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Senior Animator (External Development Dept / Apex Legends)

Respawn Entertainment is a AAA video game development studio that aspires to create new hit games that leave a lasting impact for gamers worldwide. Our work includes the critically acclaimed multi-platform games Apex Legends and Titanfall franchise. We developed the Star Wars™ action-adventure game Jedi: Fallen Order and virtual reality game Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond , and we are continuing development for our live free-to-play game, Apex Legends .

We are looking for a talented and experienced Senior Animator to join Respawn’s outsourcing team, helping to drive and steer the quality, style and tone of the animations being outsourced for Apex Legends.

What you will do…

• Work alongside our internal Apex Animation Team to create ‘emote’ animations for our Legends, that can be utilized as the quality benchmark
• Work closely with the Apex Animation Team to establish and develop all outsource related documentation, guidance and reference for our growing team of animation outsource partners
• Work with our production team to manage and coordinate the animation needs, across our internal domains including VFX, Art (props), Rigging and Audio teams.
• Integrate all externally created animation assets (characters and props) into the build during various stages of development
• Able to take externally created animations and adapt them when necessary, including; additional polish passes and fixes required to work in the game (prop setups, VFX tags etc)
• Work with Production to collate animation feedback, from both yourself and the internal Apex Animation Team, and help to communicate this information to our outsource partners
• Help to identify pain-points both internally and externally, with a view to finding viable solutions and maintaining both creativity and productivity
• Proactively assess our processes and tools to help improve the outsourcing pipeline
• Be involved with conceptual animation related initiatives within Apex, that could become potential outsourcing opportunities in the future

Ideally you will have…

• 5+ years of professional game development experience
• Experience working with a wide range of characters that have distinct, unique personality traits and behaviors
• Experience working with outsource vendors focusing on animation (ideally within the context of ‘emotes’) – providing feedback and establishing efficient pipelines
• A strong understanding of video game animation development
• A high level of proficiency with Maya (Motion Builder is beneficial but not necessary)
• An advanced level of key-framing ability, especially with bipedal/human characters (experience animating creatures is also beneficial)
• An advanced understanding of motion editing (re-posing, re-timing and plusing mocap data)
• Experience creating documentation and sourcing reference material that provides detailed guidance for animators
• A solid level of technical animation proficiency, including experience working with complex animation props, implementing and tweaking animations in the build and problem solving/bug fixing animations.
• Experience collaborating with and communicating across multiple domains - especially Rigging, VFX, Art and Audio teams