Experience

Angie Jones is an Animation Director and VFX leader with over 30 years of experience in feature films, AAA games, television, cinematics, and commercials. She has contributed to over 150 productions, leading animation and CG teams, developing production pipelines, collaborating with global vendors, and delivering complex projects under demanding creative and technical constraints.

Her career combines hands-on creative leadership with studio-scale oversight. Angie has served as Animation Director, Supervisor, and department lead on award-winning projects, shaping character performances, ensuring visual consistency, and developing production strategies across a variety of formats and styles. She is recognized for building teams from the ground up, establishing clear workflows, and aligning artists, technologists, and producers around shared creative goals.

Today, Angie oversees VFX and CG production at the studio level, managing multiple shows and teams. Her work spans cross-studio pipeline alignment, workflow strategy, vendor coordination, and delivery oversight. She focuses on building artist-centered systems that preserve creative intent while enabling consistency and scale across productions.

Throughout her career, Angie has consistently stepped into challenging situations involving new teams, pipelines, and partners, bringing structure, clarity, and momentum. Whether directing animation on individual projects or developing production frameworks at scale, her work is rooted in extensive experience, sound judgment, and a deep understanding of how creative work is actually produced.

Feature Film & Long-Form Production

After six years working in AAA game production, Angie transitioned into long-form feature film production, contributing animation and visual effects to some of the most recognizable studio films of the early 2000s. Her feature work emphasizes character performance, creature animation, and sequence-driven storytelling within intricate live-action and CG environments.

Her contributions include animating the fairies and stick bugs in Pan’s Labyrinth, delivering subtle, tactile performances for creatures deeply embedded in live-action settings. On Stuart Little 2, she animated Stuart Little and Margalo, shaping character interaction and emotional clarity within a fully CG performance framework. Her work on X-Men 2 features animation for the opening sequence, including the Nightcrawler tail performance that sets the film's tone and physicality in its first moments.

For Freddy vs. Jason, she animated the Freddy pillar sequence, blending character-driven motion with horror-specific staging and transformation. Additional feature credits include National Treasure, The Cave, Stealth, Zoom, Garfield, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Pitch Black, The Hitcher, Smurfs, and Bloodshot. Her experience also covers short-form narrative work like I’m Here, where tone and emotion are conveyed primarily through animated performance.

COMMERCIALS

Angie has led and contributed to animation and visual effects work on over 80 commercial productions, delivering character-driven performances under tight schedules and high client expectations. Her commercial work spans broadcast, digital, and experimental formats, often requiring quick iteration, precise creative judgment, and close collaboration with agencies, directors, and brand stakeholders.

Her experience includes large-scale character projects, such as the GEICO Gecko campaigns and Disney's 50th-anniversary celebration, in which she animated and coordinated performances of more than 22 legacy characters. These included Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, Stitch, Iago, Genie, Cinderella, and other classic Disney characters, all of which required consistent performance, tone, and brand integrity across a single campaign.

Other commercial work includes character animation for Honda Crosstour (Squirrel), Toyota featuring Hatsune Miku, Pokémon (Pokémon Summer), Supercell (Rush Wars), and Relish Rampage for The Powerpuff Girls. A defining aspect of Angie’s commercial work is the clarity of performance under constraint. In short-form storytelling, character intent must read immediately, and emotional beats must land within seconds.

Her skill in creating expressive, easily readable character animation in this environment has earned industry recognition, including a Clio Award for Outstanding Performance by an Animated Character for Amp Paper. Commercial production sharpened Angie's instincts for speed, communication, and decision-making, strengthening her ability to protect creative intent while managing tight timelines, client feedback, and real-world production challenges. This experience continues to influence her leadership style across longer-form and studio-scale projects.

Episodic, Series & Cinematic Leadership

Angie's episodic experience began early in her career in 1994 when she worked in television production on Reality Check, a broadcast series hosted by Ryan Seacrest. In this role, she produced daily animated sequences according to broadcast schedules, developing early fluency in episodic pacing, rapid iteration, and delivery-driven storytelling within digital pipelines.

That foundation led to larger-scale episodic and series leadership, where Angie gained the ability to scale animation quality across teams, vendors, and production models. At Oddworld Inhabitants, she worked on game cinematics during a formative period for narrative-driven animation in games. Using SGI systems and early versions of Maya, she created handcrafted character performances for cinematic sequences, reinforcing a performance-first approach that continues to shape her work across formats.

This perspective extended into modern game and episodic environments, including leadership roles on Fortnite and Valorant (cinematics). In these productions, teams and vendors often had strong backgrounds in motion-capture or creature animation but limited experience in handcrafted, keyframed character performance. Angie consistently led efforts to upskill teams, align creative expectations, and establish performance standards supporting expressive, story-driven animation within real-time constraints.

