Lead Cinematic Animator — AAA Game Experiences

Hasbro; Montreal West; On-site; CAD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Skeleton Key Montreal is seeking a Principal Cinematic Animator to lead high-quality cinematic moments for our first AAA game, blending performance capture and keyframe work to deliver immersive storytelling.

Reporting to the Animation Director, you will shape staging, camera work, and shot composition, previsualize sequences, and collaborate closely with cinematics, design, and engineering teams to craft compelling narrative experiences for players.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional experience in cinematic animation for games or film.
• Strong understanding of cinematic principles, pacing, camera movement and character performance.
• High-level experience cleaning and polishing performance capture data.
• Excellent keyframe animation skills.
• Experience with Unreal Engine, Maya, MotionBuilder or comparable software.

Responsibilities

• Create high-quality cinematic animation using motion capture and keyframe techniques.
• Collaborate with the Cinematic Director to define staging, camera work, and shot composition for cinematic sequences.
• Previsualize cinematic sequences to support motion capture shoots.
• Clean up and polish motion capture performances to a high level of fidelity.
• Refine facial animation, including expressions, eyelines, and hand-keyed acting beats.
• Craft interactive cinematic moments in collaboration with the Design team.
• Contribute to building and maintaining an animation library for systemic narrative content.
• Support implementation, maintenance, and debugging of cinematic animation systems, and help improve related pipelines and tools.

Skills

Cinematic animation

Keyframe animation

Unreal Engine

Motion capture

Team collaboration

Tools

Unreal Engine

Maya

MotionBuilder

Job description

Skeleton Key Montreal is seeking a Principal Cinematic Animator to lead high-quality cinematic moments for our first AAA game, blending performance capture and keyframe work to deliver immersive storytelling.

Reporting to the Animation Director, you will shape staging, camera work, and shot composition, previsualize sequences, and collaborate closely with cinematics, design, and engineering teams to craft compelling narrative experiences for players.