Interview with Clément Castanier: 20 Insights from a AAA Lead Animator
- Vanessa
- Dec 9, 2025
- 10 min read
Clément was my very first lead, on Heavy Rain. He was the one who opened the door to gameplay animation for me, trusting me with increasingly complex tasks. That trust allowed me to grow until I eventually led the gameplay team on Beyond Two Souls.
Beyond his efficiency and technical mastery, Clément has always embodied essential human qualities: knowing how to delegate, encourage, and give each person the space to progress.
His journey, from Quantic Dream to Sony London Studio, Splash Damage, and now Half Mermaid, speaks to a constant curiosity and an ability to adapt to the most demanding pipelines.
In this interview, he shares 20 insights drawn from his experience as a AAA lead animator.
His answers, direct and unfiltered, reflect both his pragmatism and his passion for gameplay and cinematic animation.
Could you present your career path as a gameplay animator and lead?
I loved drawing, and the idea of leaving my hometown for a while, so I went to boarding school in high school to pursue a specialized diploma in “applied arts for industry.”
That’s where I first began to discover a passion for animation.
There weren’t many options for training in this field after high school, and even fewer after I failed the entrance exams for each of them.
So I joined the Fine Arts faculty in Toulouse, where I thought I could pass off my animations as works of art… but in reality I mostly cultivated a new passion for video games.
Eventually I heard about a 3D animation program opening in Angoulême (E.M.C.I.), barely passed the entrance exam, and was highly motivated not to miss this chance.
I then joined Quantic Dream as an animator on Fahrenheit, along with two friends from E.M.C.I. who had already been working there for some time.
With an in‑house MoCap studio available 24/7, a fully proprietary engine, and ambitious, unconventional projects… I learned a lot, very quickly.
As time went on and my friends chose different paths, I gradually began building my first team.
That was for Heavy Rain.
From facial MoCap and locomotion on stairs, to the mall crowd (“Jasoon!”), or Jayden trapped in his car as a crane drags it to the shredder, to throwing chickens on ice — an astronomical amount of animations produced across 70 different skeletons, all developed in‑house from A to Z…
Then we moved on to Beyond Two Souls, with even higher ambitions, and once again the team rose to the challenge brilliantly.
But everything comes to an end: after 11 years in the same studio, I left for London.
The project there was to help redevelop a Mocap pipeline for productions on PlayStation VR. We took advantage of a reorganization of the facilities to equip the largest meeting room with 24 Vicon cameras. I focused particularly on pipeline issues, but also on gameplay, and even a bit of machine learning applied to animation markups.
After that, I went to explore volumetric capture at Dimension, a technique that uses texture projections on point clouds. The final render is incredibly detailed, from the face to the clothing.
I am especially proud to have contributed to two VR projects that integrated volumetric capture characters in the foreground, while the background was populated with classic 3D characters.
We even had to loop some animations: looping a point cloud and its video texture projected onto UVs that change every 15 frames , quite an art in itself…
I then joined Splash Damage: I missed video games, as well as their more cyclical development rhythm.
Working on an open‑world multiplayer FPS was very new and exciting.
As a longtime fan of Castle Wolfenstein, I had no idea what would eventually happen to this historic studio.
Two years ago, I was lucky enough to join HalfMermaid, where I’ve found the best of my previous experiences.
We’re slowly starting to grow the team, it’s a great project. I can’t say much more :)
Leadership & Management
How do you structure your animation team? Do you have associate leads or specializations by type of animation?
Depending on the size of the teams, I try to accommodate talents as best as possible so they can work on what attracts them most. It really depends on the people and the projects.
Fundamentally, if I can delegate to the point where I am free to do reviews, fix bugs, and help animators who need support, that’s ideal. In practice, it’s always more nuanced.
What do you look for first when recruiting a gameplay animator? Technical skills, portfolio, or soft skills?
Definitely soft skills for me. Someone with taste, who wants to understand and help with their knowledge. With the right attitude and curiosity, no technical difficulty can remain a barrier for long.
How do you train or integrate a new animator into the team? Do you have a structured process?
Not at all, some studios have a very detailed onboarding process… one thing I never compromise on is spending time outside the office with the rest of the team.
