Art

Lead Lighting Artist - Permanent

OVERVIEW

At PlayStation London Studio, we are on a mission to make award-winning, landmark games. Our upcoming PlayStation 5 online multiplayer game will be focused on a brand-new IP we are extraordinarily excited about.

Our new game is close to our hearts, as the whole team collaborated on coming up with the concept from the very beginning. We’ve seen this idea grow from a seed, and now we’re looking for new starters to continue our journey on shaping our plans for this AAA project.

We’re also a part of the PlayStation Studios family, a collective of teams - from Insomniac to Naughty Dog and many more. As such, we have solid support system – often knowledge sharing industry advancements so that all our studios, individually lead the way to create memorable gaming experiences.

About the Role

We are looking for a skilled Lead Lighting Artist who will play a meaningful role in our new project driving, directing, and crafting a cohesive vision for our universe. Their unique skills will allow them to heighten our gameplay, herd our players emotions and craft a striking benchmark of image quality.

This is a unique opportunity to be at the heart of crafting and bringing to life the next landmark PlayStation IP. You will have a substantial part to play in a sophisticated, fast-paced, and exciting environment

Scope of Work

• Accountable for delivery of high quality and optimised Lighting across our projects, to time and budget, whilst amplifying our artistic value at scale.
• Establish Art Direction, Visual Style, Quality and Metrics for lighting and weather for all the artists on our projects, which includes responsibility for our team’s and partner’s ability to implement and achieve that quality bar with clear, concise, and effective guidance and feedback.
• This is a hands-on role, where you will enjoy creative problem solving across the departments to conceptualise and implement real-time lighting solutions that satisfy both aesthetic and gameplay objectives; to creatively owning and leading sections of the game world, weather, menus, and missions.
• You actively follow the development of lighting and rendering technologies, tools, and pipelines to coordinate with Engineers to architect technical requirements for features, ongoing design iterations or to improve our proprietary Lighting production pipeline.
• Drive regular and frequent review processes including setting up reviews for Product Directors, Art Leadership, and wider decision makers.
• Collaborate with Art Management to build, source and extend our team with global AAA talent. Helping support, onboard and train our external partners, whilst reviewing and ensuring ultimate quality.
• You will have a role in evaluating and maintaining the Lighting production schedule with the Production and Art Management teams. Ensuring our scope, schedule and approach is scalable and flexible to meet our global development demands.
• You are accountable for building a long-term strategy for your area, ensuring your field is aligned and feeding into the overall strategies.
• Ensure an efficient production for our Lighting being accountable for developing and maintaining the team’s processes, workflows, documentation, and confirming expectations are accurate, communicated and understood.
• You will continually optimise, automate, identify risks and issues across Pipelines and Workflows; proactively seeking and supervising the implementation of solutions.
• Participate in setting wider Art department strategy, processes, best practises, and goals crafted to improve our teams year over year.
• When required assist or deputise for our Art Management in all aspects of production, recruitment, and organisational needs of the field.

Essential Knowledge & Skills

• A creative at heart, the candidate must have experience as a Senior Lighting Artist, Lead Lighting Artist and delivery of high-performance, high-quality Lighting for AAA titles.
• The knowledge of colour theory, which can include art history & the principals of art.
• Composition and the ability to enhance mood & tell stories through lighting, including lighting’s use & effect on gameplay.
• Following design & concept reference and have flexibility to work in a wide range of styles.
• Technical understanding of art content creation pipelines & budgets, with a knowledge of potential issues that can arise for the area of real-time lighting.
• Implications of style, quality, technical, scheduling, and budgetary requirements for Lighting production.

Impact and Complexity

Lighting plays a critical role. Through soft shadows it can emphasise drama and narrative or with striking sunlight can direct, guide, and enhance gameplay objectives. All combined it creates the high quality, memorable journeys that are the signature of PlayStation Studios.

We believe exceptional games and quality comes from a happy, productive, and creative team with clear objectives. That is why our Art Leads are essential roles that are uniquely sophisticated in that they are at the forefront of creative, development, and technology, but it’s about truly building a best-in-class team internally and amongst our external partners.

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

We encourage you to bring your best-unaltered self to work. Inclusivity is one of our studio values, which means we embrace different perspectives to fuel our creativity and we know that our games are stronger for it!

It is important to us that our teams are passionate about diversity and inclusion. They must understand that these words speak to people’s lived experiences that may differ to their own. We encourage our teams to educate themselves and show support and their commitment to DE&I (diversity, equity, and inclusion). As an example, some of our outreach activities include giving talks, mentoring, speaking at schools, running roundtables and much more.

We therefore welcome applications from all groups who are underrepresented in the games industry. We can offer training to upskill our team, so if you don’t feel you meet 100% of the job criteria, we still strongly encourage you to apply and look forward to hearing from you.

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Our roles can be flexible in terms of work location in the UK. We will consider the individual’s preference for hybrid, remote or onsite working. We may be able to support remote working from a selection of other countries depending on location and the role you're applying to, so please reach out to see if that could be a possibility. If you wish to relocate to the UK and require sponsorship, we can support you with the visa process.

We have so many benefits, and we felt that if we listed them all out here it might look like we are bragging! What we can say is that we have you covered, from health and wellbeing, to finance and personal development, there is something there for everyone! If you would like to know more head to our benefits and perks page!