Animation, People & the Occasional Cartoon Nickname

I'm Diana — Animation Director, Technical Animation/Art Director, department builder, pipeline fixer, and the person who will absolutely give you a cartoon nickname within the first week. With all due respect.

I've spent 20+ years at the intersection of creative vision, technical architecture and the beautiful chaos of production reality. I've built animation departments from scratch more times than I can count — literally from zero, two people and a dream, to fully functioning multi-studio teams with mocap stages, pipelines, processes and a culture that people actually want to show up to. I've led teams across Europe, the UK, the US and Asia — China and Japan included. Australia, you're next.

What makes me unusual — and I say this with full self-awareness — is that I genuinely operate on both sides. Creative direction and technical architecture are not separate things in my world. I set the animation vision AND build the system that delivers it. I direct the performance AND design the pipeline that makes it repeatable. I mentor the junior animator in the morning AND debug the IK solver in the afternoon. This drives some people slightly mad. I consider it a feature.

My management philosophy is simple: my job is to make your job easier. I don't lead from above — I lead from within. I ask questions before I give answers. I give nicknames before I give performance reviews. I believe that the best work comes from teams that trust each other, laugh together occasionally, and know that if something goes wrong we solve it together rather than looking for someone to blame. I have never once solved a problem by panicking. I have solved several by suggesting something that sounded completely unreasonable and turned out to work.

I care deeply about animation as storytelling. Not movement for its own sake — but the specific weight of a weapon, the hesitation before a decision, the way a character breathes differently when they're afraid. These are the details that players never consciously notice but would immediately feel the absence of. I lose sleep over bad foot plants. I have strong opinions about secondary motion. I once wrote backstory cards for every character in a game nobody asked me to. It helped.

What I'm looking for is simple too. A studio that makes games as craft rather than product. People who are genuinely good at what they do and know it without needing to prove it constantly. A culture where trust goes both ways — where I'm given the space to do my job well and in return I give everything I have. I want to build something that outlasts any single project. A team, a culture, a way of working that people look back on and say — that's where I learned what good looks like.

If that sounds like your studio — I'd love to talk.