An onion is our first character. Yes, really. 🧅

Issue #93 | April 5th, 2026

Hello Reader 👋

I'm writing this on Friday and I'm going at a thousand miles per hour. Not the exhausted kind. The kind where everything is clicking, every project is moving forward, and the energy just keeps coming. Let me tell you what's happening.

The Freelancing for Animators community is live.

We launched yesterday. We already have almost 10 people in there, and today at 5pm we're doing our first live call. Just meeting everyone, hearing what they want to build, what's blocking them. And then I get to coach them through it until they land their first clients. That's the whole point. That's what gets me fired up about this.

My Unreal film for Siemens is getting real.

Here's the insane part. Two months ago, I knew nothing about Unreal. Zero. And now I'm doing layout, importing rigs from Maya, getting my first animation tests in engine. The film is going to be around 70 shots. It's a series of animated shorts with a snow fox as the main character and a deer as a secondary character, having little adventures in a Norwegian landscape. I cannot wait to show you some frames. Soon.

Things are aligning in ways I didn't plan.

I had lunch with my best friend this week. She's the CEO of a visual effects company, and we've known for years that we should work together. But we never forced it. Different seasons, different priorities. Now suddenly three opportunities are opening up where it could actually make sense. I can't say more yet, it's still in the embryo stage. But it feels significant.

And separately, another close friend, an incredible art director I used to work with in advertising, and I are planning to open a branding agency by the end of this year. Every time we work together it's like playing ping pong with ideas. We have to control the flow because it's just too much. He does graphic design and drawing, I do motion and animation, and together there's this burst of creativity that we both know is rare. So we're building something.

2026 is the year of building things. That's what it is.

And speaking of building…

I built two Mac apps this week. Native apps. With Claude. While working on my other projects.

One is a brain dump app for capturing ideas that don't belong in a to-do list. The other sits in my menu bar and locks my sound input and output so my Mac stops switching to the crappy AirPod microphone every time I connect them. Are they pretty? No. Do they work? Yes. Did it take 20 minutes? Pretty much.

I always wanted to build Mac apps. Ten years ago I tried learning Swift and gave up because that language is definitely not my jam. But I understand how things work, I have a developer brain without the syntax skills. And now with AI, it feels like that scene in The Matrix where they upload kung fu directly into Neo's brain. That's what it feels like. Suddenly I can build whatever I have in my mind. And that is genuinely beautiful.

All right, enough babbling. I'm pumped and excited and I want you to feel it too.

Let's get into this week's issue. 🔥

The Spotlight

Two ships collide in a harbor. A city shatters. And a sailor is blasted skyward, naked and weightless, hurtling through the air for two kilometers before landing, somehow, alive. This actually happened. Halifax, 1917. The largest accidental explosion in history. And this film turns those few airborne seconds into something transcendent.

⚠️ Note: If you're outside the US, you will need a VPN to access this film on YouTube.

Let's start with what hits you first: the visuals. The Flying Sailor looks like nothing you've seen before. At first glance, you'd swear it's stop motion. Then a few minutes in, you realize there's a heavy load of CGI driving the environments, the destruction, the scale of it all. And then the sailor himself appears and you're in full 2D territory. The recipe is genuinely fresh.
Sure, you've seen mixed media before, bits of 2D here, some CG there. But never blended quite like this. Never with this particular flavor. And just for that alone, it's already worth your time.

But the real power of this film is how it grabs you. If I had one word for it: powerful. It takes you by the hand and guides you exactly where it wants, and you don't resist because you can't. The explosion is so violent, so sudden, and it contrasts so sharply with the pace of the film itself, which is slow, contemplative, almost meditative.
And then that score. Luigi Allemano's music is the kind that makes you want to stop everything and go look up what else this person has done. It carries the film with this incredible emotional weight that never lets go.

What the film captures so beautifully is that near-death phenomenon where your entire life flashes before your eyes in the space of a few seconds. And the way it's rendered here, through this mix of abstraction, memory, beauty, and terror, it reminds me of Terrence Malick at his most expansive. That feeling of being lifted out of yourself, of suddenly seeing life from a vantage point so high that the details dissolve and only the immensity remains.

