A weekly newsletter for animators who want to stay sharp. One short film. Three fresh jobs. The tools, films and rants I'm into this week. Plus honest notes from 25 years of freelancing in animation. Every Sunday, 1pm Paris time.
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Four years in a dark room for 17 minutes of film
Published 18 days agoΒ β’Β 8 min read
Issue #110 | August 2nd, 2026
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Hey Reader π
I'm writing this from my living room. It's an absolute mess. There's a couch, the floor isn't even finished, and I'm just sitting in the middle of it all. Check out the picture below. π
That's life these days. Can't wait to get my studio back!! π
Anyway. Quick update on the Citron launch. It went really well. I sold a good number of copies and made roughly a month's salary in one launch. Which, yeah, is amazing.
But here's the thing⦠the money wasn't even the best part.
The best part was the signal.
People writing in to say how much they love it. People reporting a bug, me fixing it, and then hearing back that they're happy. People sending me feature ideas for stuff they'd love to see in Citron. That whole loop is electric. It tells you you're onto something.
This isn't my first taste of it
About 15 years ago I sold a tutorial online. How to animate the Luxo lamp. I think I made around β¬400 total.
I still remember the feeling. Making money online for the first time is a real rush. Dopamine, disbelief, all of it.
This time it was that same feeling times a hundred. Bigger numbers, bigger stakes, bigger reason to pay attention.
And it reminded me why I do this
Not the money. The building.
Putting hours into small details nobody will ever consciously notice. Crafting something people actually use every day, that makes their work easier and their workflow smoother. That is deeply fulfilling for me in a way almost nothing else is.
I think I'm slowly turning into an indie hacker who makes tools. And honestly? This feels like the very beginning of the road.
Here's the lesson I keep coming back to
Opportunities send signals. Your job is to read them.
Bad signal - know when to pivot, and pivot fast. Good signal - double down and keep pushing.
Citron gave me both signals at once. The reviews and the revenue. So I'm doubling down.
I already shipped a new version with a stack of bug fixes and two new features. And I plan to keep doing that pretty much every single week.
The goal is simple - if you live in the After Effects graph editor, Citron becomes a no-brainer. A lifetime license for a tool that makes that work dramatically better. Some of the features in there don't even exist in the default AE graph editor.
And I'm not stopping at the value graph. I want to reinvent the whole thing. Including the speed graph.
If you've ever used the speed graph, you know it's a fucking mess. I want to fix it properly. A completely new way of working in there.
I'm genuinely excited about this. It's reminding me exactly why I wanted to be an entrepreneur in the first place.
And if that's the road you want to walk too
If you're thinking about building a product, starting your own thing, going independent⦠just hit reply and email me. Seriously. I'll answer, and we can figure out your next move together.
I found this one completely by accident on YouTube. Never heard of it before. I finished watching it about five minutes ago and I'm writing this while still slightly stunned.
It's 17 minutes long. I did not feel a single one of them.
Let me take a second here, because I need to process what I just watched... Ok... here it is.
You have NEVER seen stop motion like this. I'm fairly sure of that. I spent a good chunk of the film waiting for the reveal that it wasn't stop motion, because the level of animation makes no sense. At one point I genuinely thought it was live puppetry. Then I thought rotoscoping. Something, anything other than what it actually is.
Because that's the thing that breaks your brain. Madame Tutli-Putli's eyes will grab you and not let go. The performance in them is something you'd credit to CG without hesitating. That kind of subtle acting is supposed to live in a 3D package with a rig and a graph editor.
Here's the answer. The eyes are real.
Actual human eyes, filmed separately, composited onto the puppets frame by frame.
The actress Laurie Maher, who the character was modelled on, performed the eye acting in 15 to 20 takes per sequence. And this wasn't loose reference. Her eye movements were choreographed to match the puppet's gestures, the camera angle, and the motion of the train.
Then each one was hand-picked from across the takes, positioned, re-timed, painted and blended, with the lighting and shadows aligned so you never see a seam.
They even stretched the eyes slightly bigger than life. On purpose. To make you feel more for her.
And the whole thing was tracked, composited and finished in After Effects. Not a CG pipeline. Not some proprietary studio monster. The same software sitting on your machine right now. And a LOT of sweat.
There's a moment where she looks straight at camera and you're looking right into her eyes and it becomes genuinely uncomfortable. Not scary-uncomfortable. Intimate-uncomfortable. She's looking at you.
I don't know how they animated something that surreal and made you connect with it that hard at the same time.
β
It's dark. You follow this woman on a night train with a bunch of strange passengers and increasingly strange things happening around her. Weird, unsettling, and completely absorbing.
And here's the thing that makes it work: the balance. It's not heavily stylized, but it's not chasing photorealism either. It sits in this perfect zone between fictional and real where you simply never question the world. You just fall in.
You end up worried for her. Actually worried. Wondering what's coming next.
Honestly? I'd put this above Laika. And I love Laika. But in pure animation and acting terms this blew me further away.
β
Best 17 minutes you'll spend this week. Then go dig into the behind the scenes, there's a good amount of it out there. Hearing the two directors talk about spending four years in a dark room building this thing makes the whole achievement land even harder.
