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Lead Animator - Permanent

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 a highly skilled Lead Animator to join our growing team. You will have a significant role to play in driving, directing, and crafting all aspects of producing, responsive, compelling, and high-quality animations that elevate our gameplay and cinematics. The right person will have a passion for the craft as well as the game in development. Helps to build, mentor, and creatively develop a varied specialised animation team.

This is 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 high quality, responsive, captivating, and performant animation across our projects, all whilst amplifying our artistic value at scale.
• Establish and drive Animation Direction / Style, Quality and ‘feel on the sticks’ for all the animators on our projects.
• To be responsible for our team’s and partner’s ability to implement and achieve that quality bar with clear, concise, written, and verbal guidance and feedback.
• Lead by example, creating keyframe or motion capture-based benchmark quality animations to demonstrate visual and technical quality as reference for the animation team.
• Work closely with Art Leadership and Art Leads to resolve visual performances of our characters that will meet both Art Direction, Gameplay needs or Rigging.
• Collaborate closely with Engineering to spearhead our ground breaking proprietary Animation Engine; or with Design to propose and contribute gameplay systems, or to improve existing ones.
• Ensure an efficient production for our Gameplay and Cinematic animation, being accountable for developing and maintaining the team’s processes, workflows, documentation, and confirming expectations are accurate, communicated and understood.
• Work closely with Animation Supervisor to ensure team goals, art requirements and field schedules are widely understood, defined, and the approach is scalable and flexible to meet our global development demands. This includes understanding and informing the teams budgets and costs.
• Collaborate with Animation Supervisor and Art Management to build, source and extend our team with global AAA talent. Helping support, onboard and train our external partners, whilst reviewing and ensuring ultimate quality.
• Support the Animation Supervisor in ensuring the team are offered consistent guidance, mentorship, opportunities, and resources to develop and thrive. Including participating in continually evaluating performance and providing constructive feedback for team and partners.
• When required assist or deputise for the Animation Supervisor in all aspects of production, recruitment, and organisational needs of the field.

Essential Knowledge & Skills

• A creative at heart, the candidate must have hands-on experience in planning, creating, running, and delivering high-performance, high-quality animation for AAA titles.
• Ability to recognise quality and excellence and be able to support animation content that meets the highest standards of quality, performance, and polish.
• Great communication skills (both verbal and written), with an ability to engage with a multi-disciplined development team, production partners and understand when pushback is required.
• Expert understanding of animation systems and development. Including but not limited to game engines, pipelines, technical limitations, blend trees and state machines.
• Proficiency in key frame animation.
• Experience in all aspects Motion Capture from planning to on-set direction and data post-production/implementation.
• Someone with a pro-active and nurturing mentality, conducive to the mentoring and objective critiquing of a growing Art Department.

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.

We believe exceptional games and quality comes from a happy, productive, and creative team with clear objectives. That is why our Art Leads are essential roles that are uniquely complex in that they are at the forefront of creative, development, and technology, but it’s about truly building a best-in-class team internally and amongst our external partners.

Supervision

In this role you will be expected to build out the team, so we need someone who is a self-starter and a phenomenal teammate. We are hoping you are the type of Manager who leads, constantly wants to improve, and can motivate, empower, and steer a team.

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!