Mark Thielen
Senior Technical Director at Skydance Animation
Los Angeles Metropolitan Area United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolMark Thielen is a Senior Technical Director with 11+ years building production pipelines, tools, and integrations for animation, robotics, and AI-driven performance—currently leading story, pre-production, and production tool development at Skydance Animation. He combines deep crowd-simulation and Massive expertise with product management and hands-on Python pipeline development, having architected crowd pipelines at studios from Digital Domain to Walt Disney Animation. Notably, he animated and integrated emotive performances for Hanson Robotics' Sophia, bridging mechanical, AI, and animation teams to create believable robotic interactions. Comfortable leading teams and training artists, he has a track record of simplifying complex workflows with Shotgun, Maya, Nuke, and modern VFX renderers while applying Agile practices. Based in Los Angeles with an MFA in Computer Animation, he brings a rare blend of creative animation craft and scalable technical product leadership.
11 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
MFA, Computer Animation, MFA, Computer Animation at Academy of Art UniversityBSED, Architecture, BSED, Architecture at Ball State University
Github Skills (10)
robot9
robotics8
blender8
shotgun8
ros8
synchronize7
api6
animation6
pipeline5
frame4
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
mdthielen/jj_dev
Mar 2017 - Jun 2017
Contributions:4 PRs, 68 pushes, 4 branches in 3 months
dreamview-studios-inc/dvs-multi-setframerange
Apr 2021 - May 2021
A Shotgun Pipeline Toolkit App that lets you synchronize the application frame range with the one in Shotgun
Contributions:3 releases, 6 PRs, 5 pushes in 18 days
pipelineframeapplication-framesynchronizeshotgun
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