In brief:
- Senior Animator / Animation Producer for a multi-award winning creative agency near Cambridge
- Full breadth involvement in projects; strategy, creative direction and development through to delivery.
- Predominantly 2D with additional opportunities for design / illustration work and 3D animation
- Ambitious and dynamic team, opportunities for continuous personal development and mentoring others.
- High spec industrial office space with studio, plus agency owned cafe on site. (opening Spring 2021).
- Ideal candidates will be highly experienced, creatively talented and familiar with agency / client workflows.

In full:
Hello from the team at Somersault! We're a successful and dynamic creative agency, working with large international clients on high importance campaigns and content driven comms programmes. Our HQ is a few miles south of Cambridge, in the heart of the world famous tech / biotech cluster. It's a pretty interesting neighbourhood, combining big guns like Amazon, Apple and AstraZeneca with extraordinary tech start ups and scale ups.

Over the last 8 years we've been very busy and we've achieved a lot, including being named the UK's leading video agency by the Drum (ahem, three years in a row), and winning various other awards as a high calibre small business and a leading employer. But that's just the beginning - we're an ambitious team and much more that we want to do; maybe you could be a part of the next chapter?

As it has been for almost all businesses 2020 has been pretty different for us but our core business has performed well and we've adapted and innovated too - and it's resulted in us winning new clients and launching new services. We've also reimagined our workspace; over the last 8 months have added a 100sqm live streaming studio and we're opening a stunning 300sqm cafe at our site too. So we're heading into 2021 feeling optimistic, and looking forward to getting back to some of the things we've missed in 2020!

Anyway, enough about us, over to you...
We're looking for a multi-skilled Senior Animator / Animation Producer with an impressive showreel of work and the creative flair to produce captivating and engaging animated content coupled with strong design skills. Working within our creative services department, the role will see you combining your skills in animation and design across the full project breadth; from initial client exploration, through creative development and into full project delivery.

Our current team say the following are the things they like most about the position:
- Working across a wide variety of campaigns for some of the world's largest brand and the freedom and responsibility to propose design routes and ideas that I conceive and create..
- Collaborating with an amazing team of ambitious creatives that all look to push boundaries and think big.
- Progression opportunities within a dynamic and fast-moving company and the chance to help others develop too.
- Our brilliant company culture that enables and encourages you to do your best work with maximum flexibility.

Our team describe our culture and values in various ways - supportive, ambitious, creatively driven, fun, team first, open and honest, hard working, committed, flexible, humble but confident. Suffice to say you'll fit in well if these sorts of things align with your values and you're looking to bring your very best to a new challenge in 2021.

Essential skills and experience:
- Strong all round skills as a lead animator on client briefed projects; from initial ideas and design routes, storyboards through the various stages of delivery to final sign off.
- Ability to translate scripts and bullet point narratives into compelling and enhancing visual designs and ideas.
- Highly skilled in After Effects, with strong knowledge of wider Adobe design tools and software.
- Strong breadth of design and animation styles and influences, and able to confidently follow, interpret and extend visual brand guidelines.
- Design-trained to understand typography, movement, layout & composition. Experience in storyboard illustration, character and custom elements design. Compositing simple graphic elements onto live-action environments.
- Adaptability in development and delivery approach, from complex and detailed hand crafted projects to those that are assembled and customised through templates and toolkits.
- Experienced and capable in project management of client commissioned work; prioritising, organising, delegating and motivating others. Managing expectations, highlighting risks, pragmatic budget management. High standards of work, creating opportunities to create additional value, recognising and adapting to client scenarios.
- Good capabilities in wider production workflow tasks including building pitch decks, scriptwriting, music selection, media management.
- Works well with others, across the creative services unit and with project managers and client services team

Comfortable working under pressure and to agreed deadlines. It's not an everyday thing, but occasionally we all need to pull out the stops and make amazing things happen in double time.

About you:
You are experienced in delivering projects alongside creative colleagues and a seasoned pro in dealing with clients; from exploring and presenting ideas through pitching and understanding the importance of your role in building and maintaining strong relationships. Your ideas and outputs hit and exceed the client's brief and expectations and the way you present yourself and your ideas builds trust and confidence.

You've earned your stripes as a professional animator, having worked on countless projects and campaigns and risen through the ranks. A proper team player; someone that knows how to act in the important moments, bring fun to the difficult moments, can take feedback, and give it diplomatically too. You're flexible and adaptable to the needs of projects and wider plans; happy to step in and support others, confident and capable in leading a group too.

You're also someone that has mastered the fundamentals of being part of a professional and productive team; you're organised and structured, positive-minded, set and expect high standards, considerate and aware of the needs of others around you.

You will have a calm, diplomatic approach, great communication skills and demonstrate excellent attention to detail under pressure.
Note that we're happy to receive applications from ambitious and talented animators that feel they're perhaps a rung below this job description.

We offer:
- Total package in £30k - £40k range; dependent on experience. Includes pension
- A flexible work schedule including options for home / remote working by arrangement
- High quality workspace with safe shoot studio facility. Agency owned Cafe on site from Spring 2021
- Company pension, 25 days' holiday + bank holidays. Free flu jabs and eye tests.
- Regular company socials, summer BBQ and Christmas Party, team training at 'Somercamp' our annual training and planning retreat, 'lunch & learn' sessions held monthly and charity support.

Application Information:
We run a three stage interview process. In normal times this consists of an initial video call and two in person interviews, where candidates get to meet various members of our team. We're hoping that we can follow this process this time around but we'll adapt as needed based on the Covid-19 guidance at the time.