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Issue #108 | July 19th, 2026

Hey Reader 👋

Quick heads up before we dive in - the intro runs long this week. There was just a lot I wanted to talk about. So settle in for that part, and the usual Spotlight, Job Fair, and Random Stuff are all waiting for you right after. Grab a coffee.

This week was weirdly good. Focused. The kind of week where you actually watch the work move.

I've got a couple of films to deliver to a client, and here's the small thing that changed everything - I finally started using a real production tracker.

Sounds boring. It's not.

On a big production, this is invisible. There's a production assistant somewhere handling the charts, the calendars, the giant Google Sheet, and you just show up to meetings and animate. You never think about it.

Solo, you tell yourself you'll just… manage. Keep it all in your head.

You won't.

A tracker is a breakthrough because it lets you delegate the tracking to something that isn't your brain. You know exactly where you are at the end of the day. You stop carrying the whole thing around in your skull. And every week you tighten it a little more.

Going more professional always saves you time. Always.

And that freed-up brain went straight into Citron.

Citron is the graph editor for After Effects I've been building - the first digital product for Animator NOW. I honestly have no clue if it's going to sell. People are asking for it, there's clearly a need, plenty of folks are interested… but "interested" and "putting money down" are two very different animals.

We'll see. Whatever happens, happens. I'd rather find out than sit here wondering.

On the home front - it's moving.

We hired a painter, and that hits different. You spend months being the guy doing the work… and then one evening you just walk in and the whole living room is white and clean and it wasn't you this time. Feels amazing.

There's a garden now. The two-year-old runs around in it. And a little cat, maybe six months old, keeps coming to visit and play. We're all still crammed into one bedroom while the rest gets finished, but honestly? It's fine. It's good.

Okay. Now the honest part.

I told you a while back about a crazy opportunity. It went down the drain. Got the email last Sunday.

To be transparent - it was a robot company. A butler-robot thing, backed by one of those trillion-dollar AI giants, real investors, the whole deal. They reached out to me. I went through two rounds - more real conversations than interviews, really - and it went well. Really well.

And then… it wasn't the right fit for the moment. On their side, and if I'm honest, probably on mine too.

Here's how I hold it - I've got this philosophy that when something doesn't happen, it's not a miss. You put everything in. You did your best. You don't always get to know why. You let it go.

But I won't pretend it didn't sting. A little regular, consistent income would've been nice, honestly.

Partly, too, because it forced the question - do I actually want to be an employee again? After finally being on this entrepreneur path I kind of love?

And here's the tough truth.

I'm 48. Three kids. I don't carry a lot of regret… but some days, feeling how exhausting and stressful this is, how much sits on my back - I wish I was 20 years younger.

I see the guys online. Fired up, shipping an app in two days, making money, pure velocity. And I get it. I've got a lot of energy for my age. But nobody says the quiet part - the ones who move fastest are often the ones asking the fewest questions. No family weighing every call. No consequences to model out. Just full throttle.

At 48, with a family, you can't do that. You have to think about everything. Which makes it maybe ten times more stressful and ten times more tiring.

Do I know if I'll make it as an entrepreneur? No. That's the honest answer. I'm building it anyway. Plenty of ideas, trying hard not to scatter myself across ten of them at once.

One last thing that's been sitting with me.

I listened to an interview this week with a French entrepreneur. He did his big exit years ago - now he's just doing a podcast, living the slow life. And he said the thing everyone says, the thing you've been hearing for years: money doesn't buy happiness.

Yeah. Sure. True.

It didn't crack anything open for me - I already knew all that. But there's something about hearing a guy like him say it out loud one more time. It landed. Reminded me of Andrew Wilkinson in Never Enough - a book you should genuinely go read.

Because then comes the part people always leave out - when you don't have money, it's brutally hard to be happy in a normal society. Sure, go live alone in the forest and you'll barely need any. But for a normal life, with real options? You need it.

And what I'm actually chasing isn't money. It's freedom. Money is just the thing that buys it.

