About the role

We're looking for a freelance senior creature animator from May - September/October who can move fluently between two animation contexts on the same production:

Cinematic / pre-rendered Linear, narrated, projection content. You'll bring hero creatures to life (Dinosaurs) with the weight, timing, and performance in their natural habitat.

Real-time / interactive Large-scale projections built in Unreal Engine 5 that respond to audience presence via tracking cameras. You'll author idle loops, key behavioural anchors, and reactive animations that make each creature feel like a living animal sharing space with the user.

What you'll do

• Animate hero creatures to a high standard of behavioural and anatomical accuracy
• Deliver cinematic shot animation, working from blockout, script, storyboards, and direction.
• Author modular, loopable, blendable real-time animation sets - idles, transitions, and reactive "key anchor" behaviours triggered by audience proximity
• Animate using a pre-built rig produced by the rigging team in Maya - no rigging work is expected from this role, but you should be comfortable raising rig issues and working closely with riggers to refine controls
• Ensure consistency between pre-rendered and real-time deliverables so the same creature reads as the same character across both
• Collaborate closely with riggers, technical animators, Unreal developers, and sound designers
• Take animation from blockout through to final polish

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional creature / character animation, with strong quadruped and large-scale animal work
• A reel demonstrating cinematic animation craft - weight, timing, silhouette, performance, camera-aware staging
• Fluency in Maya 2024 - this is the primary animation DCC for the project
• Comfort working from blockouts, storyboard, references, and direction
• A track record of shipping creature animation on a production with a published bar for quality

Bonus

• Prior experience on games, museum, themed entertainment, or location-based experiences
• Experience authoring real-time animation for Unreal Engine 5: state machines, blend spaces, animation montages, root motion, and animation Blueprints
• Experience animating with Zoo Tools rigs, or with comparable advanced auto-rig systems and a willingness to come up to speed quickly
• An interest in natural history, wildlife reference, or paleoart
• Pre-visualisation, layout, or virtual camera experience

To apply

Please send the following to studio@neonbadger.studio with the email subject [Freelance - Animator]

• Your animation reel / portfolio (please flag creature and quadruped work, especially Dinosaurs)
• Your top-line daily and weekly rates

We're currently finalising the script, and we'll ask shortlisted animators to quote a flat-rate based on this.

Thanks!