I pay particular attention to the tasks I assign at the beginning, starting with things that will help build their confidence before moving on to those that are trickier
How do you handle animation reviews within your team? What frequency, what format? How do you help your animators progress?
It varies a lot depending on the animator whose work I’m reviewing. For some, I’ll review directly in the build when it’s ready, for others I’ll take a look at the end of the day.
If I’m really concerned, I’ll go see them right when they come back from a break.
I try to find what I like in an animation and focus on that , what I like less becomes much easier to fix once we’ve established what works
As a Lead, how do you divide your time between management, pure animation, technical work, and meetings? What proportion for each?
Right now I manage to keep my mornings free of meetings so I can animate, rig, work on the pipeline, and plan.
The afternoons are dedicated to meetings, made easier by the fact that our team is based in both Europe and the U.S.
Working remotely across different time zones offers that kind of advantage.
Scheduling is something I tackle much more sporadically, but once production is underway it’s crucial to be as rigorous as possible with it.
In short, I prefer pre‑production.
"With the right attitude and curiosity, no technical difficulty can remain a barrier for long."
Pipeline & Technical Tools
Which game engine do you prefer to work with? What are the concrete differences for you as an animator?
I’ve mostly worked with proprietary engines, at Quantic Dream and then Sony.
My experience with Unreal is fairly recent.
I find a lot of advantages in it ^^
I think having the chance to work with a proprietary engine is more educational , you learn more laterally, but Unreal has become dominant.
How did you structure the animation pipeline on your current project? What were the key technical decisions?
The project will require high‑quality facial animation and realistic characters, with a structure that involves a very large number of unique animations.
Since the engine is Unreal, the decisions followed quite naturally: using MetaHuman for facial animation at scale, scanning actors for realism, facilitating retargeting, and minimizing adjustments by using skeletons tailored to each actor.
What tools or scripts have you implemented to optimize your team’s workflow? Which ones had the greatest impact?
I think the workflow we set up at Sony was phenomenal.
It allowed an incredible number of manipulations on files (from Maya, of course).
I enjoy tinkering with Python , no need to become a full‑on coder, but being able to build your own script is extremely valuable.
The one I’ve been using for ages is a very simple script that creates locators for a list of transforms and a control in worldspace as the parent.
That lets me do all the space switches I need without any plug‑in.
How do you decide on major technical choices (engine, software, animation system)? Which criteria do you prioritize?
The ease and speed with which you can iterate is a decisive criterion.
Unreal has become very competitive in recent years.
Maya is still my go‑to because I work quickly with it, but there are even faster solutions nowadays.
How do you manage performance constraints (memory budget, number of bones, etc.) at the team level? Do you have strict guidelines?
Yes, guidelines are generally provided, but it’s also a matter of compromise: you can use a highly detailed rig at one point and then switch back to a more economical version the next.
"It’s very important to reach clear agreement with everyone, but in the end my advice is: anything that brings quality is worth keeping."
Creative Vision & Collaboration
What was your most formative project as a gameplay animator? What did you learn from it?
Project Astrid at Splash Damage, for all the FPS and multiplayer aspects, but also Blood and Truth for PSVR.
We used Morpheme, producing and maintaining all the state machines and blend trees for this action/adventure game.
Is there a type of gameplay animation you’re particularly skilled at (narrative, combat, platforming, etc.)?
I love idle cycles. It’s half a joke: it’s in the quiet moments, when nothing dramatic is happening, that you can best cultivate a character’s personality.
I enjoy animations that loop elegantly . Especially idles.
How do you define the artistic direction of animation on a project? What is your process?
Since I often use MoCap, my artistic direction is already strongly informed by the actors and directors.
I like to share animations that I particularly enjoy to illustrate a direction.
How do you ensure consistency of animation style across all your animators : references, guidelines, reviews?
Annotated references gathered in a bible. Watching a film together to establish the tone.
I also really enjoy physical practice , bringing in stunt performers to train blocking and parrying moves, etc.
Mostly, reviews are done directly in‑game.
How do you structure collaboration between animation and game design? Regular meetings, shared documents, specific processes?
Regular meetings are useful, but it only takes one or two that are less productive for everyone to wish the meeting would disappear ^^
Documents are important, but more for keeping a record , to truly collaborate, I prefer good discussions.
How do you work with the technical/programming team?
