Company Description
Repeatedly voted one of Montreal’s Top Employers and Employer of the Year for the 2022 Mercuriades Awards, Rodeo FX is a high-end creative company offering services in visual effects, advertising, animation, and experiential.
Nominated for multiple Emmy® Awards for its work on the series Stranger Things season 4, The Witcher season 2, and The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power season 1, the independent, Oscar®-winning company boasts close to 900 artists crafting from studios in Montreal, Québec City, Toronto, Los Angeles and Paris.
Rodeo FX is a creative partner to the world’s best storytellers including Netflix, HBO, Disney, Marvel, Amazon Studios, Warner Bros., and Sony, and has collaborated on ads for YouTube, NBC, and Apple. Current projects include Blue Beetle, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and Zack Snyder's Rebel Moon. Recently released projects include John Wick: Chapter 4, Black Adam, Disney's The Little Mermaid, and Love, Death and Robots Volume 3, for which the company won a 2023 VES award.
Job Description
The Generative AI Artist creates images and sequences that support every stage of a project at Rodeo FX: visual direction, pitches, previs, IP development, and increasingly, final shots for broadcast. At Rodeo FX, AI is a creative tool in service of an artistic intention. It does not replace it.
Within the Ads, Post & AI department, this person works closely with our compositing, 3D, real-time, and art direction teams. Their role is to extend what these teams can do: explore more creative directions earlier and deliver imagery that holds up in production.
This is a hybrid role grounded in the realities of advertising production, requiring both a strong creative eye and technical rigor.
Key Responsibilities
Master Your Craft
- Build and maintain your own workflows in ComfyUI, combining multiple models based on the needs of each shot.
- Train LoRAs on image and video models and prepare the required datasets, including image selection and balancing for pose and lighting.
- Test new models methodically and select the right tool based on quality, control, turnaround time, and cost.
- Deliver professional-quality visuals quickly and consistently, in line with studio standards.
Creative Quality
- Generate visual directions, lookframes, key visuals, animatics, and final shots for advertising projects and IP development.
- Think in cinematic terms: framing, lens choice, lighting, camera movement, and editing rhythm.
- Use AI to explore, iterate, and propose creative possibilities without replacing human artistic intent.
- Ensure every image supports the story, the intended visual language, and the overall consistency of the project.
Technical Quality
- Maintain consistency of characters, products, and visual worlds from one shot to the next.
- Ensure work is reproducible: save workflows, document model versions, and create results that can be recreated.
- Deliver outputs in formats that can be used by compositing, 3D, and finishing teams, including the appropriate color space, resolution, frame rate, and passes.
- Use live-action plates, on-set capture, or mocap data to guide generation.
- Explore generative 3D techniques, including Gaussian Splatting and image-to-3D, for environments and previs.
- Track credit and compute usage across projects and report on it as needed.
Communication
- Work closely with art directors, supervisors, producers, and artists across other departments.
- Clearly explain to producers and clients what AI can do, what it cannot do, and what it costs.
- Be comfortable saying when AI is not the right solution for a shot.
Responsibility
- Respect copyright, consent requirements related to a person's likeness, and the commercial licensing terms of every tool used.
- Protect the confidentiality of client materials: no client content may be uploaded to a platform that has not been approved by the studio.
Learn, Share and Grow
- Actively stay current in a field that evolves every month.
- Document methods and contribute to the internal library of workflows, LoRAs, style references, and test results.
- Train artists from other departments and contribute to a creative, rigorous, and collaborative AI culture at Rodeo FX.
Qualifications
- Portfolio demonstrating strong taste and visual judgment, including composition, lighting, style, and storytelling.
- Artistic background in illustration, photography, concept art, compositing, motion design, cinematography, or a related discipline.
- Strong proficiency with ComfyUI and the ability to build custom workflows and graphs.
- Experience training LoRAs and preparing datasets.
- Proficiency with at least two video-generation models and several image-generation models, with a strong understanding of their respective strengths and limitations.
- Understanding of VFX workflows and the constraints of advertising production, including tight deadlines, feedback rounds, version management, and budgets.
- Proficiency in Photoshop is required; foundational compositing skills are strongly preferred.
- Proficiency in both French and English, spoken and written.
Assets
- Knowledge of Python, Nuke, Houdini, Blender, or Unreal Engine.
- Experience developing custom ComfyUI nodes or contributing to open-source projects.
- Experience delivering advertising or post-production work.
- Knowledge of on-set capture techniques used to support generative workflows.
Technical Environment
Generative AI tools evolve every month, and today's leading model may be obsolete tomorrow. What we are looking for is someone who stays current across image, video, 3D, and audio models and has the curiosity to discover new tools before someone else points them out. We do not expect you to know everything. We expect you to know how to test, evaluate, choose the right tool, and move on when something better becomes available. If you have already experimented with a tool that no one around you has heard of yet, that is exactly the kind of thing we want to hear about in an interview.
Additional Information
- 5 paid sick/personal days ;
- 2 additional statutory holidays in the winter holidays ;
- Group Insurance, access to Dialogue online support and to an Employee Assistance Program (EAP);
- RRSP with employer contribution ;
- Discounts on public transports, several spas, sports classes, art centers, cafes, furniture and several other local businesses.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
At Rodeo FX, diversity is a core value. We’re committed to creating an inclusive, equitable workplace where different perspectives are embraced. Every team member brings unique insight that strengthens our creativity, challenges our thinking, and helps us deliver better work.
Use of Artificial Intelligence in Recruitment
Rodeo FX may use AI-based tools to support certain steps of the recruitment process, such as interview transcription or preliminary application analysis. These tools may be operated by third-party providers, and data may be processed outside Quebec. These tools never replace human decision-making: all final hiring decisions are made by our recruitment team and hiring managers. To learn more about how we protect your personal information and your rights, please consult our Privacy Policy.
Apply with LinkedIn
If you would like to use the “Apply with LinkedIn” feature to simplify your application, please make sure you accept cookies on the SmartRecruiters application page. This allows the feature to display and function properly.
Department: Rodeo FX - 3D