AI Video Artist (Cape Town)

Job description

Remote, Project by Project

We make videos for B2B tech companies whose products can't be filmed. Cybersecurity, identity, fraud detection, AI infrastructure. There's no gadget to shoot and no interface worth watching, so every brief starts with inventing the picture from scratch. We work with some of the largest names in enterprise tech, and the demand keeps growing: one great video delivered, and other teams in the business want their own.

We're hiring an artist who happens to be dangerous with AI tools. Not the other way round.

How we see the work

These are complicated products, and explaining them simply is the minimum. Every studio in our category can do that. It's where our work starts, never where it finishes. What we're actually paid for is the idea nobody else would have made: a metaphor that carries the whole story, a quirk that makes it unmistakably ours, humour that's tone rather than jokes, craft you can feel in a single frame. If a piece looks like the category, the category wins, and we send it back.

Mixed media is our native tongue. 2D and 3D animation, motion design, live action, stock and archive, AI generation, type, texture, sound. The collision of the mix is our hallmark: we push disciplines into each other until the result belongs to no single one of them. Sometimes the right answer is almost pure AI, and we take that road with the same obsession. Restraint is a craft decision.

The role

You'll work directly with our creative director on AI-driven launch films, explainers, style frames and full sequences. Generated imagery pushed into animation, live action, type and sound, then composited, graded and finished by hand until it stops looking like AI and starts looking like ours. And sometimes the brief calls for almost pure AI, taken as far as the tools will go.

• Project by project. Brief by brief, priced per job

Do good work and the briefs keep coming; our best relationships run for years.

What this role is not

A prompt engineering job. Prompting is the easy part and we assume you're good at it. Anyone can generate a thousand frames an hour. The job is knowing which frame is the idea, and why the other 999 are quietly wrong.

The eye we're hiring for

You art direct the model, you don't gamble on it. That means directing shot choice, lighting logic, lensing, composition and motion in the generation itself, the way a director briefs a DP. And it means the detector: you look at an output and instantly clock the plastic skin, the light with no source, the physics that are 5% off, the motion that floats, the frame that's pretty but dramatically dead. Where that eye came from is your business. Film school, fine art, animation, photography, or two obsessive years teaching yourself since university. We only care that you have it.

The frontier is part of the brief

We intend to stay ahead of the AI wave, and we run a simple loop to do it: when the next model drops, we experiment with it on real work. If it holds up, or adds something to how the studio makes things, it goes into the workflow. If not, we move on. You'd be one of the people running that loop.

Because the job isn't only making what the tools are already good at. It's finding what they'll be good at next. Photorealistic generation is one lane. AI-assisted animation, which isn't properly solved yet, is another. Code-driven motion through platforms like Remotion, wired into AI, is a third. The creative craft and the eye are the foundation; this role is also about pushing what the studio can do. If you're the kind of person who sees a new model drop and loses a weekend to it, this is the room you want to be in.

The kit

Every tool you need, funded. The full stack of current image and video models, the subscriptions, the compute, the tokens. You'll never ration a generation or eat a platform cost to do the work properly. Your job is to flex the craft as far as it goes; paying for the sandbox is ours.

Who this could be

Seniority isn't the filter. You might be fifteen years into film or design and now deep in the tools. You might be a year or two out in the wild whose AI work already looks like nobody else's. Both are welcome. The portfolio is the door: one or two pieces that stop us scrolling count for more than any CV.

You must have

• A portfolio with taste. Ideas and images we haven't seen before, not a grid of pretty outputs. This is the whole interview
• An eye for the craft of filmmaking: shot language, lighting, composition, and the ability to say precisely why a generation reads synthetic
• Deep, current fluency across the AI stack: image and video generation, node-based workflows, and the habit of learning whatever shipped last month
• Finishing skills in After Effects or equivalent, because raw generations are never the deliverable
• Reliability on deadline, remote, with clear communication while several jobs are in flight
• Bonus: any B2B or technical subject matter experience. Our work is complex tech, not consumer

The bar

Every model has a default look, and the world has seen plenty of it. What we're after is work with a fingerprint: pieces where your taste, your choices and your hand are visible in the frame, and no one else could have made them quite that way. If that's what your portfolio shows, we want to see it.

Location and rates

Remote, from anywhere. We're a South African studio and our budgets are set in rand, so our rates suit brilliant freelancers in South Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. If your day rate is set in London or San Francisco, we're probably not the right fit, and we'd rather say so here than waste your time.

How to apply