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Issue #89 | March 8th, 2026

Hey Reader 👋
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​This week was intense. Like, really intense.

I hit some kind of focus mode I didn't even know I had in me — and honestly I'm still not sure how I'm standing. Between the house renovation, a toddler who's decided sleep is optional, and everything I'm building right now… at 48, I don't know where the energy is coming from. I think it's just passion. The excitement of building something real keeps me going in a way that nothing else does.

On the client work front

I finished storyboard and layout in a single week. Placed almost all the cameras. And I hired a modeler and rigger on Fiverr to handle the character creation. All of that — without dropping the ball on anything else. The newsletter, the launch prep, all of it kept moving.

It's one of those weeks where you surprise yourself.

The big news — Freelancing for Animators launches April 2nd

Let me ask you something honestly.

How long have you been waiting for a studio to call back? How long since you've had a real, consistent stream of work coming in?

If it's been a while… maybe it's time to ask yourself a different question.

Not "how do I get more studio work?" but — "should I be building something that doesn't depend on a studio at all?"

I've been a freelance animator for 25 years. Freelancing has always paid my bills. Way more than that, actually. And the thing is — I wasn't working for studios. I was working with clients. Inside and outside the industry. Clients who have budgets, who need work done, and who don't care about your festival credits. They care about whether you can solve their problem.

That's a completely different game. And not enough animators know it exists.

That's what Freelancing for Animators is about.

The launch is happening on April 2nd. Not April 1st — for obvious reasons 😅

Here's what you get when you join. A 12-module course — each module covers a critical part of building a real freelance business. Not hacks. Not tricks. The actual foundations. The kind that build something that lasts years, not weeks. On top of that, a community of animators building the same thing. And every week — a call with me, where we look at what you're building together, and I help you avoid the mistakes I made along the way.

If you're tired of waiting and you're ready to start building something you control — subscribe to the Freelancing for Animators list down below. You'll get all the updates and be first through the door when we open on April 2nd.

👉 Subscribe to Freelancing for Animators​

On building in general

I was driving the other day and I had this thought. A lot of people are settled. The routine is comfortable, things are quiet — and that's fine. Really, it is. But for the last two years, we've moved across the country, built a house, launched a business, had a baby. We've built so much. And yeah, we're tired.

But I genuinely feel weird when nothing's moving. Because I believe — deeply — that there's no plateau. You're either growing or you're sliding. That's just how it works for me.

By the end of this year, I think we'll finally breathe a little more. More space, more time, more settled. But right now? We fucking build. 🔨

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

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The Spotlight

An earthquake in the bay of Naples unearths a body — a man the Italian police believe took his own life forty years ago. Dino and his daughter Victoria are summoned for a DNA test.
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What starts as an administrative trip to a foreign city becomes something much more intimate: a journey into a past Dino never wanted to revisit, and a quiet reckoning between a father and a daughter who are only beginning to really see each other.

That's the setup. But the film is so much more than its plot.

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Vimeo doesn't embed directly in newsletters — so here's the link to watch the full film: Watch Noir-Soleil on Vimeo​

Every single frame in this thing looks like a painting you'd want to hang on your wall. And I mean that literally — I kept thinking I could print these out, frame them, and put them in my studio. Marie Larrivé painted the entire film by hand, and it shows. There's just enough detail to tell you everything you need to know about a character, and when detail isn't needed, the faces blur into something almost abstract — loose, gestural, present. It shouldn't work as well as it does. It absolutely works.

The color palette is something else. Warm Naples ochres, deep shadows, light that feels like it's actually coming from the Mediterranean. The illustration is so perfectly balanced — nothing is overdone, nothing is gratuitous. It's an exercise in restraint that most feature films can't pull off in two hours.

And then there's the sound design. Pierre Oberkampf builds a soundscape that puts you on the streets of Naples. I genuinely wanted to stay there. That's the thing — great animation doesn't just show you a place, it makes you want to inhabit it. This film does that completely.

What I loved most though is the pace. At 20 minutes, this is almost three times longer than what I usually spotlight here. And you feel none of it. The film breathes — in the best Miyazaki sense of that word. There are moments where the camera just sits with a character, and you have actual time to ask yourself: what is he thinking right now? What is he feeling? That's a rare gift. Most shorts are so afraid of losing you that they never let a single moment land. Noir-Soleil trusts you completely.

The animation itself is exactly what it needs to be — not showy, not competing for attention. It serves the world. It helps you sink in a little deeper. That's the job, and it does it beautifully.