The more I work, the more I feel how this whole society is built like a giant prison - you're born, taught to do a thing, then you do that thing for someone else, and that's your life. Being an entrepreneur is harder. More struggle, more sleepless nights. But at least there's hope. Hope that one day you're free.

Some afternoons I stop dead in the middle of the day, step back, and think - why am I doing all of this? What's the point?

And I have to remind myself. The point is freedom.

I don't care about watches. I don't care about cars. I want to travel when I want to. Surf when there are waves. Make music. Be with the people I love. And keep them safe.

And for all of that… I need money. I don't give a shit about money itself. I just need enough of it to stop having to think about it. Which is the most backwards thing in the world - you have to think really hard about the one thing you don't care about, just so you can finally stop thinking about it.

Alright. Let's get into the rest of this week's issue. 🔥

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The Spotlight

A priest, worn down by decades of routine and quietly drowning in alcohol, hits the bottom of a stormy, drunken night… and gets a visit from a rooster. That's the setup. What follows is a subtle, luminous little exploration of a man's quest to know himself.

Fifteen minutes. That's long for a short. And it earns every one.

Here's the thing that got me. For the first stretch, I'm watching what looks like gorgeous stop-motion. Then the camera starts doing things - moves so complex, so fluid, that I flipped in my head and went okay, this is CG, this is just really, really good CG dressed up to look like stop-motion.

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Then the credits roll. And no. It's actually stop-motion.

For that reason alone, this thing is a small miracle. It keeps making you forget you're watching puppets and sets. That's the whole trick, and they pull it off again and again.

And it's not just stop-motion. It's a proper multi-medium film - 2D, 3D, stop-motion, 2D sequences in totally different styles, photography, live-action video, all of it. On paper that should feel like a mess. A show reel. Instead everything sits exactly where it should. Every technique is doing a job. Nothing feels bolted on. It all folds into the story.

But the part I keep coming back to is the acting.

There's so much subtlety in what this character does - what he's doing, what he's thinking - and at no point are you lost. Not once do you sit there wondering what's going on. No voiceover holding your hand. It's just right there in front of you, clear as day.

That's the real sign of great animation, by the way. Not the flashy move. It's when you never have to ask what's happening here? When the thought is legible on the character without a single word. That's the hard part, and it's beautiful when it lands.

The set is gorgeous too - the church, the little house tucked beside it, the trees. Real handcrafted stop-motion texture. And that opening scene… how do you show a man losing his faith? Faith is an internal, invisible thing. There's nothing to point a camera at. And the way Lévesque stages those first few beats to show it - it made me smile. Genuinely wonderful filmmaking.

So yeah. Beautiful, patient, quietly ambitious film.
Go watch it.

🎬 Credits
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​Director: Jean-François Lévesque
​Production: Julie Roy - National Film Board of Canada​
​Sets: Marie Bloch-Lainé (set design), Bertrand Lévesque (construction), Valérie Dupras (finishing)
​Animation: Jean-François Lévesque, Valérie Dupras, Patrick Bouchard (stop-motion) · Adrien Calle, Catherine Manesse (watercolour)
​Camera: Stephan Ballard, Mathieu Bergeron
​Music: Robert Marcel Lepage
​Sound: Olivier Calvert (sound design)
​Compositing: Mélanie O'Bomsawin, Jean-François Lévesque, Stephan Ballard, Brenda Lopez Zepeda
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Share this short film to someone! 😊

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The Job Fair

• ​Senior Animator - Unknow Swiss studio
  ​Join a creative studio environment where your animation expertise will help shape engaging and visually memorable gaming experiences. In this role, you will create high-quality animations that define the visual identity of interactive products and bring characters, symbols, interfaces, and effects to life. Working closely with artists, designers, and developers, you will influence creative direction from concept development through final production. You will combine artistic creativity with technical knowledge to deliver polished assets that enhance player engagement. This is an exciting opportunity for an experienced animator who enjoys storytelling, innovation, and contributing to the evolution of visual experiences in a collaborative team.​
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• ​Senior Character & Motion Animator - Ruby Labs​
  Ruby Labs is a leading tech company that creates and operates innovative consumer products. We offer a diverse range of opportunities across the health, education, and entertainment industries. Our innovative teams are driving the future of consumer-led products, and we're always looking for passionate individuals to join us.​
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• ​Motion Designer - Lodgify
  ​Lodgify is a fast-growing scale-up company leading the vacation rental industry. Backed by $30M in funding, our platform empowers property owners and managers worldwide to efficiently manage and grow their business through technology. Headquartered in sunny Barcelona, we're now a team of 380+ people representing over 60 nationalities, united by a passion for transforming the future of short-term rentals.

