Jason Schleifer

Jason Schleifer grew up in Northern California and is an animator, character technical director, and entrepreneur. Schleifer started his career in Santa Barbara, California at Alias/Wavefront where he was a product specialist during the development of the 3D animation software Maya. In 1999 he moved to New Zealand to work as a character technical director and eventually animation lead at Weta Digital where he helped create and animate the character, Gollum for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In 2003 Schleifer moved back to the U.S. to work at PDI/Dreamworks in Redwood City, CA as an animator on feature films such as Madagascar and Shrek the third. Eventually he became Head of Character Animation heading up Megamind and Mr. Peabody & Sherman. During his time at PDI/Dreamworks, Schleifer also created a series of character rigging tutorials focused on making "animator friendly rigs". These tutorials have been used by character technical directors all around the world who have gone on to have incredible careers in the animation industry. In 2014 Schleifer co-founded Nimble Collective with DreamWorks alumni Rex Grignon, Bruce Wilson and Scott LaFleur with a goal to democratize the animation industry. Jason Schleifer has a B.A. in High Honors from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He also received an Honorary Doctorate of Animation from the Digital Media Arts College in Boca Raton, Florida.