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Issue #88 | March 1st, 2026

Hey Reader 👋
​
​Something funny happened to me this week.

I've been working on an animated film — shot entirely in Unreal Engine. A project I genuinely wanted to do, with full creative freedom, and even the choice of tools. Dream setup, right?

And yet… I got lost.

The technical rabbit hole

For a month and a half, I dove deep into the software. Snow shaders. Multi-layer landscape materials. Importing Maya rigs. Blueprints. All of it. I was getting good at Unreal — I could feel it — but something felt off. Time was flying, and I couldn't shake this low-grade panic.

Was I just not good enough yet? Was I too slow?

Turns out, no. The problem was simpler and a little embarrassing: I had been building a technical playground for weeks… with no storyboard. No story reel. Nothing that actually talked about the film.

So this week, I stopped.

Closed the shader editor. Opened my iPad. Started drawing shots.

And the moment I dropped those panels into After Effects with some music and rough sound design — that thing Pixar calls a story reel — the whole film clicked into place. Even the Unreal stuff suddenly made sense. Every technical decision I'd been wrestling with became obvious once I could see the film.

25 years in, and I still walk into that trap. 😅

I'm not mad at myself for it — I kind of just smile now when I catch it. But if you're earlier in your career, hear this:

The tools are just tools. The story, the animation, the feeling you're trying to create — that's the DNA. Everything else exists to serve that.

There's an order to things. Not because someone invented rules, but because the right order keeps your ideas fresh, keeps you from burning out, and makes each step feed naturally into the next. When you're going in circles and starting to feel like you're failing — it's rarely because you're not good enough. It's usually because you're working on the wrong thing at the wrong moment.

Stop. Step back. Ask yourself what you're actually trying to build.

Then go build that.

(And for what it's worth — real-time rendering in Unreal is kind of magic once you're past the setup phase. No render farm. Multiple passes on the same shot. It's a different world from traditional CG pipelines, and I'm genuinely excited about where this is going. 👀)

Alright. Let's get into this week's issue. 🔥

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The Spotlight

There's a lonely widow. A strange cat appears on her daily walk to the supermarket. It follows her home. And from there, things get wonderfully, quietly weird.

That's the premise of Budō — a Swedish stop-motion short set in Japan, directed by Amanda Aagard and Alexander Toma. Fifteen minutes. No dialogue. And one of the most beautifully lit animated shorts I've seen in a long time.

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Here's the thing — and this is what makes Budō unusual to talk about: the animation itself is not the star. It's simple. Minimalist. Occasionally rough around the edges. And honestly? It doesn't matter one bit. Because everything around the animation is so stunning that you barely notice.

What hit me hardest was the lighting.

And that's the thing — the lighting isn't just beautiful for the sake of it. It creates the whole emotional experience of the film. That feeling of warmth, of wanting to curl up in those narrow Japanese streets, of a world that feels safe and a little magical. That's not the story doing that. That's the cinematography.

I was literally watching each new shot just to see what creative lighting decision they'd made next. That's rare. That's a really good sign.

The animation serves the story — and that's exactly what it needed to do. Nothing more. The directors themselves have said this was their first stop-motion project — they came from live-action commercials, and it shows in the best possible way. They brought a cinematographer's eye to a medium that often gets so focused on the technical challenge of moving things that it forgets to actually light them.

Go watch it. It's 15 minutes and it'll stick with you.

🎬 Credits

Directors: Amanda Aagard & Alexander Toma
​Production: Alexander Toma & Amanda Aagard — AmsagaAnimation: Mikael Lindbom (Head of Animation), Amanda Aagard, Alexander Toma
​Cinematographer: Alexander Toma ​
Gaffer: Mikael Linell
​Music: Isak Lundholm
​Sound design & mix: Anders Kwarnmark
​VFX: Ulf Lundén
​Color grading: Sander Wan Wijk
​Co-production: Film i Väst

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The Job Fair

• ​2D Animation Artist/Cartoonist - Causey Consulting, LLC Causey Consulting, LLC · United States (Hybrid) — Contract
  ​An author and illustrator is looking for an experienced OpenToonz animator to walk them through building a rig-ready character puppet in Photoshop — covering layer organization, joint separation, eye/mouth shapes, and PSD prep for import. It's a paid 30–60 minute recorded Zoom session, with potential for more tutorials if the fit is right.
  ​
• ​Remote 3D Animator - School with Jabraan School with Jabraan · Philadelphia, PA, USA (Hybrid) — Contract​
  Ed-tech startup founded in 2021 is hiring a 3D animator to bring educational content to life through engaging character animation and scenes. You'll work with motion capture data, refine movements, and collaborate with the creative team. Requires proficiency in Blender, rigging experience, and ideally a background in educational or multimedia content.
  ​
• ​Senior 3D Animator - MON Co. MON Co. · Anywhere (Remote only) — Full time​
  MON Co. (formerly LiquidX), the studio behind Pixelmon, is hiring a Senior 3D Animator to create fluid character, creature, and object animations for their gaming IP. You'll work in Maya, Blender, or 3ds Max with Unreal Engine, optimizing animations for mobile. The team is international, fully remote, and sits at the intersection of gaming and Web3.

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The Random Stuff

🤖 I cancelled my ChatGPT subscription

I've been doing a big subscription cleanup this week — you know the kind, where you realize you're paying for things you barely use anymore. The most unexpected cut? ChatGPT.

It wasn't even a hard decision. Over the past few months, Claude just became my main LLM — for writing, brainstorming, organizing, building files. The files it generates are genuinely beautiful. I don't use them out of the box, but they're so clear and well-structured they make everything easier. I spent a couple of weeks migrating all my projects over, and now that it's done… I don't miss ChatGPT. Not even a little. I'm even thinking about jumping to the Max plan at some point because I keep hitting my usage limit. That's a good problem to have. 😅

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🎬 The Pit — ER for the modern era

If you know me, you know I'm obsessed with ER. I've watched every season probably every two years — it never gets old. So when I tell you The Pitt is a worthy successor, that means something.

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Noah Wyle is back, and this show captures exactly what made ER so great — the chaos, the humanity, the relentless pace of emergency medicine. Small correction from my voice memo: it's called The Pitt , it's on Max (HBO Max), and it didn't just get nominated — it won 5 Emmy Awards including Outstanding Drama Series and Best Actor for Wyle. Season 2 is currently airing right now. If you've never seen ER, watch that first. If you have — you already know what to do. 👀

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🛠️ Wispr Flow — backup dictation that's actually good

I use SuperWhisper for pretty much everything. My brain moves way faster than my fingers, so dictation tools aren't a nice-to-have for me — they're infrastructure. So when Super Whisper had a bug this week and was down for a couple of hours, I realized just how dependent I've become.

I scrambled and found Wispr Flow as a backup — and honestly, it's really solid. Works across every app, cleans up filler words in real time, and it's free to start. It's not replacing Super Whisper, which is back up and running, but it's good to know there's a worthy alternative. If you're not dictating yet and still spending hours typing out emails, notes, and ideas… you're leaving so much time on the table. 🎙️

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Philippe Duvin​
Founder, Animator NOW

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