There's a concept called The Overview Effect. It's what happens to astronauts when they look down at Earth from space. Without details for the eyes to catch on, they're hit with this overwhelming understanding of how vast and interconnected everything is. They can almost hold the entirety of existence in their hands. Some films can recreate that feeling, not through literal space imagery, but through emotion, through story, through connecting you to something bigger than your daily routine.
The Flying Sailor does exactly that. Especially when the journey literally takes the sailor toward the cosmos. Everything connects. The metaphor becomes reality on screen.

And then it brings you back. Back to the ground. Back to the body. Back to the fragile, ridiculous, miraculous fact of being alive.

This one stays with you.

🎬 Credits

Directors: Amanda Forbis, Wendy Tilby
Production: David Christensen — National Film Board of Canada
Animation: William J. Dyer, Amanda Forbis
Additional 2D Animation: Anna Bron
Music & Sound Design: Luigi Allemano
Compositing: Nicolas Mermet
Editing: Chelsea Body
Final Mix: Jean Paul Vialard

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Forward this email to them - It takes 2 seconds 😊

The Job Fair

2D Animator & Designer - Psyop Stuttgart, Germany (Baden-Württemberg, freelance)
Psyop Stuttgart is seeking elite freelance talent for an upcoming 2D teaser of ‘The Twilight World,’ a prestigious co-production directed by Werner Herzog. We are looking for artists with a deep understanding of realistic human and animal anatomy, capable of delivering a grounded, naturalistic performance. This is a rare opportunity to contribute to a high-concept adult animated drama under world-class direction.
Motion Graphic Designer / Animator - The Murphy Studio · India (full-time)
The Murphy Studio is hiring a Motion Graphic Designer/Animator with 1-3 years of experience for luxury wedding invitations and brand content. After Effects, Cinema 4D, Illustrator, Photoshop
Senior Animator · Pixel Movement
An independent game studio building a stylised melee action title centred on expressive combat, fluid transitions, and rewarding mastery. The team is currently moving from prototype into pre-production, with a near-term focus on building a strong first playable for publisher conversations.

The Random Stuff

🎨 Animator Now! Is Getting Its Own Rigs

We've been working with the incredible team at HuHaa Studios on something I've wanted to do for a long time: building our own character rigs for Animator Now!.
The idea is simple. Free or very cheap rigs, a bit like what Agora does, but with our own flavor. And by "our own flavor" I mean… a little weird.
Our first character is an onion. Yes. An onion. It's training wheels for everyone involved, the rigger, the character designer, and me, working together for the first time.

The modeling is 95% done and rigging is underway. This is the first of what will be an entire set of characters, and they'll be available on the Animator Now! site as it evolves into a real hub for animators: rigs, podcast, courses, newsletter, articles, all in one place. Stay tuned.

🎬 Coinbase's "Your Way Out" is Pure Filmmaking Madness

Okay, stop what you're doing and watch this. Coinbase aired an ad during the Oscars that looks exactly like a PS1-era video game. Low-poly characters, isometric camera angles, NPCs walking in loops, the whole thing.
But here's the kicker: it's all real. Live action. No CGI.

The costumes have printed-on textures. The actors were trained to move like game characters. The sets are physically built to look pixelated. Director Oscar Hudson shot everything in-camera, and the transition from game world to reality as the protagonist breaks free is genuinely jaw-dropping. They could have done this in CG a million times over, but as the director says, it would have been so much less fun.
And honestly? So much less powerful. This is what happens when craft meets ambition.

🤖 The Newsletter That Got Me Serious About AI (especially Claude)

People keep asking me how I started doing real work with Claude, and the honest answer is one newsletter: How to AI by Ruben Hassid. It's on Substack, it's free, and every issue is a step-by-step workflow with screenshots that you can use the same day you read it. No fluff, no hype, just practical guides.

There's a paid tier that gives you access to his Slack community, but the free version alone is already packed. And while I'm at it, Substack in general has become my go-to for quality AI content. It feels more curated than YouTube, less algorithm-driven, and way less AI slop. If you're tired of watching 20-minute YouTube videos to get one useful tip, try reading instead.

You can even follow me on Substack.

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. 🥰