Film
In VFX/animation production such as Pixar or Industrial Light and Magic or game studios, a technical director's (TD) responsibilities vary from studio to studio and as such, the term is not very well defined.
Typically, a TD is a mix of an artist and a programmer, responsible for the more technical aspects of film production, such as programming shaders, developing character rigs and animation setups, performing complex simulation tasks and setting up the pipeline how the data is passed from one stage in the film production to the next. In contrast to a programmer, a TD would normally not work on large programming projects but rather make heavy use of scripting languages such as Python, MEL, or MAXScript or shell scripting. Another responsibility of a TD is to look after any technical problems the regular artists encounter and to develop custom tools to improve the artists' workflow.
"Technical Artist", "Technical Animator" and "Generalist TD" are sometimes used as synonyms, and frequently, the role of a TD is more precisely defined, for example "Effects TD", "Lighting TD", "Modeling TD", "Pipeline TD", "Creature TD", "Hair TD", "Cloth TD", "Matchmove TD" etc.
Read more about this topic: Technical Director
Famous quotes containing the word film:
“The average Hollywood film star’s ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend.”
—Katharine Hepburn (b. 1909)
“I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation. Films that make you confront aspects of your own life that are difficult to face. Just because you’re making a horror film doesn’t mean you can’t make an artful film.”
—David Cronenberg (b. 1943)
“Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It’s another part of the twentieth-century mind. It’s the world seen from inside. We’ve come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film.... You have to ask yourself if there’s anything about us more important than the fact that we’re constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)