WildBrain 3D Artist Interview Questions
& Process

The initial interview process seemed straightforward. HR reached out quickly the day after I applied, as they needed someone for a short-term contract. I then interviewed with a producer and department head, which went well enough, and I had relevant experience to start immediately. Despite being told I would hear back quickly due to the fast timeline, I never received a response. Follow-ups went unanswered. This level of communication, or lack thereof is highly unprofessional and frustrating. If this is indicative of how the studio handles communication internally, it’s a serious red flag. While the interviews themselves were fine, the ghosting and disregard for candidates’ time left a very negative impression. The initial strong impression was completely undermined by being ghosted, turning what started out promising into a negative experience. Brutal.

The interview was really smooth and simple. They asked how I heard about them and if I had previous experience working on TV shows. I spoke with the animation director and the layout director.

It took about 2 weeks before I got to a video interview. Once I had the meeting with these two guys they basically told me about the show "Peanuts". They showed me some stuff without even having me sign an NDA. I saw some designs and some poor animation attempts they told me was in the rough stages. Looked nothing like Charles Schultz's work. I thought okay- it's still needs work in development. Everything thing seemed fine like they wanted me to work on the show after seeing my years of animation experience and even working for Disney as a lead animation director. I spoke to them about animation timing and expressions, as the true Charlie Brown characters have very subtle expressions. It appeared like I was going to be hired. Most questions were basically answered if they read my resume but...The final question was very odd. What is your favorite song? So I played the Peanuts theme on my piano for them. I thought hey- we were talking about peanuts and that came to mind. Then I had to wait for about 2 weeks after that and by me following up every few days to get an answer about being hired. I finally get an answer they want me now to do some kind of a test. I was a little stunned by that. Anyway, this is where i should have realized this was some kind of a game to get artwork for free. However, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and did what I would call a very unprofessional test. Even though at this point I had now signed an NDA they sent poor board sketches with a bold watermark through the work I was trying to see. The instrustions were not clear as to what they even wanted done. Becuase they were not paying me for the test I did up some very nice clean drawings of Schutz styled poses. I had to do my own research to get model sheets of the characters and try and design them from a few different time periods. I realized I was putting way too much time into this and finally sent them a few, but not all of the work. I became very skeptical, thinking back on the meeting, that they had no clear direction for character models yet. It was even in the test notes to reference comic strips from 1965- 1975. I sent in my test and waited yet another week to hear anything back. At this stage I had to move on to something else- but was surprised to finally hear back from a very green recruiter that I was not being hired. Wow, I showed my work to many of my professional colleagues and they all thought, based on the poor direction or what they were looking for, my work was of the highest quality so what the hell were they looking for? I have to wonder now seeing how under developed the show was at that time they were gathering artwork from artist for free. So I guess you could say working for Wild Braindead pays you peanuts!