspects of rigging and skinning characters for animation, have an ability to animate the human form, giving the character weight, personality, mood, and believability and are comfortable animating in realistic and stylized motion. Demonstrating an understanding of classic animation principles and fundamentals is a must. Candidates should be well organized and have strong communication skills. Knowledge of camera work, prop integrations, mocap processing and Shotgun is a plus.

The Animator should know how to reveal attitude, emotions, and mood through a character's movement and behavior, and can create memorable characters to appeal to players and have knowledge of the timing and appearance of human and animal movement and facial expressions. At EA, Animators usually have a degree in Fine Arts or Computer Animation. Some knowledge of programming is desirable.