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The Random Stuff

🎬 Gollum's back… and so is the old mocap debate

Warner Bros just dropped a little first-look video to mark day one of production on The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum. Not really a trailer… more of a "cameras are officially rolling" thing. Andy Serkis walks onto the set in his mocap suit, drops into the crouch, does the voice, calls action. And boom - we're back in Middle-earth. This is the continuity after the Hobbit trilogy, and some of the legacy members are coming back. Elijah Wood as Frodo. Ian McKellen as Gandalf. That part genuinely got me.

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It gave me that same buzz I used to get watching Peter Jackson's old Hobbit vlogs… just a little dimmer this time. Because it's basically the Andy Serkis show now. He's the director, he's Gollum, he's doing pretty much everything - if he could hand you the popcorn himself, he would. 😅 And it dragged me straight back to that old fight from the first trilogy - digital vs the mocap department.
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Remember how much of Gollum was actually the work of animators? That's the part nobody puts on the poster. Mocap sells because it's easy to sell - watch an actor do a move with the puppet right next to him, instantly cool. Watch an animator sit patiently at a screen for hours nailing one shot… not as sexy. So performance capture always wins the marketing. Always has.
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And here we go again. But still - Elijah, Ian, Middle-earth. I'm in. Take a look. 👀

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🛸 The Age of Disclosure (it's not little green men)

Okay, confession - if you're anything like me, you've always had a soft spot for UFOs, the X-Files, all that stuff. Not obsessed. Not reading about it every week. But interested. Well, I just listened to the director of a documentary called The Age of Disclosure on Diary of a CEO, and it flipped a switch in my head.
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First thing I learned: we don't even call them UFOs anymore. They're UAPs now - Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon. And this whole subject? It got serious. Like national-security-serious. The government, the military, actual senators openly talking about it.

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Here's the thing - if you're waiting for a little green man to stroll out of your house and down the street, you're gonna be disappointed. That's not the point. The doc pulls together 34 senior US government, military and intelligence people - folks with serious credibility based on their careers alone - openly saying they've had an experience, or that they know for a fact there's been a black program hiding UAP activity for 80 years.
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And honestly? Believe it or don't, that's not even what got me. What got me is just watching the Senate, the senators, the whole US political machine start to talk about this out loud. That in itself is kind of wild. It's on Amazon Prime Video. Go check it out. 👀

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🎨 Gawx filmed Fred again.. and it's just poetry

Last one, and it might be my favorite. I love Gawx. If you don't know him, he's this Mexican artist on YouTube who is, to me, the actual definition of what an artist is. The guy does everything - drawing, painting, editing, filmmaking, even music - and he does it all at a level that's honestly insane. He basically invented his own genre on YouTube. And you know how rare that is? Casey Neistat did it. MrBeast did it. Gawx did it. People copy his style constantly. That's how you know it's real.

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And then he goes and makes this. It's a little film about Fred again.. - this incredible DJ I only discovered a couple months ago and now can't stop listening to - built around the Mexico City finale of his USB002 tour.
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Gawx spent the week with him and the result is just beautiful. You get this glimpse into Fred's world on tour, and the sheer amount of work behind the whole USB thing is insane. But what makes it sing is that it's pure Gawx - the framing, the camera, the lighting, all of it poetic and wonderful. Twenty minutes. Do yourself a favor and press play.

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Like what you're reading? Don't keep it to yourself.
​Forward this to one person who'd love it.
That's how we grow this thing. One animator at a time. 🥰

Philippe Duvin​
Founder, Animator NOW

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