This one is going to be in my top five of 2026. Easily.
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Go check out the making of as well👇

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🎬 Credits

Director — Marie Larrivé
​Production — Nicolas de Rosanbo, Céline Vanlint · Eddy Production
​Co-production — Amélie Quéret · Respiro Productions Screenplay — Marie Larrivé
​Backgrounds — Marie Larrivé
​Head of Animation — Lucas Malbrun
​Animation — Marion Auvin, Ambre Decruyenaere, Romane Granger, Cécile Ladaveze, Morgane Le Péchon, Lucas Malbrun, Jean-Baptiste Peltier
​Editing — Vincent Tricon
​Sound Design — Pierre Oberkampf
​Music — Maël Oudin & Pierre Oberkampf

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The Job Fair

• ​2D Animator — SciPlay · Remote (Ukraine-based)​
  ​SciPlay is a major mobile gaming studio (500–1,000 employees) looking for a skilled 2D Animator with strong Unity chops. The role covers the full spectrum — feature animations, UI micro-interactions, onboarding sequences, monetization assets, and animated popups — all implemented directly in Unity using Animator Controllers and Timeline. You'll collaborate closely with tech artists, designers, and developers on a live-service mobile product. Strong After Effects skills and a solid grasp of 2D animation principles required.
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• ​Spine Animator — SolarCraft · Remote (Worldwide)
  A small indie studio (under 10 people) looking for a freelance Spine Animator to bring realistic drawn characters to life. You'll work directly with their artists and game designer to create fluid character animations. A bonus if you have experience generating animations with AI tools. Scrappy, independent, and remote-first. Good fit for a freelancer comfortable working in a tight-knit environment.
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• ​Freelance 2D Animator — MatchPoint Studio​
  MatchPoint Studios is a creative agency based in Chicago, IL. As a creative video production agency, our mission at Matchpoint Studios is to offer a fun and seamless ideation and production process that is guided by our values of integrity, character, transparency, humility, and candor.

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The Random Stuff

📚 The Great Mental Models — Shane Parrish

You know that feeling when you pick up a book and three pages in you're already thinking "why did nobody give me this earlier"? That's this one.

The Great Mental Models is a series by Shane Parrish — the guy behind Farnam Street, one of the best blogs on the internet on decision-making and clear thinking. The concept is simple and powerful: instead of accumulating random knowledge, you build a small set of big, transferable frameworks — mental models — that you can apply across basically every situation in life.

Think of it like learning the underlying physics of how things work rather than memorizing facts. Once you have the model, you can navigate almost anything. The book covers things like inversion, first principles, Occam's razor — concepts that people like Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have credited as foundational to how they think and decide. I just started Volume 1 and I'm already hooked. If you're building something — a business, a creative practice, a freelance career — this is the kind of reading that compounds. Highly recommend picking it up. 📖

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🛠️ Glaze by Raycast — Desktop apps, reimagined

If you use a Mac and you're not already on Raycast, first — go fix that. It's basically Spotlight but rebuilt from scratch by people who actually care about their tools. I've been using it for years and it's one of those apps that quietly becomes invisible because it just works.

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Anyway — the team behind Raycast just launched something called Glaze, and I genuinely think this is a big deal. The idea: describe any app you want in plain language, and Glaze builds it. A real, native Mac app. Not a browser tab. Not a web thing. A proper desktop app that lives on your machine, works offline, has keyboard shortcuts, menu bar integration — the whole thing. There's even a public store where people share and remix what they've built.

It's in private beta right now, Mac only to start, with a full Raycast integration dropping in April. If you're already a Raycast user you'll get priority access. I'd get on the waitlist at glazeapp.com — this one feels like it's going to be one of those tools people wonder how they lived without. 👀

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🤖 Claude Skills — building your actual AI assistant

Last week I told you I cancelled my ChatGPT subscription. I did it. No regrets.

I've been going deeper into Claude and specifically into something called Skills — and this is genuinely changing how I work with AI. Here's the thing: normally when you open a new Claude conversation, it knows nothing about you. Start a project, it has context — but step outside that project and you're back to zero.

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Skills are different. You build a skill — basically a set of knowledge and instructions around a specific topic — and Claude will automatically call it whenever it's relevant, regardless of what project you're in. I have a music production skill now. A LinkedIn writing skill. And yeah, obviously, this newsletter has its own set of skills too 😅.

The best part? You can update them whenever you want. It's dead simple. And what you're really building, piece by piece, is a virtual assistant that actually knows you — your tools, your voice, your workflow. That's not a chatbot anymore. That's something different. We're still early but this is the direction everything is heading, and I'm here for it. 🔥

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Philippe Duvin​
Founder, Animator NOW

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