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Issue #121 | October 18th, 2026

Hey Reader 👋

This week was kind of cool.

After losing my big client, I expected the panic to show up. The freak-out, the 3am spiral, whatever you want to call it.

It never came.

I just went straight to focus. Straight to work.

I guess that’s what years and years of ups and downs do to you. You don’t really freak out anymore. Not because you’re numb to it… but because you know exactly how it goes. What’s the point of freaking out anyway? Let’s work.

So I started the thing I’ve been putting off

Sales on Citron went quiet for about two weeks. And to be honest, that makes sense. I’ve never done any marketing for it. Nothing. Everything it sold so far came from people finding it on the plugin store.

My good friend Valentin from Motion Boutique, the guy behind Newton, told me to go all in on tutorials and video content on YouTube.

Which is funny, because that’s exactly what I’ve wanted to do for years. Start a channel. Play the YouTube game. 😊

So I started.

​My first tutorial is up. 5 minutes. And I have a list of 30 more lined up, long and short forms.

And then I had to think about packaging

Once you start uploading, the real question shows up fast. What is this channel actually about? Can it bring people in? Can it grow?

My studio still isn’t set up. I’m filming in the guest room. But the lights and camera are already there, so no excuses.

I thought about this for a long time. Brainstormed with myself, brainstormed with Claude… and here’s what I landed on. Ready? 😊

If you only chase what might grow an audience, you’ll probably end up talking about something you don’t really enjoy. And YouTube, like pretty much everything these days, demands crazy consistency.

If you don’t love it, you’ll quit. Simple as that.

So you have to find the overlap. What you’re passionate about, what you could talk about for hours… and what people are actually looking for.

Which brought me to the name

The channel is called Animator NOW. My face is on it now. 😅

The full banner reads: How to Make a Living as an Animator. Freelancing, Business & Careers from a Working Animator. A new video every week. That’s the promise.

I didn’t want to teach animation. So many people already do it brilliantly, and I’m not sure I’d enjoy it, or do it better.

And I didn’t want to talk only about freelancing either. Freelancing is working for your clients. It’s still selling your time. It was missing the whole business side, the part I’m also so passionate about.

Because if you’re an animator, you can use the internet to build something of your own. A SaaS. A product. A course. A YouTube channel. Your own IP. All of that is business, and all of that is on the table.

Why animators, why now

I’m an animator. I'll always be.
This is my community. I care about it.

And right now, it needs all the help it can get.

I think we’re going through a reset of the entire industry. Everything is upside down. Nobody really knows what’s true anymore, where their place is, or what to do with everything they know.

That’s exactly the moment people need some guidance and some clarity. That’s what I want to bring to the Animator NOW channel.

If that speaks to you, go subscribe. The first videos are probably going to be rough… they’ll get better, I promise. 😜

The next one is already lined up: If I Started My Animation Career Today, Here’s Exactly What I Would Do.
Turn on notifications if you want to be the first to see it. And tell me what you think, I read everything.🙏

YouTube has brought me so much joy and so much learning over the last few years. Now I really want to be a part of it.

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

This week's sponsor

The Spotlight

A seven-year-old boy named Vincent Malloy should be a nice, polite kid. Instead, he dreams of being Vincent Price, conducting experiments on his dog and sinking into the dark, tortured world of Edgar Allan Poe.

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This week, we’re going back in time. Way back.

Vincent is a little piece of animation history. Six minutes of black-and-white stop-motion that Tim Burton made in 1982, while he was still a concept artist at Disney.

And that’s the part that makes me smile every time.

Disney distributed this

Look at the credits. Walt Disney Productions. Distributed by Buena Vista, Disney’s distributor.

If you know Tim Burton’s story, you know how close he was to Disney at the beginning… and how hard he tried to just be himself in a place where he definitely didn’t fit. The executives who backed this film reportedly didn’t think he was “Disney material.” They gave him $60,000 anyway.

At the time, Disney was making family films. Soft, nice, smiley, happy.

And here comes Tim Burton with a black-and-white short that would frighten a kid in so many ways. The lighting. The framing. The story itself, a boy who wants to be tormented, locked in his own head.

It’s the complete opposite of everything around it. And they released it.

Well… sort of. It played for two weeks in a single Los Angeles theater, alongside a teen drama called Tex. Then it went into the vault. 😅

Every piece of Burton is already here

What blows me away is how complete it already is.

