Senior Animator

Job Description

Your Platform:

Located in the San Francisco Bay Area, Melbourne, Australia, Toronto, Canada and Guildford, UK – Sledgehammer Games is the videogame development team behind Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare 3, Call of Duty®: Advanced Warfare and Call of Duty®: WWII. Since our founding in 2009, our greatest passion has been making AAA games. The strength of our team makes us not only excellent at what we do, but also how we do it. We firmly believe in supporting our passionate employees to be the best they can be. Here at Sledgehammer Games, everyone is a game maker.

We are constantly evolving and innovating – which are some of the most rewarding aspects of game development. With our extraordinary audio, design, engineering and art teams, we've been able to achieve some of the highest-quality game execution of any studio in the industry. We love making games and we work hard to make sure that each new game we make is even better than the last. Creativity is key, and we're looking for dedicated game developers for our exciting next project.

Sledgehammer Games is wholly owned by Activision. To learn more about our studio, please visit us at www.sledgehammergames.com or search for Sledgehammer Games on your favorite social media platform. Want to hear what it's like at the studio directly from current employees? Check out our #LifeatSHG developer profiles: https://youtu.be/12DUBszg-w4

Your Mission

As a Senior Animator, you will become part of a tight-knit team that prides itself on creating in-game and cinematic animations that are sophisticated and believable. Working with the department lead, you will receive shot assignments or animation tasks that contribute to furthering understanding of character and/or action and advance the emotional and gameplay goals of the project. Completing your work will require you to build relationships with many production disciplines, such as Design, Engineering, and Environment, as you all collaborate to achieve the best visual and narrative results for each game.

Priorities can often change in a fast-paced environment like ours, so this role includes, but is not limited to, the following responsibilities:
• Use traditional animation fundamentals to craft game motions that range from stylized to hyper-realistic.
• Demonstrate a strong understanding of camera animation and cinematic framing, as well as shot continuity and facial animation.
• Respond well to feedback and be willing to iterate multiple times to achieve the polish level we need to deliver AAA titles.
• Troubleshoot tool implementations and spearhead workflow improvements in order to increase the efficiency and creativity of the team.

Player Profile

Minimum Requirements:
• 5 years professional animation experience
• 2+ years of experience specifically as a game animator
• Familiarity with the animation integration process and animation state machines
• Knowledge of Cinematic and Motion Capture Editing and cleanup
• Strong animation fundamentals with a focus on human movement
• Ability to adapt to new tools and tech
• Excellent skills animating in the Maya environment
• Strong problem-solving skills both technical and cross-department
• Ability to mentor Junior Animators
• Ability to think philosophically about character movement

Extra Points:
• An understanding of character creation (modeling, texturing, and rigging) is a bonus.
• An interest in participating in live previs shoots to help clarify tone, choreography, and pacing for mocap actors

We love hearing from anyone who is enthusiastic about changing the games industry. Not sure you meet all qualifications? Let us decide! Research shows that women and members of other under-represented groups tend to not apply to jobs when they think they may not meet every qualification, when, in fact, they often do! At Activision Blizzard, we are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment and strongly encourage you to apply

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Jobcode: Reference SBJ-r0e88m-3-136-18-48-42 in your application.