Producer, Animation

Summary We are seeking an Animation Producer to join our team and support the development of high-quality character animation for a new IP AAA open world game. As an Animation Producer at Absurd Ventures, you will work closely with Animation, Design, Engineering, Art, and Production to organize and drive animation work from planning through implementation. You will help manage schedules, priorities, dependencies, and communication across the Animation team, ensuring that work is clearly defined, appropriately scoped, and progressing toward project milestones goals. The ideal candidate is highly organized, proactive, detail-oriented, understands animation workflows, and comfortable working with creative and technical teams in a fast-paced game development environment. Core Responsibilities - Partner closely with Animation leadership and the Animation team to plan, organize, and track animation work across project milestones. - Build and maintain production schedules, task breakdowns, and delivery plans for animation features and content. - Manage day-to-day animation production, ensuring priorities, ownership, dependencies, hand-offs and next steps are clear to the team. - Track animation work through development, from initial planning and asset creation through implementation, review, polish, and completion. - Work with Animators, Designers, Engineers, Technical Animators, and other disciplines to identify and coordinate cross-functional dependencies. - Facilitate regular team meetings, reviews, planning sessions, and other production rituals, ensuring decisions and action items are captured and followed through. - Identify scheduling risks, blockers, and production issues early and work with the appropriate team members to develop solutions. - Maintain accurate and up-to-date production information in Jira and other project tracking and documentation tools. - Help ensure animation requirements and deliverables are clearly defined and appropriately scoped and communicated before work begins. - Coordinate with other Producers to ensure animation schedules and dependencies are aligned with broader gameplay, cinematic, character, and project goals. - Support milestone planning, status reporting, and forecasting for the Animation team. - Help improve production processes and workflows to increase clarity, predictability, and efficiency while preserving creative iteration. - Foster clear communication and strong collaboration across Animation and its partner disciplines. Core Qualifications - 3+ years of production experience in the video game industry. - Experience supporting a game development team through multiple phases of production. - Strong understanding of game development pipelines and the dependencies between Animation, Design, Engineering, Art, and other disciplines. - Experience building and maintaining schedules, tracking deliverables, managing dependencies, and identifying production risks. - Experience with production tracking and documentation tools such as Jira and Confluence. - Strong organizational skills with exceptional attention to detail and follow-through. - Ability to manage multiple priorities and adapt effectively as project needs change. - Strong communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to work effectively across creative and technical disciplines. - A proactive, solutions-oriented approach to identifying and resolving production challenges. Plus if... - Previous production experience specifically supporting an Animation team. - Experience working on a AAA, open-world, or large-scale 3D game. - Familiarity with character animation pipelines, including gameplay animation, locomotion, traversal, combat, cinematics, or motion capture. - Experience working with Unreal Engine or supporting teams developing content in Unreal Engine. - Familiarity with motion capture planning, shoots, processing, and implementation workflows. - Experience coordinating animation dependencies across Design, Engineering, Character Art, Technical Animation, and Cinematics. - Experience working with external animation vendors or outsourcing partners. - Experience supporting milestone planning and forecasting on a large multidisciplinary development team. Description - Full-time job with benefits. - Role is on-site in Santa Monica, CA. - Office is located near downtown Santa Monica – near metro and freeways. The base pay range for this position is $115,000 to $125,000 per year. Actual compensation is based on market location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. We also offer a competitive package of benefits including vacation time, sick time, company holidays, parental leave, medical/dental/vision insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, and 401(k) matching to regular full-time employees. Certain roles may also be eligible for bonus and equity.