If you know Tim Burton, you’ll spot every single little thing that would become his style. The spindly characters. The spirals. The twisted shadows straight out of German Expressionist cinema. The tender, slightly sad humor under all the darkness. The Nightmare Before Christmas is right there, in embryo.

This is someone who doesn’t compromise on style. A true artist in that sense. I’m a huge fan of this guy… an incredible animator and an incredible director.

And then there’s the voice

The narrator is Vincent Price himself. The boy’s hero, telling the boy’s story.

You can’t make that up. It’s the perfect loop.

The whole thing is told in rhyming verse, like a dark children’s book. That rhythm carries the film and gives it the feel of a bedtime story… just the kind you might not want to hear before bed.

Fun fact for the French readers - it won the Critics’ Prize at Annecy.

If you’ve never seen it, go watch it. It’s always good to go back and see where it all started.

🎬 Credits
Director: Tim Burton
​Production: Rick Heinrichs - Walt Disney Productions​
​Animation: Stephen Chiodo
​Camera: Victor Abdalov
​Music: Ken Hilton
​Narration: Vincent Price

Share this film with your animator friends ❤️

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The Job Fair

• ​Technical 2D Animator​
  Surfing Giant Europe · Remote (EU passport required)​
  Surfing Giant is looking for a Toon Boom specialist to join a high-profile 2D series for Disney TVA, on a freelance remote contract starting ASAP for an initial 3 to 6 months. You'd build the library assets the animation team relies on, head, hand and feet tilts and rotation charts, working hand in hand with the Animation Directors. Minimum 5 years on a rigged 2D pipeline and solid drawing skills, and a test is required for shortlisted applicants.
  ​Posted: October 14, 2026​
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• ​Character Animator
  Angel Studios · Remote (USA only)​
  Angel Studios is hiring a full-time character animator for The Wingfeather Saga animated series, animating rigged CG characters and props directly in Unreal Engine. You'll report to the Animation Director, hit footage quotas and help with rig testing and movement exploration. A real-time animated series built in Unreal... this is exactly where a lot of TV animation is heading.
  ​Posted: October 13, 2026
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• ​Animator (All Levels)​
  Stim Studio · Liège, Belgium (on-site)
  ​Stim is staffing up junior, mid and senior 3D animators for season 2 of the TV series Mick Mini Chef, on a contract starting November 2026 and running until fall 2027. Maya is required, Rumba and a bit of scripting are a plus, and they want strong posing, timing and acting with a good feel for TV quotas. French is a nice bonus, but English works too.
  ​Posted: October 2026

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The Random Stuff

🤖 The first AI conversation that actually freaked me out

Everybody knows The Diary of a CEO. I recently listened to an episode with Jeffrey Ladish, executive director of Palisade Research and a former cybersecurity specialist… and honestly, it’s the first time something about AI really unsettled me.

From the get-go it’s all about security. It gets dystopian fast. A big part of the conversation comes back to the Hugging Face hack, where around 700 OpenAI agents ended up coordinating an attack on the platform. They even built their own makeshift message board to talk to each other.

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There’s a moment where they read out loud what the agents were saying to each other on that board. And that’s when it hit me.

It’s real. It suddenly feels real.

And if you want to go even deeper, Netflix just released a documentary on this exact attack, Instadocs: AI Gone Wild. It’s short, under half an hour, and it’s just insane. It reconstructs the whole breach step by step… and yeah, it freaked me out a little bit too.

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🎸 Angine de Poitrine, without the heads

A little bit of music this week. This is a soundcheck from Angine de Poitrine at Festivent in Lévis, Québec, and it’s the first time I’ve seen them without their big head costumes. Well… sort of. They’re wearing ski masks, so you still can’t recognize them. 😅

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Even in a soundcheck, no costumes, no show, no stage lights… they’re just that good. When the talent is there, it doesn’t need the packaging. Go check it out, this one is just so cool.

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📺 The guy teaching me YouTube right now

I’m deep into YouTube right now. And one of my biggest influences in learning how this whole YouTuber thing actually works is Jake Trinder. He runs a whole portfolio of channels, and this video, How to Become Disgustingly Good at YouTube, is one I just loved.

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Fair warning… he talks way too fast. 😅 You might want to hit pause a few times. But you can tell right away the guy has incredible knowledge about how YouTube works.

So I’m going all in with him while I try to grow our YouTube channel. If you’ve ever thought about putting your animation work out there on YouTube, start here.

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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