Character Art Manager

Sony PlayStation Studios Visual Arts provides world-class content, development and services to PlayStation Studio development teams. The Visual Arts team works on the industry's leading game titles, at the forefront of technology. We partner with award-winning and industry-leading game development studios in art and animation support. This is an opportunity to work closely with interactive industry professionals from all over the world in a dynamic environment.

As we expand our team in Malaysia, we seek an experienced, qualified and motivated candidate to manage and guide our art staff in our Kuala Lumpur Malaysia-based location. The candidate should be proficient in high-quality art processes and team management in the video game industry. Deep collaboration with the stakeholders internally and the global management group to strategically support the organization's work and initiatives.

This is a people management position and will have direct reports with the expectation to guide a staff at various stages in their career to evolve as a team and on individual discipline trajectory.

Be an organized and diligent leader, strategic, and thoughtful in all interactions and communications. The candidate should be dedicated, focused, self-motivated, collaborative, and possess relevant experience in team management, strategic staffing, problem solving, career progression and team building.

This role will orchestrate efforts and requirements with the Production team and Art disciplines with the Visual Arts teams in Malaysia and North America to achieve AAA quality results on-time and on-budget to support the needs of PlayStation.

The art management team covers a wide range of complex disciplines. To focus, specialize and properly support the teams and initiatives, the Character and Scan Art Manager would specifically oversee the team members working in photogrammetry post processing, character modeling, texturing, surfacing, shading, clothing and costume creation including scan and bespoke processes, deformation rigging for faces and bodies.

This role reports to the Visual Arts Senior Director.

We support a hybrid workplace environment.

Responsibilities and Role Requirements:

Staffing:

• Actively participate in talent recruiting including refining JDs, interviews, active sourcing.
• Partner with talent acquisition and Art disciplines leads to interview, evaluate, acquire, and retain top talent.
• Retain and build upon the talented team producing high-quality art from a range of disciplines.
• Mentor artists of multiple disciplines and define recruiting targets for HR (Human Resources) and recruiting to support a balanced team.
• This is a people management position that supports team growth and individual career progression.

Production:

• Excellent verbal, visual, and written communication skills. A balanced skillset between business development/strategy, technical knowledge, and people management.
• Support the creative vision of our clients and the internal Supervisors while collaborating with studio management, internal artists, and outsourcing partners to maintain velocity, schedule and budget.
• Collaborate to develop onboarding and skills training initiatives focused on improved performance on project work and long-term growth.
• Document and communicate expectations and goals and supply leadership and guidance to artists. Guide members through the performance review process.
• Significant Scheduling, Budgeting, and Outsourcing experience.
• Work with the Supervisors and Production team to develop staffing for projects and Visual Arts studio goals.
• Anticipate and organize team requests for ongoing hardware and software to Studio Operations and Production.
• Continuously improve team members technical and human competencies so the team can manage and deliver high fidelity deliverables to achieve AAA results.
• Collaborate strategic efforts with our Visual Arts teams in North America and be the point-of-contact partner on the Malaysia side for this globally distributed effort.
• Exposure and practical familiarity with Jira, Confluence, Perforce, Aspera, ShotGrid, Google Suite and Office365.

Management/Strategy:

• Active participant in management meetings and communications amongst Visual Arts management in North America and Malaysia.
• Develop and communicate strategy for the Art Department; successfully execute initiatives that would improve and maintain efficiency, reduce artists’ idle time.
• Work with Supervisors and Production to identify, develop or refine workflows.
• Constantly and proactively strive to improve production processes, tools and pipelines for art and service disciplines.
• Guide plans for service development in new discipline areas, lead internal business plans for art services and pipelines.
• Evaluate opportunities to improve processes to workflow, communication and team skill development.
• Create polished presentations and proposals to effectively communicate department goals across locations and site-specific.
• Expected to be capable of travelling to United States and potentially PlayStation locations around the world.

Qualifications:

• 10+ years' experience in game or film production and have led or supervised teams on simultaneous, multiple projects.
• Experience with requirements for AAA game assets development and execution.
• Bachelor of art, degree in business, or equivalent industry experience.
• Possess experience, skills, and knowledge to manage a team of 3D artists and technical artists working with photogrammetry and material scan data, sculpted character head, bodies and clothing, as they pertain to the creation of AAA character art assets.
• Knowledge of the terminology, processes and software packages associated with these disciplines is required.
• Understand various art functions and dependencies within a game art pipeline, and how to organize and supervise artists to collaborate and carry out their assignments.
• Excellent understanding of how engineering and technical art work within the organization, and how to collaborate with engineers to define request for tools and technical support.
• Possess strong technical knowledge and experience in 3D computer graphics production.
• Understand production requirements for scheduling, communication, risk management.

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