WHY AN ANIMATor COLLABORATOR?
(yay, i’m so glad you asked!)
protect your project
Animation scope and process issues can balloon into disaster for your game’s deadlines and polish.
I’d love to help you create a realistic plan while balancing your creative vision. My goal is to proactively build a healthy path toward production!
support your team
Without animation involved in the planning and ideating process, character and gameplay work often suffers.
Listen, it’s a common and unavoidable situation due to budget constraints. Allow me to bridge that discipline gap while you gather your dream animation team.
retain your leads
Animation leaders are often burned out, stretched too thin, and hard to find.
While I wish this wasn’t even a thing, I’m here to offer empathetic, experienced support. I know what it’s like to juggle a thousand context switches, so I’ll lighten the mental and technical load for your beloved teammates.
who are you even???
Hello! I’m Esther (she/her), your favorite animator collaborator :)
Since 2012, I’ve worked across a diverse range of studio sizes, project types, team structures, and have built my career in both the individual contributor and leadership routes in the gameplay animation discipline.
Regardless of the context, I’ve noticed many similarities between the struggles that popped up at different studios, as well as how it’s very difficult to resolve them on top of actually, you know, making the actual game and maintaining your team health.
I treasure the community and relief that games can offer people. And I would love for more of these valuable experiences to reach the world, in a way that supports the human developers behind the game.
So hey, I’m here to help you and your teammates Make The Fun Thing while minimizing the not-fun things -
the goalS, the values, AND the vibes
GOALS
Contribute to the game industry’s shift toward a more sustainable way of making games - one that preserves our well-being and creative joy.
VALUES
Approach with curiosity and inclusivity
Creative work without the burn-out
Contextual, proactive problem-solving
Compassionate accountability
VIBES
Cheerfully analytical
Practical creativity
Probably too enthusiastic about karaoke and BTS
experience
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It’s important to me that content teammates have the space to easily make-the-thing, vs spending half of their time slogging through crusty workflows!
At Hi-Rez, Bioware, Possibility Space, and continuing on with my clients’ studios, part of my work was spent improving areas such as the import/export roundtrip to the game engine with tech artists, refining DCC animation tools with riggers, standardizing iteration process with production, and designing animation debug systems with gameplay engineers.
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I care a lot about aligning goals with reality, and ensuring gameplay and character work is planned from a holistic, cross-discipline level!
In both my time as a lead and director, I partnered heavily with production and fellow discipline leaders to do work like translate project goals into tangible work, flexible roadmaps, and design healthy hand-off/iteration practices across the character pipeline and gameplay pipeline.
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I believe gameplay animation can’t happen in a bubble, and successful gameplay itself can’t happen without design + animation partnership!
My entire career has always been spent in active, day-to-day collaboration with gameplay design teammates. Examples include designing animation personalities to highlight gameplay archetypes for players, finding a successful balance between responsiveness and animation time, or even designing core ability suites and hit reaction metrics together.
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It’s important to me that gameplay animators are empowered to at least import and test their own work in game, as that not only lets us work within player context, but also removes the animation bottleneck to our other gameplay teammates.
From my time working heavily in Frostbite and ANT, as well as Unreal 5, I’m deeply familiar with the in-engine work to design and or implement animation content, systems, and stateflows.