KATIE NAEHER KALINIAK | LEVER | SENIOR 3D ANIMATOR
From Wētā FX and Framestore to fast-moving production pipelines, Katie Naeher Kaliniak’s work focuses on capturing nuance — translating subtle expression and intent into believable, high-fidelity performance. Now a Senior 3D Animator, she combines artistic sensitivity with technical precision, crafting characters that not only look convincing but feel authentic, whether on screen or in-engine.
Please introduce yourself, what are your specialities?
Hi, I’m Katie, a Senior 3D Animator with nearly 20 years of experience across VFX, film, television, games and commercials. I have worked at companies including Wētā FX and Framestore as a 3D and Facial Animator on large-scale film projects, collaborating with cross-disciplinary teams.
I specialise in character performance, particularly adapting animation across a wide range of styles, pipelines, and production environments – something that has been a consistent thread throughout my career.
Can you talk about some of the most exciting or challenging projects you’ve worked on within your career?
The most exciting has to be Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes at Wētā FX. But the story actually starts a little earlier – on SheHulk, my first project with the company. The facial team was stretched at the time and asked a few animators to learn the tools to assist. I’d always loved facial animation and had solid keyframe dialogue experience from previous studios, so I was very excited for the opportunity.
I became fairly proficient with the Facial Deep Learning Solver (FDLS) and process, and by the time Apes came around, I was working across both the Animation and Facial teams on my sequences.
That dual role grew into something I hadn’t expected – my colleagues needed to learn the solver process for their own shots, so I became a liaison between the two teams, teaching other animators how to use the tools to get a baseline performance, and then building in the nuances by hand-keying on top. That kind of cross-team collaboration was something I found really fulfilling.
The shots themselves were some of the most complex I’ve worked on. There’s one early in my demo reel – Proximus Caesar being attacked by five eagles simultaneously – that genuinely pushed me. It started with motion capture on the actor, but ended up fully keyframed to make the physicality believable. So many moving parts, and I’m really proud of how it came together.
I was also given the opportunity to choose a couple of dialogue shots in the film. At Wētā, that’s not something animators are typically given – so being trusted with that choice felt like a genuine acknowledgement of what I’d contributed to the project. On the whole, it’s some of my proudest work.
Additional reference material: ACM Digital Library, SIGGRAPH Talks 2024, Denver: A New Kingdom: Weta FX Returns to The Planet of The Apes
Having worked across these sectors and now your current role as Senior 3D Animator at Level – can you talk a little about how each industry has influenced your approach to character animation and performance?
Most animators develop expertise in one corner of the industry. I think the fact that I haven’t is one of my biggest strengths – each environment demanded something different from me, and those demands have shaped me in ways that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
Television taught me speed and strategy. With heavy workloads and fast turnarounds, you learn to identify complexity early, plan accordingly, and communicate clearly when expectations don’t align with reality. A lot of my efficiency habits came from this – using Studio Library to save animation and poses, and working towards strong blocking quickly so there’s time left for real polish.
Working in commercials at a company called Assembly (now spread across Assembly and Fathom VFX) was where I grew the most broadly. Small teams, constantly changing projects, and an expectation that you should wear many hats.
with Weta Workshop, ASB: Meet Clever Kash, Contact Energy: Get the Goodies Plan
Coming from a purely animation background, I quickly had to branch out into modelling, lighting, and rendering – doing whatever was needed to see a project through from start to finish. I picked up ZBrush and Mudbox for sculpting, dipped into MotionBuilder, and learned V-Ray for rendering across different projects. That gave me a much better understanding of the full production pipeline.
My animation style diversified enormously there. I could be working on simulated stop-motion characters one week and naturalistic, high-end performances the next. That range has genuinely informed how I approach new projects – I can get a sense of what direction a project could take and what it might need creatively.
Games introduced systems thinking. It’s not just about making something look good in isolation, but understanding how it behaves inside an engine – how it blends, how it reads from every angle, and how scope can quietly expand through transitions and edge cases. Staying organised and consistent from the start is essential to avoid rework later.
VFX raised the bar on detail and discipline. Deadlines can be similar to TV schedules, but the level of scrutiny is much higher. You’re tracking surrounding shots, shared assets, and subtle continuity across departments. It also taught me the value of checking in early and often – knowing when to ask for feedback before going too far down the wrong path, especially in large, remote teams – absolutely essential.
Each industry you’ve worked in has quite different production rhythms, pipelines, and definitions of ‘done.’ What’s been the biggest mindset shift you’ve had to make when crossing from one to another?
The biggest shift has been moving between VFX and Games. Television, commercials, and VFX share a fairly similar structure in terms of how you work – production cadence, team size, and tools vary between companies, but the underlying mindset isn’t that different. Games is where everything changes.
In VFX you’re perfecting a shot from a specific angle, for a fixed moment. In Games, the animation has to survive player chaos and engine constraints while still creating moments of excitement and awe. Having worked across both Unreal Engine and Godot, my whole thought process shifts depending on what the engine demands as much as what the character needs. I’m thinking what’s going to feel the most fun, what change to this character’s movement will be the most impactful during gameplay. Especially for motion that carries meaning: you succeeded at something, you failed – maybe there’s something off to the side of the screen you need to notice. Within all of that there’s also a balancing act – not everything can be operating at full intensity at once, and the right movements have to dictate where attention goes. You need a lot of variation.
