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Issue #120 | October 11th, 2026

Hey Reader 👋

This is probably going to be the most vulnerable, most honest intro I’ve ever written here.

I just lost my biggest client.

They decided to go in another direction. And the strange part… some part of me was happy about it.

Because that client is the reason I almost burned out a couple of months ago. It was a tough, tough, tough challenge. A tough bet.

I don’t regret it. I produced a crazy amount of content. I learned Unreal. I’m proud of all that.

The first thing you drop

Let me be clear about one thing.

Finding clients has never been my problem. I’ve been doing it for 25 years.

My problem was time.

A newborn. A full, complete house renovation. Too many clients at once. Building a business. And that one crazy client on top of everything.

When your plate is that full, something has to go. And the first thing you drop is always the same… client acquisition.

So here I am, exactly where a lot of freelancers end up. Starting client acquisition again from scratch.

And you know what? It’s great.

Watch me do it

Because I’m going to show you exactly how I do it.

From zero, step by step, in my other newsletter, Freelancing for Animators. The positioning, the pricing, the whole client acquisition machine. I’m even creating a brand new studio for it… Jem Studio, for health and health tech.

If you want to follow along, you can opt in HERE.​

Client work is not the business

I want to be super clear about something.

My client work and the business I’m building are two very different things.

One funds the other. Client work pays the bills while I build Citron, the newsletters, and the Freelancing for Animators community I want to relaunch.

And the business is what I really care about.

I care about my clients. But if tomorrow the business could pay for everything, I’d definitely drop the clients and the studio.

That’s my plan A. And remember… the best plan B for your plan A is no plan B. Because then you can’t fail. You have to keep working on the thing.

It’s actually insane that I’m not panicking. I’m calm. A bit stressed inside, sure. But SO confident.

And I am being tested.

A loser until you’re a winner

Here’s the thing about building a business.

You’re a loser until you’re a winner.

For years, people look at you and don’t understand what you’re trying to do. And you keep doing the thing anyway. You keep pushing.

That’s literally what faith is. A vision only you can see… and believing in it anyway.

Then the day you make it, the day you reach the top, everybody is suddenly so proud of you. They believed in you from the beginning. They always knew you’d make it.
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I call bullshit.

Because really, nobody was there while you were climbing the fucking thing for years.

Anyway. That’s the way it is. Building your own thing is a lonely path.

What my daughter told me

This week I told my daughter I’d lost my big client.

I told her all of that. That I haven’t made it yet. I know I will. But not yet.

And then I told her something I don’t say often.

My kids are the first reason I want to succeed big.

To prove to them that I’m not that loser. Not just a dreamer.

A few minutes later, she sent me a Snap.

“I love you dad, and I see you as anything but a loser or someone who’s always struggling. The opposite. To me you’re a figure of strength. You never let go of anything, you never get discouraged, you’re always ambitious, with tons of projects. That’s how I see you. It’s just that you get handed hard tests, because otherwise you’d be too strong.”

I was amazed.

I told her how lucky I am to have kids this smart, and how proud I am of her and her studies. She’s in Portugal, studying to become a veterinarian.

And I told her this.

“You’re going to have an amazing life. Just please, learn from everything I do. But also learn from everything I did wrong, so you don’t make the same mistakes.”

Yeah.
I love my kids.

Alright. Let’s get into this new issue. 🔥

This week's sponsor

The Spotlight

A lonely peanut on the road picks up a hitchhiking strawberry. A few minutes later, they’re on a crime spree together. No dialogue, 7 minutes, and Pixar calls it “the untold story of the most famous duo of all time.”

Wow.

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If you’ve been reading The Animation Sunday for a while, you know I never spotlight a short from a big studio. They get enough spotlight already. But this one caught my eye on YouTube, and it’s so refreshing to see Pixar release something like this from their Lab.

You’d never guess it’s Pixar

Pixar is a CG studio. A very, very strong one. They’ve mixed 2D into their films here and there, but stop-motion? Almost never. As far as I know, this is only the second time, after Self in 2024.

And here it’s the real thing. Handmade puppets, handmade sets, shot frame by frame, with a few 2D sequences on top.

The fun part… if nobody had told me, I would never have guessed this was Pixar. You’d have no fucking clue.

That’s exactly what I’m looking for.

I needed that

I’ll admit it, I’m a couple of Pixar films behind on my watch list. I keep having the feeling that I’m seeing the same thing again and again. The designs look alike sometimes. There’s something where you just know… this is a Pixar film.