How do you define the animation systems together?
In general, I’ll give my counterpart the freedom to establish an initial framework.
Once that’s in place, I’ll bring forward my points of view, share my requests, which may or may not impact the original idea.
But I’ll actively seek to make it clear that I’m there to work with them, with their ideas.
“There can be many methods to achieve the same result; what matters is that we’ve chosen ours together and that we grow it together.”
Career Path & Experiences
How do you estimate the animation workload on a project? What methods do you use to plan?
I rely heavily on my own practice: how long it takes me to clean a file, how long to import that MoCap, how many lines of dialogue are in a scene. I establish three tiers of complexity for handling animations and assign processing times accordingly.
It’s a very frustrating exercise: never detailed enough to be perfectly predictable, and it constantly needs updating.
I don’t really have a recipe, but even if it seems futile, it’s an exercise worth doing and redoing.
Tell us about a crisis situation you had to manage (tight deadline, major change, departure of a key animator). How did you navigate it?
Today I feel much more at ease with this kind of situation. As a rule, when it happens I focus on establishing very honest upward communication about the issue.
A client who had already paid for the rigging of their characters and recorded MoCap separately wanted to see their animations integrated into Unreal within 15 days. Of course, when the assets arrived everything was misaligned — two weeks would barely have been enough just to redo the characters properly.
In that moment, quality took the biggest hit: by using a few scripts and spending only the allotted time on each file, we rebuilt a skeleton in each character, recovered the animations, retargeted the MoCap onto them, positioned everything in the scene, etc.
The result wasn’t very satisfying from our point of view, but I had taken care to communicate this clearly as progress was made.
In the end, the client was delighted: we met the deadline, and the audience at that event never complained about the retargeting quality, the skinning, or even the glaring absence of finger bones in the short VR experience they were offered that day.
As Lead Animator on Heavy Rain and Beyond Two Souls, you shaped the way characters moved and expressed their emotions in these highly cinematic narrative games. How do you approach gameplay animation in such narrative-driven projects? What are the specific challenges when every movement must serve both gameplay and emotion?
I think that’s what keeps my passion for video games and gameplay animation in particular alive: the idea of creating a semblance of life, an avatar to inhabit for a moment, that seems intelligent and whose emotions can be shared by the players.
You moved from Quantic Dream to Sony London Studio and now to Half Mermaid. How has your approach to animation evolved across these different types of projects? What fundamentally changes between animating for narrative performance capture, immersive VR, and interactive Full Motion Video?
I’m a big fan of Immortality, but the project I’m working on is more traditional in its presentation , maybe for the next one?
I don’t really know what changes, to be honest; for me it’s always just different recipes and ingredients.
Perhaps the common thread is the idea of respecting the actors’ performances, capturing those micro‑details that bring life to the characters , making them interactive, believable, and moving. That’s what attracts me the most.
To conclude, could you share a piece of advice, a technique, or an approach that you would specifically recommend to gameplay animators? Something you wish you had known earlier in your career, or a specific tip for those aspiring to become Lead Animators?
Junior tip: with a layer containing all the controls, set a key on frame 1, copy/paste it to the last frame. Boom , motion looped.
Mid‑level tip: if you’re told your animations are too slow, check their blend time first…
Lead tip: “It’s all fine.”
Through these twenty answers, Clément Castanier offers far more than a technical glimpse into the role of a lead animator: he shares a work philosophy where rigor goes hand in hand with trust, and where creativity is nourished as much by pipelines as by human qualities.
For me, having had the chance to grow under his direction from Heavy Rain through Beyond Two Souls, these words resonate as a natural continuity: Clément remains true to what has always distinguished him , his ability to delegate, to encourage, and to transform constraints into opportunities.
His advice, whether addressed to juniors, mid‑levels, or leads, reminds us that animation is not only a matter of technique, but also of transmission and passion.
It is this combination that makes him a reference point in our field, and that renders his testimony invaluable for the entire community.
Thank you, Clément, for taking the time to answer this interview! :)
Half Mermaid is hiring a Senior Gameplay Animator: https://app.trinethire.com/companies/30538-half-mermaid-productions/jobs/114643-senior-gameplay-animator
If you want to learn more about Clément’s profile, head over to his LinkedIn:
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