One of the aspects I find most creatively satisfying in Games is getting to design the full range of a character’s behaviours. In larger VFX productions, those decisions are usually mostly determined long before animation begins – you’re working within guidelines rather than building them. In Games, that creative ownership sits much closer to you.
Having navigated different pipelines throughout your career, what have you learned about adapting to new tools and workflows? Are there principles – around rigging collaboration, DCC tools, game engines, or motion capture – that have stayed consistent regardless of the studio or pipeline you’ve worked in?
The honest answer is that the technical side – learning a new pipeline, a new DCC, a new engine – has never been the hardest part of moving between studios or industries. I have used Maya at every company thus far except for one – GameLoft – which used 3D Studio Max. I learned that software on the job – much like the proprietary tools you encounter at larger studios. Most studios have documentation for the proprietary tools they use, and now with the wonderful resource that is the internet – you can learn most things fairly quickly. What has stayed constant, and what I think matters far more, comes down to three things: communication, organisation, and flexibility.
Communication is everything in this industry. There are so many people working across so many moving parts on any given project, all of which affect each other’s outcomes. Staying in tune with your teammates, knowing what to ask or where to look before you start a shot, following up with the people downstream of your work – these things directly affect the quality of what ends up on screen. In games especially, knowing the right questions to ask a designer or engineer who will be building on your work can be the difference between animation that serves the project and animation that hinders it.
Organisation is something I think gets genuinely underestimated. You are often managing a lot of information across multiple shots or even multiple projects simultaneously – feedback received, feedback addressed, deadlines, asset status, dependencies from other departments. Keeping track of all of that, for yourself and for the people around you, is not a soft skill. It’s a core one. I don’t depend on Producers to keep track of the status of all my work – that part is up to me, and to communicate that information back to them.
And flexibility – being prepared to pivot without taking it personally – is maybe the most important of all. Things change constantly in creative fields. Being too attached to your first iteration, or even to the first version of a project is dangerous. Most of the time when something needs to change, it’s not that the work is bad, it’s that the direction has shifted. The animators who handle that well are the ones who remember that everyone is working toward the same goal.
With advancements in real-time animation, procedural systems, and AI-assisted tools, how do you see the role of a character animator evolving, and how are you adapting?
Having worked in games means that real-time animation is already core to how I think. Every piece of motion I create has to function within engine constraints – responsive, efficient, and readable from any angle. You can’t rely on a fixed camera, so the performance itself has to carry the clarity. That’s shaped both my technical thinking and how I approach the way a character moves. Procedural systems aren’t really part of my work – my focus is character performance, which I think still very much needs a human eye and sensibility, and always will.
“I think the more interesting shift is around AI as a learning tool. The way I can now access highly specific, relevant information exactly when I need it has significantly sped up how I develop in my career. If I’m troubleshooting a technical problem, learning a new tool, or trying to find a faster solution to achieve the same quality outcome – that used to take hours of digging. Now it doesn’t. It hasn’t replaced the creative side of my work, but it’s made technical growth much faster.”
Overall, I think the role of a character animator is becoming more hybrid – still grounded in performance and storytelling, but increasingly technical. The tools will keep evolving, and I think the most important thing is understanding how to use them in service of the work – not letting them define it.
How do you approach conveying believable emotion and personality in your characters, especially when working with different styles (realistic vs stylized)?
My starting point is always the character themselves – my job is to find their intent before I decide how to express it through movement. That often involves asking questions, digging into the back story, and understanding the purpose the character serves. I see that as a process of translation: taking a creative vision and finding the clearest way to express it in performance.
That approach stays consistent whether the character is realistic or stylised. I’m always asking the same questions about who they are and what they’re feeling. What changes is the execution. With photoreal characters, you’re working in subtlety; with stylised characters, you can push physicality much further. A character like Po from Kung Fu Panda, or any of the Penguins from The Penguins of Madagascar, can squash and stretch in ways that directly carry emotion – fear or excitement can be expressed through shape change in a way realism wouldn’t allow. Learning to think in those terms, rather than defaulting to naturalistic motion, can be a genuinely fun shift.
For human performances, I tend to use video reference from myself or others, along with observational and animated reference for more stylised work. I’m not always a natural performer on camera, but I usually have a clear sense of what I’m looking for. If I can’t get what I need from my own reference, I’ll work with someone else to capture it. For me, it’s less about being the performer, and more about knowing how to identify the performance that best serves the shot.
What’s your approach to working with motion capture data versus hand-keyed animation? When do you favour one over the other?
It really depends on the requirements of the project or the shot. Sometimes motion capture needs to remain largely intact for technical reasons – if we’re replacing a body double’s head with an actor’s, a significant portion of that upper body performance has to match. There’s some flexibility, but you need a precise understanding of how any adjustment will affect the final outcome.
Other times you start with motion capture as a draft and end up with a lot more freedom to shape it – or the shot evolves so far from what was originally filmed that the capture gets scrapped entirely and you’re building it from scratch. Both happen more than people might expect.