βRemote 2D Animator - Rival Animation Β· 100% Remote (UK based)β Senior 2D animator and producer role where no two weeks look the same. One project is a fintech explainer, the next is content for a theme park, the next is their own original IP. You would be storyboarding, animating, running schedules, coordinating VO and freelancers, and talking to clients directly. Starts as a 6 month contract, Β£35-45k pro rata DOE, and they are openly looking for a long term team member. βPosted: July 30, 2026.β β
βStoryboard Artist - Mecca Studios Β· 100% Remote (United States)β Contract gig boarding a mixed media music video that blends live action and animation. They want someone equally comfortable with live action storyboarding and illustration, since the boards have to carry both worlds. Refreshingly small application process, you email your storyboard samples straight to the director. βPosted: July 29, 2026. β
β3D Animator (Contract) - HAUS Β· 100% Remote (United States) β Freelance 3D animation turning photoreal assets into finished sequences for hero films, product visualisations and scroll triggered web animation. Heavy emphasis on camera choreography and shot composition, which is the fun part. They want cinematography used as storytelling, not just a turntable. Solid freelance territory if you like hard surface and mechanical motion. βPosted: July 29, 2026.
The Random Stuff
π οΈ Ben Marriott animates a podcast intro, and shows you every step
Ben Marriott is one of my favourite motion designers on YouTube. Not even close, honestly.
His channel is huge, and it's earned. He's gotten me through a lot of projects over the years with his techniques, and beyond the technical side he just has an eye for design that I really love. That part you can't teach.
This time he animated the intro for a podcast called Sloppy Joes, and he walks you through the entire process. Start to finish. Not a polished "here's the final result" reel, but the actual thinking and the actual work.
What makes his stuff worth your time is that he doesn't separate the design thinking from the animation. Most tutorials pick one lane. Ben shows you why a shape is the shape it is, and then how it moves.
If you don't know his channel yet, go subscribe. You'll end up watching six videos in a row and coming out the other side better at this.
π¬ Knight Rider: Declassified
This one might mean nothing to you if you're under 30. If you're over it, you already know exactly what I'm about to say.
Knight Rider. The black 1982 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am. That red scanner light sweeping back and forth across the nose of the car.
I watched this show furiously as a kid. Could not miss a single episode. And I wanted that car so badly that I drew the entire KITT dashboard on a sheet of paper and taped it to my bike, so I could pretend I was driving it. π€£
Now there's a proper documentary about it. Five parts, five hours, with brand new interviews from the cast, the creators and the crew who actually built the thing. From the creation of KITT through all the stories that never made it out at the time.
Five hours on one 80s TV show sounds excessive until you remember how much of the show's DNA is still floating around. A car with a personality that talks back to you was pure fantasy in 1982. Now half of us are having conversations with our dashboards.
I can't wait to watch this. Go check it out.
π οΈ I just got approved as an author on aescripts
If you use After Effects, you already know this one. aescripts + aeplugins is the marketplace for plugins and scripts. It's where you go when you want a tool that actually solves something.
And it's not just After Effects anymore. They cover Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator, Audition, InDesign, Cinema 4D, Blender, Maya, Houdini, Nuke, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut, Figma, Cavalry, plus standalone apps. It has quietly grown into a genuinely huge platform.
β
Here's why I'm bringing it up.
Literally ten minutes ago, I got approved as an author. π±π₯³
Which means Citron is heading there. And once I finish onboarding, you'll be able to find Animator Now on the platform properly.
I'm not stopping at one tool either. I have a stack of ideas, and not all of them are After Effects. Maya is very much on the list.
This is the thing I actually wanted. Not just selling a plugin, but having a real home for the tools I'm going to keep building.
Go browse it. Even if you buy nothing, you'll find three things you didn't know existed.
Like what you're reading? Don't keep it to yourself. βForward this to one person who'd love it. That's how we grow this thing. One animator at a time. π₯°
A weekly newsletter for animators who want to stay sharp. One short film. Three fresh jobs. The tools, films and rants I'm into this week. Plus honest notes from 25 years of freelancing in animation. Every Sunday, 1pm Paris time.
Issue #112 | August 16th, 2026 101 Dalmatians Hey Reader π This week was a finishing week. Everything landed at once. I finished the floor in the living room. Actual, real, done floor.I shipped a nine-minute film to my client. Full and final. I finished two storyboards. And I'm about to send Citron over to aescripts. That last one has been a whole thing. The onboarding is way more involved than I expectedβ¦ so much marketing material to prepare, so many little assets. But it's nearly there....
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Issue #109 | July 26th, 2026 Hey Reader π So. I launched my first product ever this week. π Citron. My graph editor for After Effects. It's out there in the world now, and people are actually using it. π₯ Here's the thing nobody tells you: building the extension was the easy part. Seriously. The code, the UI, the logic, the thing I was actually scared ofβ¦ that went fine. What crushed me was everything around it. Hosting the product. Setting up checkout. Wiring it all together. Bug report...