Pipeline TD (Pre-Production/Animation)

Description

The Technical Director at Skydance Animation is a member of the Production Technology team and will be responsible for developing and maintaining the studio animation pipeline, developing technical solutions to creative problems, as well as supporting artists for feature, short-form, and episodic productions. The Production Technology team provides the tools and capabilities for our artists to create animated content and be an expert in all third-party CGI software. The ideal candidate has experience building and supporting multiple pipelines in multiple environments, possesses excellent communication skills, and is able to quickly learn new workflows and technical skills.

Responsibilities

• Thoroughly understand the animation production process, both internal and when working with outsourced production vendors
• Own, improve, and support the production pipelines
• Regularly examine user experiences, satisfaction, and level of understanding to identify areas of improvement to the production pipelines
• Pitch pipeline improvement opportunities to studio leadership
• Break down pipeline changes by area of responsibility and coordinate delivery of the final solution across all stakeholders and development teams (R&D, Systems, Pipeline, etc.)
• Establish high-functioning levels of communication with creative and technical staff both within the studio and with external vendors and partners
• Liaise between production and technology departments, translating production needs into technical requests
• Collaborate with technical staff at vendor facilities to increase the efficiency of dailies, data exchange, and tracking
• Create automation and other tools to reduce the technical burden on creative staff
• Examine new and innovative technologies, evaluate and ultimately present how they could improve the pipeline
• Collaborate with IT and Systems Engineers to evaluate and integrate changes to the infrastructure
• Document tools and workflow and train creative staff on those processes
• Solve production issues that require technical expertise

• Undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Computer Graphics, or equivalent and/or experience to equal that level of technical and creative knowledge and professionalism
• Excellent communication and customer service skills, both verbal and written (required)
• Understanding of CGI concepts and workflows (required)
• Ability to work independently balancing multiple competing priorities (required)
• Experience with third party software packages: Adobe Photoshop, Foundry Flix, Autodesk Maya, Foundry Nuke, Autodesk Shotgun (required)
• Proficiency with Python scripting language (required)
• Experience in computer animation, visual effects, or the game industry (preferred)
• Experience, including pipeline and plugin development, with many third party VFX/Animation software packages (preferred)
• Experience with software development languages: Java, Javascript, C++, C#, Objective C, Swift (preferred)
• Experience with other toolkits and systems: Qt, Bootstrap, Docker, Git, AWS (preferred)
• Experience with OSX, Windows, and Linux operating systems (preferred)