About the Company:
Focused on the future of filmmaking, Wonder Dynamics is an LA-based start up founded by Actor/Producer, Tye Sheridan who’s starred in films like Ready Player One, X-Men: Apocalypse, Mud and VFX Supervisor/Filmmaker Nikola Todorovic. Their mission is to revolutionize the production and post-production process by leveraging state-of-the-art AI. They are striving to democratize the use of visual effects which will pave the way for the next generation of filmmakers. That mission attracted some of the most influential individuals in the film and tech industry that are now involved in their team.
Wonder Dynamics is backed by Epic Games, Samsung, Horizons Ventures (a Hong Kong VC firm with early investments in Skype, Siri, Facebook and more) and Founders Fund, a leading Silicon Valley VC that funded some giants like Space X, Facebook, Spotify, DeepMind, etc.)
Their Advisory Board consists of leaders in Hollywood and Silicon Valley:
- Joshua Baer, founder/CEO of Capital Factory;
- Terry Dougas, Producer and financier of Film and TV. Founder of Rhea Films,1821 Media
- Angjoo Kanazawa, assistant professor at UC Berkeley and Google research scientist;
- Joe Russo Director, screenwriter, and Producer (directed Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame)
- Robert Schwab - Private equity investor, President, and CEO of R&L Properties.
- Steven Spielberg - Film director, producer, and screenwriter
- Antonio Torralba - Professor and Head of AI and Decision making, EECS, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
- Gregory Trattner - President, Film Finances Inc. (World leader in completion guarantees and film services)
About the Position:
The Lead Character Artist will be helping establish and maintain quality of character art, while guiding our high-caliber team of artists to create authentic characters and memorable creatures for our content creation platform by high visual standards defined by the Art Director. The lead sets the example by the creation of art assets, and a mastery of proprietary technology and tools.
You will be a key driver of the platform's creative vision and will help define the overall look and feel of a wide variety of characters, creatures, hard surface characters, and others. Aside from the creative freedom to design awesome high end characters, you would be helping out implementing new production methods and balancing the quality and efficiency of colleague artists and teams work to reach the best results within given time frames.
We strongly believe in artists' empowerment, so the artist will have a very high level of creative freedom when making characters. We like to enable artists to create characters that they prefer to make when they work on their passion projects. This is not a position where you are told what to do and don't have creative freedom!
Responsibilities:
- Work directly with the Founding team and Creative Director to refine the look and feel of characters for the project.
- Collaborate with diverse teams consisting of Technical Artists, Artists, and Machine Learning Engineers.
- Create high quality character models and textures, including cinematic assets
- A chance to learn and stay up to date on bleeding edge AI and ML pipelines
- Collaborate with the concept and design teams in planning asset production
- Lead, task, mentor and conduct one-to-one meetings with colleague Character Artists
- Update technical documents for the character art team
- Participate in milestone planning and reviews
- Provide mentorship for junior team members
- Review work from external partners and provide feedback
Qualifications:
- An inspiring portfolio demonstrating strong conceptual ideas and visual creativity to form original characters
- Proven experience leading teams in the development and release of successful 3D Characters for Games or TV/Film production
- Expert knowledge in standard art packages such as Maya, Blender, 3Ds Max, Zbrush, Substance Designer, etc.
- Knowledgeable of the real-time art production pipeline & process for different asset creation types (Unreal Engine)
- Able to develop, interpret, and clearly communicate artistic direction and feedback to guide and mentor a highly skilled team.
- Exceptional understanding and application of form, shape, structure, and silhouette in regard to modeling with an excellent eye for light, shade, color, and detail.
- A passion for deep, compelling science fiction stories & characters
Why should you consider joining us?
At the intersection of film and technology, this job will offer a very unique experience, and you will be exposed to a diverse set of fields spanning from film production and visual effects to AI, machine learning, and computer vision. Because we are operating in the state-of-the-art territory, there will always be something new to learn on the horizon. We highly value our team and the support of our co-workers and strive to create the best environment to work in.
We offer a competitive salary, valuable stock options and comprehensive benefits that allow individual flexibility for all employees to choose what makes the most sense for their personal situation.
Wonder Dynamics is committed to a culture of flexibility, diversity, and fun for all of our employees. We are working on some of the most challenging technical problems and we know the solutions will come from all of us working together in an inclusive, transparent and open manner.