Michael D. Duffy cppm

Foster City, CA ***** 214-***-**** ad12kt@r.postjobfree.com linkedin.com/in/mikeduffysrep

Senior Producer

Objective: Skilled Sr. producer / project manager with extensive experience in people management for gaming, film, commercial, post production, VFX, motion graphics, animation, and print seeking a Senior Producer position. Self-starter dedicated to delivering high-quality work. Proven ability to establish schedules, manage budgets, and leverage collaborative experience with cross-functional teams to ensure successful proj execution.

Shipped Titles include: Multiple World of Warcraft expansions, Overwatch II, Diablo IV

AREAS OF EXPERTISE

Production Management: Experienced in owning schedules, developing complex project plans and roadmap, creating budgets, and tracking actuals, ensuring financial accountability and legal compliance. Proficient in all aspects of task management, backlog, action items, waterfall, kanban, agile methodology. Creative solutions.

Cross-Team Collaboration: Strong oral and written ability to communicate and build relationships with studio management, leads, engineers, production staff, artists, and external vendors. Effective collaborative decision making, partnering with game producers/leads to balance resources and elevate issues to management.

Leadership: Adaptable leadership skills with the ability to influence, motivate, communicate, and encourage teamwork. Innovative problem solving, identify risks, drive solutions, promoting continuous improvement.

Communication: Excellent oral and written communication skills. Able to effectively communicate with creative and technical leads, supporting the needs of Execs, Directors and IP partners. Strong follow-up skills.

Technical Proficiency: Proficient in Microsoft Office, Google Suite, SmartSheets, Shotgrid, Atlasian and perforce ensuring all data / databases are kept up to date. Experienced with JIRA & Confluence for projects.

EXPERIENCE

Meta, Burlingame, CA July 2022 – June 2023

Technical Art Producer, Reality Labs, Horizon Worlds, Jan 2023 – Augst 2023

Successfully implemented VFX outsourcing initiative for scalability to alleviate bandwidth bottleneck and expand VFX resources by 400% growth, unblocking multiple high priority work streams delivering to market.

Led the sourcing and onboarding of external vendors, including contract negotiation, establishing realistic schedules and milestones, developed outsourcing pipeline to match internal pipeline.

Collaborated closely with vendors gathering creative decks and reference ensuring project accuracy through cross-team communications. Facilitated the flow of creative feedback to maintain velocity and target quality.

Initiated and led cross training of animation staff in the use of PopcornFX to allow them to become self-sufficient in VFX development on their own workstreams reducing bandwidth pressure on Tech Art.

Technical Artist Team Building, July 2022 – Dec 2022

Established, hired, and led the Production Support Technician group (PST) to support Tech Artists and Art Department to streamline workflow processes increasing their performance, velocity, and impact.

Provided technical support to cross-functional departments, troubleshooting, and resolving in-engine bugs and pipeline issues and collaboration with QA creating documentation for proprietary applications.

Assisted in development of Art Dept real-time VR Pipeline, connecting proprietary tools to various DCCs.

Conducted performance test plan of new VR in-engine features documenting best practices for UGC creators.

Blizzard Entertainment, City, CA September 2018 – June 2023

IGC Lead Production Show Tech (PST), September 2019– June 2023

Hired and led a team of 3D generalists supporting AAA in-game cinematic shows, assets, and animations.

Acted as the primary contact for client departments and stakeholders, addressing asset/shot/capture/tools and pipeline issues and bugs, solving hand-on, or escalating them to the proper POC freeing TDs and Tech Art.

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Triaged and resolved issues, ensuring effective communication and collaboration across departments.

Supported various teams using technical knowledge of the engines for supplying in-game asset and animations updating proprietary back-end databases, and innovating procedures and processes, providing detailed Jira tickets, documenting workarounds in confluence, providing solutions to quickly unblock artists.

Responsible for ingesting all new cinematic characters, props, assets, and animations including mo-graph on-screen effects, ensuring correct real-time playback in-engine from pre-vis to final capture and delivery.

Provided set dressing using available in-game assets and created new environments and models from scratch for “cinematic only use” to free up game artists to concentrate on in-game development.

Monitored and reported on the status of shows, assets, and production hurdles impacting downstream departments, documented deficiencies utilizing Jira for bug tracking, and updating status reports and documentation in Confluence assessing risks and providing mitigations to solve problems before ship.

Prioritized and resolved asset/shot/capture issues by solving or escalating them to the appropriate individuals or departments, fostering cross-team communication and collaboration, implemented fixes to affected assets.

IGC Senior Production Show Tech (PST), November 2018 – August 2019

Collaborated on IGC pipeline implementation and worked with Tech Art to improve workflow processes.

Demonstrated in-depth knowledge of multiple AAA Blizzard Engines, troubleshooting pipelines, and technical asset requirements. Delivered 1,000s of assets from engine to art departments, re-ingesting uprezzed assets.

Tested new features for the engineering team and implemented them into cinematics like DOF, Motion Blur, Crowds, and extended sets to accommodate cinematic action with base lighting and proper zones.

