XR Animator
Forward is seeking a motivated, passionate, and experienced animator to join our team as we build the future of storytelling in mixed reality and augmented reality at Universal Innovation. In this role, you will be hands-on with animating publicly-facing characters, objects, and environments that will be brought to life in products using emerging technologies for Universal’s breadth of film IP and other brands.
You will work in close collaboration with the Executive Producer, Creative Producer, Technologists, and Studio Executives to deliver digital experiences aimed to excite and entertain the next generation of consumers. A successful candidate will possess excellent animation abilities in a performant real-time engine context, is familiar with working at a large media industry company, and be solutions-oriented with strong communication skills.
Responsibilities:
Create believable animations for a wide range of characters, creatures, and subjects, based on storyboards, thumbnails, or video capture.
Collaborate across disciplines, working closely with designers, technical artists and engineers to create animation from conceptual phase to implementation.
Work with performance capture data to adapt it to project needs.
Set delivery specifications and evaluate deliverables for other artists and team members.
Manage work across multiple platforms: Asana, Notion, Miro, Figma, Google ecosystem, Slack
Requirements:
Comfortable with keyframe animation workflows across a wide range of styles, both realistic and stylized.
Experienced with procedural animation systems (e.g. state machines, blendshapes, timeline-based animation blending).
Has worked through an entire real-time production cycle for performant platforms (eg mobile games).
Ability to solve technical problems while thinking creatively.
Ability to anticipate, prioritize, and organize work to meet objectives.
Independent and self-managed, excellent communicator and team player.
Desired skills:
Experience creating animations for AR & VR experiences, with a deep understanding of constraints and best practices.
Experience working with decimated, optimized assets from higher-fidelity projects.
Experience with cleaning up animations from motion capture data.
Comfortable working on VFX-related tasks such as writing vertex and fragment shaders, creating technical art assets, designing particle emitters, etc.
Employment Terms:
Freelance flat-rate project-based
Working time zone Pacific Standard Time
Evenings and weekends as required
Payment terms - Net-30 upon receipt of invoices
Freelancers use own equipment to complete the tasks
Full Scope of work will be provided to review