The Lighting Technical Director is responsible for supporting creative and visual objectives through pipeline troubleshooting, user support, technical direction, and tool development.
What You’ll Do:
- Understand the visual requirements for productions and suggest new technologies, or design procedures, techniques, and tools that will enable these to be met.
- Provide technical expertise and guidance for technology within the relevant production craft groups, especially Lighting and rendering stakeholders.
- Participate in or lead the direction, evolution & maintenance of technology within the relevant production craft groups .
- Design, develop, and write well-maintainable and consistently high-quality code.
- Track, debug and resolve workflow issues in partnership with TAs, Lead TDs, Technical Supervisors, Associate Technical Supervisors, Solutions Engineers and R&D.
- Work closely with other TDs on your team to drive the technical success of key development initiatives.
- Ensure that technology, tools, and procedures support the creative process.
- Provide solutions to visual problems through existing tools or by leading the implementation of new tools.
- Help debug and optimize misbehaving or poorly performing renders.
- Take responsibility for the troubleshooting & optimization of tools, software, and workflows.
- Actively participate in or drive QA, technical testing, and validation of new technology, tool releases, or pipeline changes, such that artist workflow is not impacted.
- Understand the processes of adjoining departments, provide input where required to maximise pipeline efficiency and quality.
- Actively participate in brainstorming and problem-solving, contributing technical expertise and insight, to create and maintain technology within the canonical production pipeline.
- Support the organisation’s overall technical goals as required.
- Be aware of the deadlines for development initiatives and actively engage in keeping these on track.
- Continuously monitor the scope of development initiatives and help to ensure scope adjustments have additional estimates, etc.
- Prioritise and break down technical projects into organised parts.
- Provide technical guidance to other TDs and TAs, where appropriate, with day-to-day issues and escalation through the right channels when necessary.
- Mentor more junior team members and assist in orientation with new starters.
- Create synergies between different work groups to promote efficiency and optimization and to generate innovative ideas and approaches to how we do things
What You’ll Need:
- 5+ years of proven pipeline TD experience in large-scale animated features, animated TV series, the gaming industry, and/or VFX feature films.
- Solid production/industry experience as a TD, ideally as part of a team.
- An understanding of traditional techniques appropriate to the relevant craft groups.
- Good software development skills and understanding of department workflows and technology.
- Ability to code review and troubleshoot problems as they arise.
- Knowledge in Python as well as PyQt or another GUI toolkit.
- Knowledge of concepts like data flow, data dependencies, metadata, publishing, and retrieval.
- A familiarity with the principles of computer graphics including rendering, scene representation, color and image processing.
- Familiarity with C++ or Swift is a plus.
- A strong understanding of USD and its general concepts is a plus.
- Knowledge of Flow Production Tracking (shotgrid).
- Knowledge of code management software such as git and github and code review processes.
- Knowledge of software development practices such as Agile and how to apply them in software such as Jira.
- Degree in Animation, Film, Computer Science, Design, Engineering, Math or Physics, or equivalent combination of education & work experience in animation/VFX.
