Animator

**Company Overview**:
A leader in creating deep and engaging experiences on PC and mobile, Jagex was founded in 2001 and is today one of the UK’s biggest and most respected video game developers and publishers.

Famed for its flagship MMOs RuneScape and Old School RuneScape, Jagex has welcomed more than 260million player accounts to its world and created a $1bn lifetime franchise revenue. Today the RuneScape franchise exists beyond running games in live operations; our titles are living games that connect and inspire millions of players, with content and experiences both inside and outside of inexhaustible game worlds.

Both RuneScape and Old School RuneScape, on PC and mobile, offer ever-evolving, highly-active worlds and our community-focussed development ethos empowers players to have a real say in how each game is shaped.

Jagex is expanding and extending its portfolio with fresh franchise titles, new IP and, in 2018 launched Jagex Partners, delivering third-party publishing and operational services exclusively for the living games of the future.

Jagex employs more than 400 people at its Cambridge headquarters and is on the hunt for talented people to work across the business to help the company to achieve yet another year of record growth and player satisfaction.

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THE JOB AND THE TEAM*
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This is a fantastic opportunity for an animator looking for a varied and challenging role that encourages creative input, teamwork, and personal development. The successful applicant will join an experienced team of artists, working on our flagship PC and mobile title, RuneScape.

**Working within our talented art team, you will**:

- Create, develop, and refine high quality 3D animations across creatures, human characters, and locations in Maya
- Ensure the animation quality and style is maintained through all projects within your own and colleagues work, via feedback
- Provide feedback to all animators in the team in group reviews and more junior members of the team in day-to-day production
- Work with more senior animators and the lead to develop your own creative and technical skill set
- Work with more junior animators to develop their creative and technical skill set
- Work closely with Content Developers to ensure animations are correctly implemented in the game engine
- Work with Tools Developers to troubleshoot and improve existing in-house tools
- Work with Technical Artists to troubleshoot and improve existing workflows

**What we're looking for on your reel**:

- We are primarily looking for animators who can create exciting, characterful human and creature keyframe animation with a developed sense of spacing and timing, exaggeration, and stylisation.
- Specifically, we want to see that you can create high quality character animation, across locomotion, traversal, and combat.
- After that, cinematics and facial performances are a bonus with motion capture also of interest to us. Also, we really value life drawing to further demonstrate an understanding of key poses and anatomy. So, if you have life drawing examples, please include them

**What we need**:

- Excellent key frame animation skills across creatures, set pieces and human characters
- A great eye for dynamic spacing/timing, squash and stretch and smearing
- Experience in Maya animation production, particularly for games
- An excellent demo reel that adequately reflects this experience, showing examples across a broad range of creatures and characters
- A keen interest in games, game animation and animation in general
- The ability to give and take critique, helping yourself and the team to develop
- To take direction and work with the Lead Animator and Art director to maintain game style and quality personally, and across the team
- To be proactive and take responsibility for keeping assets optimised, organised, and functioning in-game as required
- To maintain a good level of communication with all relevant team members throughout animation production and implementation

**Even better if**:

- Good knowledge of animation implementation (blend trees, state machines etc) in UE, Unity or equivalent
- Experience rigging and weighting characters in Maya
- Degree in Animation
- Traditional animation skills
- Traditional 2D art skills

We can only consider applicants who include evidence of their work, along with breakdowns in an online format such as personal website, blog, Github, or online album

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Company Benefits: *

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Flexible Working
- Bonus Scheme
- Private Health Care
- Gym Membership
- Generous Pension Contributions
- Life Insurance
- Free Cycle Repair
- Income Protection
- Dental Plan
- Free Fruit and Drinks
- Subsidised Canteen