Produced layout scenes in engine with proprietary timeline tool for cinematic animators to provide required characters and props in the proper in-game environment with basic timing and synced script as a baseline.

Uprezzed in-game asset models and textures used in cinematic closeups to hold up to the shot requirements.

Pulled in-game environments to Maya for the Layout team to stage shots and prep them for the animators.

IGC AE Artist / Compositor / FX, September 2018 – November 2018

Game developer designing high-quality FX for multiple IPs, ensuring fidelity, realism, and adherence to each IP's distinct visual style, including environmental, natural, and magic effects using Adobe After Effects.

Utilized 3D tracking techniques to enhance captured scenes with particle effects such as dust, smoke, and water spray, as well as sprite-based effects like torch fire, explosions, and smoke plates. Integrated magic effects seamlessly with characters and props. In-Engine environment editing and lighting for cinematic needs.

Developed new looks for magic effects that showcased the evolution of magic as the story progressed and different schools of magic merged or evolved. Merged disparate looks to create a cohesive whole to maintain visual continuity and communicate and support story points. Close communication with Creative director.

Janimation, Inc., Dallas, TX 2017 – 2018

Freelance Senior Project Manager

Skillfully negotiated cost estimates, purchase agreements, terms of business, and statements of work to provide clear project scope, specifications, schedule, road map, and deliverables to producers and clients.

Negotiated rates and contracts for freelance contractors and external partners globally for outsourcing needs. Led morning scrum meetings with the team to establish sprint goals and ensure project schedule adherence.

Assumed multiple roles per project, including Executive Producer, Producer, Project Lead, Agile Scrum Master, Creative Director/Art Director, Editor, Mo-Graph & VFX Artist, UI design, and liaison with back-end support.

Proactively tracked budget, scope, and schedule variances, maintained a risk register, monitored milestones and client reviews, and facilitated cross-functional and cross-team meetings to promote clear communication and collaboration across disciplines and stakeholders ensuring on-time and on-budget project completion.

Leveraged years of creative production experience across multiple disciplines to anticipate issues/risks and develop mitigation strategies before they happened and affected release.

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Twin Cities Public Television May 2016 – December 2016

Managing Producer-Ready to Learn

Collaborated effectively with Finance, the Project Director, Executive Producers, Project Managers and Producers to establish a new department and internal organizational structure within TPT, modeled as a self-contained entrepreneurial "Startup Company," to support simultaneous development and production across five production silos: Administration, Television, Digital, Outreach, and Research.

Developed an Agile department infrastructure, including team member allocation, hiring schedules, defining team responsibilities, and reporting structures, and implementing naming conventions and version control.

Implemented a streamlined, cloud-based production and management pipeline to facilitate seamless collaboration with local and remote teams, coordinate with vendors, oversee television production, supervise the development of digital games and websites, centralize the development of outreach materials, and support nationwide focus group testing and randomized controlled trial (RCT) research.

Managed interdepartmental and external schedule dependencies across five production silos and multiple cross-functional teams, both internal and remote, in an international production and development effort.

Janimation, Inc., Dallas TX 2006 – 2016

Senior Project Manager / Executive Producer

Regularly led client presentations by preparing visuals to clearly communicate project vision and process through audio visual presentations of reference art, original designs, timelines, and flowcharts of processes.

Demonstrated exceptional skills in converting warm leads into closed deals across various verticals. Produced film projects, broadcast spots, online content, websites, game cinematics, trailers, digital assets, banners, print, and interactive AR projects, utilizing creative strategies and effective negotiation and communication.

Significantly grew client business by securing major contracts with clients such as Pixomondo, ID, Firaxis, 2k, Grupo Bimbo, LeapFrog, PCCI, and Nerium, resulting in substantial revenue increases year after year.

Responsible for mentoring a team of line/post producers overseeing all aspects of production and post.

Clearly defined project scope for seamless handoff to teams, resulting in a 25% reduction in outsourcing costs.

Excelled at hands on creative production tasks providing additional bandwidth for animation, VFX, motion graphics, compositing, UI/UX design, Action Script web development or Python scripting for automation.

ADDITIONAL RELEVANT EXPERIENCE

Janimation, Inc., Dallas TX

Project Manager-Sr. Broadcast Producer / Interactive Producer / Post Producer

Janimation, Inc., Dallas TX

Operations Supervisor

EDUCATION

Graphic Arts

UW Stout

Certified Professional Project Manager (CPPM)

University of St. Thomas

SOFTWARE SKILLS

Microsoft Project Microsoft Excel & Office Suite Google Suite Macro scripting for Excel, Word, Google Sheets Smart Sheets Shotgrid Miro Adobe Photoshop, AE & CC Maya 3dsMax Unity Jira Confluence

*Limited Capabilities: VBScript Python Objective C Jscript Unix command line

**Experience with Agile and waterfall project management of games, broadcast, web, print and interactive technologies including embedded kiosk systems, websites and mobile apps

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