In a lot of the other industries I’ve worked in, motion capture doesn’t really come into it at all – it’s usually entirely hand-keyed. That’s made me very comfortable working in either mode, which I think is important.
My favourite part of hand-keying is what I call “frankensteining” – pulling together pieces from different performances I’ve built: leg motion from one thing, upper body posing from another, some overlap or squish from somewhere else – and merging them to create the result I’m after. I utilize animation and pose libraries that I populate over the course of a project to iterate on and pull from, which helps me work efficiently.
As for a preference – honestly I don’t have a strong one. What I care about most is the outcome. The method is just the path to get there.
Have you experienced challenges in your career or industries, if so what changes and improvements would you like to see?
There are a few layers to this. The industry runs in cycles, and you have to be mentally and financially prepared for periods where work is scarce. When budgets tighten, companies compete for the same contracts, and it becomes a race to the bottom. It’s usually the artists who absorb that pressure, with lower wages for intensive schedules, and expectations that don’t reflect the rates being paid.
Then there’s the structural side, particularly in New Zealand. Most of us that have worked in film and media are treated as contractors, which has historically meant no minimum entitlements, no unfair dismissal protections, no leave. The Screen Industry Workers Act has moved things in the right direction, but not nearly far enough – and the knock-on effect is that talented people leave. Better wages, better protections, better opportunities exist elsewhere, and it’s hard to argue with that when you’re weighing up your career.
Day-to-day, the work can be incredibly demanding. Deadlines are tight – sometimes unreasonably so – and scope creep is relentless: rewrites, reshoots, casting changes, projects going on hold. None of that is inherently a problem, but the delivery date almost never shifts to accommodate it. That gap between what’s asked and what’s resourced is where burnout lives.
There’s also a persistent misunderstanding about what digital art actually involves. People see it on a screen and assume it’s fast or simple (don’t get me started about the assumptions with Motion Capture achieving a finished result), but the technical complexity can be enormous. Inefficient pipelines, massive scenes demanding huge processing power, rendering times that are entirely outside your control – it all adds up. When companies don’t prioritise art or understand how long quality work genuinely takes, that creates real friction.
“And then there’s the age-old challenge of being a woman in a male-dominated industry. It shows up in pay scales that don’t stay consistent with job titles, and in the kinds of opportunities that come your way – or don’t. It’s something the industry has been slow to address, and it’s still very much a conversation worth having.”
How do you ensure consistency in character performance and style across a team, especially when multiple animators are working on the same character?
Early on, it’s important to establish strong character guidelines – not just visually, but in terms of personality and intent. Understanding how a character thinks and behaves helps animators make consistent choices, even across different shots. It becomes a question of ‘would this character do this?’ rather than purely ‘does it look appealing.’
From there, regular group reviews are key. Looking at shots that are really hitting the mark and using them as benchmarks helps align the team. It gives everyone a clear visual target, and keeps style from drifting over time as more people contribute.
On the practical side, I’ve found animation libraries to be really effective for maintaining consistency in commonly used poses and expressions. On Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness, for example, we had a very specific “OO” mouth shape for Po that required a precise combination of many controls. Since it was used frequently, we saved it into a shared library so everyone could apply it in their work. We’d do the same for key facial shapes or poses – things that can easily become inconsistent if everyone builds them from scratch.
Personally, I try to support consistency by referencing those standards in my own work, and staying active in reviews – both giving and receiving feedback – so we stay aligned as a team. Ultimately, it’s about having a clear target, keeping communication open, and making sure the team has what it needs to stay consistent.
What advice would you give to someone interested in developing a career as a 3D Animator?
A big part of developing as a 3D animator is staying open to different influences and not locking yourself too early into one path. Try different styles, tools, and if possible, different industries.
You might start with a clear idea of where you want to end up – but it shouldn’t limit what you explore. I originally wanted to work in VFX; Jurassic Park was a huge inspiration growing up – the idea of creating something that doesn’t exist and convincing an audience that it does really made an impact on me. I love VFX work (and that film). But along the way I also discovered a real interest in stylised work, and each of those has made me a more adaptable and diverse animator.
“Actively seek feedback from people you respect in the industry, and try to take it on board constructively rather than defensively. Animation is a team discipline – your ability to communicate, collaborate, and adapt will often matter just as much as – if not more than – your technical skill.”
I’d strongly encourage attending industry events and conferences where you can. SIGGRAPH, GDC Festival of Gaming, Melbourne International Games Week, and local events like New Zealand Game Developers Conference or the NZ Games Festival, are genuinely valuable – not just for the talks and education, but for the exposure to where the industry is heading and the people you will meet. Those connections and that context are hard to replicate anywhere else, and early in your career especially, being in those rooms can open doors you didn’t know existed.
For your demo reel, be very intentional. It’s the first thing people will judge you on, and it should only contain your strongest work. Keep it short, and consider editing it to music so the timing of your shots feels deliberate. A well-edited 45–60 seconds of strong work will always land better than a long reel with filler. Be strict with yourself about what stays in – regardless of how much time it took.
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