Sometimes I need to be refreshed to the point where I don’t even recognize the studio.

This short does exactly that. It feels super crafted, almost low budget, and still the story, the effects, everything is so freaking cool.

I also spotted a few names I know in the credits, like Victor Navone and Chris Chua, good old guys from the Pixar animation department. So cool to see them jump on this kind of project.

Still Pixar

What can I say… it’s still a Pixar movie. They will never release something that isn’t good enough. Whatever the technique, by default it lands at that level.

So yes, it’s great. It’s fun to watch, and you get a couple of laughs left and right.

Go check it out.

🎬 Credits​
​ Director: Rej Bourdages & Tony Maki
​ Production: Pixar Animation Studios (Pixar’s Lab)

Share this film with your animator friends ❤️

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The Job Fair

• ​Robot Animator​
  Skild AI · San Mateo, California, USA​
  Keyframe animation for real robots. You author motion in Maya or Blender, choreograph single and multi-robot performances, then work with the robotics engineers to get that motion running on physical machines. They want a senior animator with 5+ years in film, games or robotics, a strong sense of weight and body mechanics, some rigging experience on mechanical characters, and a demo reel. Base salary range is 100,000 to 300,000 USD.
  ​Posted: October 8, 2026.
  ​
• ​Storyboard Revisionist: Paw Patrol​
  Guru Studio · Toronto, Ontario, Canada (remote flexible)​
  Clean up and redraw panels from the assistant directors' notes on PAW Patrol, in Storyboard Pro, fast and on model. They ask for at least 2 years as a revisionist on 3D animated shows. It is a fixed-term contract of about 8 weeks with a possible extension, paid $1,400 per week, and the listing comes down on October 15.
  ​Posted: October 6, 2026.
  ​
• ​Artista de Storyboard Freelance​
  Zincotools Studio · Remote (studio based in Colombia)
  ​One for the Spanish speakers, since the listing itself is in Spanish. A freelance, 100% remote contract with flexible hours, where you turn scripts, briefs and visual references into clear boards and handle staging, shot composition, pacing and transitions for animation projects. Photoshop, Storyboard Pro and DaVinci or Premiere, plus enough English to read the scripts.
  ​Posted: October 8, 2026.

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The Random Stuff

📚 The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

I’m back in a reading phase. I hadn’t opened a book for a couple of months, and now I can’t stop.

My reading ecosystem is a bit insane. I do read real paper books, but most of it happens on my iPad, and I track everything in Goodreads. I always have 5 or 6 books going at once, maybe more, because my mind is never in the mood for the same book all the time. Business at night fires up my brain instead of putting me to sleep, so I jump to a novel. Other days it’s health and body hacking.

So I looked at everything I had in progress and picked up one I started years ago and never finished. I really don’t know why, because it’s an incredible book.

It’s about getting wealthy, but through very broad principles… like the idea that you will never get rich renting out your time. It’s built from Naval’s tweets, podcasts and interviews, which makes it super easy to read. I’m about to recommend it to my son, who’s 17 and more and more interested in business. If you want to get into the right mindset for business, start with this one. And the whole thing is free to read online.

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👀 Alex Hormozi x Chris Williamson… 4 hours of brutal truths

Careful with this one. I haven’t watched the whole thing. It’s four hours long 😅

It’s Alex Hormozi on Modern Wisdom, Chris Williamson’s podcast, and the episode is called “33 Brutal Truths To Stop Wasting Your Potential.” I really like Chris Williamson as an interviewer.

​

It’s not their first episode together, and you can feel it. These two really resonate with each other. They sound like good pals, and that’s what makes it so cool to listen to. Four hours is way too long for one sitting, so take it in pieces. It’s a wonderful episode.

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🤖 Spark + Claude… I don’t write emails the old way anymore

​Spark has been my email client for years. It’s beautiful, I have six accounts in there, and I can’t even remember the last time I opened Apple Mail.

I just finished my trial of Spark Pro, which adds a bunch of AI. Usually I’m not a fan of software bringing in AI and asking you to pay a premium for it. But this one I really integrated into my workflow. And it works wonders.

Claude connects to Spark and gets access to every email in every account. It can search, tag, find a recipient’s address, add it to my contacts, and put the emails straight into my drafts. Dozens of drafts. I just sent a bunch of promo licenses for Citron without typing a single one. I reread everything, edited a couple of things, hit send. No more New Message, go to Claude, copy, come back, paste. That’s over for me. It’s kind of expensive, €22 a month for Pro, but the hours it gives me back are amazing. Check it out.​

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​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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