Her experience also includes large-scale cinematic and facial animation production at ImageMetrics, where she led two full animation shifts, managing about 40 animators across multiple game vendors. Although capture technologies like Faceware provided an initial performance basis, achieving entertainment-quality results required animator-led refinement, performance direction, and consistent oversight.

Across episodic, series, and cinematic pipelines, Angie's focus remains on building systems and teams capable of maintaining performance quality over time, not just delivering individual sequences.

Games & Interactive Media

Angie spent six years working intensively in AAA game production, contributing to and leading animation on some of the industry's most influential early narrative-driven titles. Her game work sits at the intersection of real-time technology, cinematic storytelling, and handcrafted character performance, often within high-pressure production environments where technical constraints and creative intent had to be reconciled in real time.

Her early game career includes work at Oddworld Inhabitants, where titles such as Abe's Oddysee and Abe’s Exoddus featured character performance and timing central to the player experience.

She later served as Animation Director at Angel Studios, leading animation on Dino Crisis 3 in collaboration with an overseas development partner. This work required close coordination across language, cultural, and production-model differences, as well as alignment with an international publisher. Angie established shared performance standards, communication structures, and review processes that enabled consistent character acting across distributed teams.

Her game experience also includes work on Red Dead Revolver, where she contributed to early cinematic approaches that later influenced narrative presentation in modern open-world games.

Across game production, Angie's focus has been on maintaining performance quality under constraints, building teams capable of adapting to evolving engines and tools, and ensuring that character-driven storytelling remains central within interactive systems.

Studio Consulting & Advisory Work

In addition to in-house leadership roles, Angie has worked in consulting and advisory positions for studios, technology teams, and research institutions. Her focus has been on production systems, pipeline design, and aligning creative and technical aspects, especially in environments where character performance needs to scale within real-world production limits.

Organizations include Disney Feature Animation, the Institute for Creative Technologies, SideFX, ImageMetrics/Faceware, Motion Theory, and Zoic Studios.

Her work covers animation, visual effects, interactive media, and emerging production technologies, with an emphasis on scalable, artist-centered systems and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Immersive & Emerging Media

Angie's immersive and emerging media work examines how storytelling, character, and performance function when narrative is no longer linear or fully author-controlled. In AR, XR, and AI-driven interactive platforms, audiences decide where to look, what to engage with, and how long to stay. This shift fundamentally changes how stories are created, how characters are perceived, and how meaning is formed moment to moment.

Her work includes AR projects such as Google Stickers, as well as experimental and research-driven interactive media for the government and defense sectors. One project involved creating a virtual human named Bill Ford, designed to help soldiers experiencing stress and PTSD. This work focused on character appeal, emotional intelligence, and trust, developing performance and presence that support psychological well-being rather than delivering a scripted story.

Angie has also worked in the emerging field of virtual influencers and synthetic personalities, collaborating on projects like Hatsune Miku and Lil Miquela. In these environments, characters exist across platforms as media artifacts, social presences, and interactive entities, requiring new ways of thinking about identity, continuity, and audience engagement.

Across immersive and interactive projects, Angie focuses on understanding how narrative works when attention is fragmented, perspective is user-driven, and outcomes are unpredictable. Her approach emphasizes maintaining character integrity, emotional clarity, and narrative intent in spaces where the audience actively shapes the experience.

Education, Mentorship & Industry Engagement

Alongside studio leadership, Angie has maintained a long-standing commitment to education, mentorship, and professional development. She served as a full-time faculty member at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, Division of Animation and Digital Arts, and has instructed creature animation at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects. She continues to teach advanced character performance through Workshops 3, 4, and 5 at iAnimate.net.

She developed a two-year curriculum in creature and character animation for CG Spectrum and has mentored graduating students internationally at Brassart. Her industry engagement includes lectures and panels for SIGGRAPH, the Visual Effects Society, the Game Developers Conference, the National Association of Broadcasters, and Walt Disney Animation Studios, among others.

LEADERSHIP AT SCALE

Across feature films, games, episodic and cinematic productions, immersive media, and commercial work, Angie’s career is defined by a consistent focus on character, performance, and clarity within constraints. A consistent focus on character, performance, and clarity within constraints characterizes Angie's work. Moving smoothly between long-form storytelling and high-pressure short-form production has sharpened her creative judgment and decision-making. Simultaneously, immersive and interactive projects have broadened her understanding of narrative beyond linear control.

Today, this broad experience informs her studio-scale leadership, where she applies practical knowledge, creative discipline, and a deep respect for how artists, teams, and systems truly operate together. Whether shaping a single performance or overseeing complex productions, her approach centers on making ambitious work attainable without sacrificing its original intent.