Technical director

A Technical Director (TD) is usually a senior technical person within e.g. a software company, engineering firm, film studio, theatrical company or television studio. This person usually possesses the highest level of skill within a specific technical field and may be recognized as an expert in that industry.

In software development, a Technical Director is typically responsible for the successful creation and delivery of the company's product to the marketplace by managing technical risks and opportunities; making key software design and implementation decisions with the development teams, scheduling of tasks including tracking dependencies, managing change requests, and guaranteeing quality of deliveries and educating the team on technical best practices.

Typical Responsibilities:

In Visual Effects (VFX) (Industrial Light and Magic, Sony Pictures Imageworks, etc.), Feature Animation (Pixar, Dreamworks Animation,etc.) and Game Development (Naughty Dog,etc.), 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, 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.

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