Issue #113 | August 23th, 2026
Hey Reader 👋
This one's for you if you're trying to build something. A product, a small business, a way out. Especially if you're doing it because your animation career isn't going anywhere and you've decided to actually do something about it.
One of my best friends is stuck.
He's not finding professional success and hasn't for years. No recognition. And here's the thing that kills me about it: this is a guy with incredible talent and incredible taste. Whatever he touches, he's already better at it than most people who've been doing it for a decade.
That's not his problem.
His problem is he never stays.
He gets obsessed with something for a week. Two weeks. A month, if it's a good one. He goes all in, produces something genuinely great… and then, in his words, the magic starts to dissolve. He loses interest. He jumps to the next thing.
He did it with photography. Bought a beautiful camera, started shooting portraits, was doing awesome work almost immediately. Then somewhere along the way he lost faith. In the work, in himself, hard to say. So he sold all the gear. Destroyed some of the photos.
And moved on to the next thing.
Years of this. Years.
So yesterday he asks me the question.
"I wish I had someone who could just tell me what to do next. What's the thing I should be doing?"
And I told him: the thing that'll finally give you the success you're craving is the thing you get obsessed with. The one you'd do for hours without noticing. The one you'd come back to tomorrow, and the day after, and in two years.
Because 95% of people doing your exact thing are doing it in a normal way. Reasonable hours. Reasonable effort. And a lot of them quit.
So if you go obsessive on one thing, every day, longer than everyone around you… it compounds. Quietly. And one day you look up after a year or two and you're just ahead. Miles ahead. That's where the success actually comes from. Not from picking correctly. From staying.
Pick the thing that feels best to you. Put in the hours. Don't even think about money yet. Get really good, talk about it, post about it, let the world know you exist and that this is what you do.
Then keep doing it for an absurdly long time.
The part nobody tells you about is faith.
I'm not religious. But I understand the concept, and it's this: believing in something you can't see.
That's the job. Every entrepreneur who makes it has it. They can't touch the thing yet. It doesn't exist. They can only see it in their head, and that's genuinely all they have to hold onto.
You'll work long hours. You'll doubt yourself constantly. You'll ask is this even the right thing, is this going to work, should I be doing something else?
That question is the magic dissolving. That's the moment.
And that's exactly when you push.
Side note, speaking of obsession: After a way too long reviewing process and a bunch of tweaks, Citron is finally live on aescripts. 🥳
30% off for the next two weeks. There's a trial too, so you can just go poke at it and see if it does what you need before spending anything.
Alright. Let's get into this week's issue. 🔥
The Spotlight
Patsy is 65, a retired librarian, and her husband Paul just died after a long illness. While he was sick, sitting by his bed, she knitted a small wool doll to keep her hands busy.
Now she's back in the house. It's empty. And the doll comes to life. That's the setup, and it's about as heavy as it sounds. This one is a gut punch. There's very little air in it.
Full disclosure before I go further: this is an ESMA film, and I taught my courses there last year. So I'm not a neutral party. But I'd be saying the same thing if I'd never set foot in the building.
The look is the first thing that gets you.
Tricot de corps sits in this desaturated, almost monochrome world. Grey house, grey light, grey woman. And then there's Tewey, this little blue knitted man, the only saturated thing in the frame.
And he sheds.
He leaves little trails of blue wool everywhere he goes. Across the floor, over the furniture, through rooms that haven't had anything living in them for weeks. Colour spreading through a dead house, one thread at a time.
That's the whole film in one image. They found the visual idea and they trusted it. No dialogue needed to explain it.
The knit texture on the character is beautifully done too. That fibrous, hand-made quality is very trendy in 3D right now, and it's easy to do badly. Here it reads as genuinely soft and genuinely fragile, which is exactly what the story needs. The whole thing feels closer to an indie film than a school project.
Lighting and rendering are excellent. There's this quality of looking at something old, a memory rather than a present-tense scene.
The direction is where it goes beyond student work.
Camera choices and compositions are genuinely strong. Some shots are better than you'd expect from professionals, honestly. Someone on that team of eight has a real eye for where to put the frame and how long to hold it.
The music does a lot of heavy lifting too. Grief has enormous emotional potential, and it's also the easiest thing in the world to overplay. They didn't. It stays restrained.
Now the honest part.
The animation itself is simple. Basic, in places.
And that's fine, it's a student film, it's a graduation project made by eight people in a year on top of everything else they had to build. But if you're watching as an animator, you'll see it. The performances don't have the weight or the layered subtlety that the art direction and the direction are reaching for. There's a small gap between how sophisticated the film looks and how sophisticated it moves.
Doesn't matter much. Everything around it is so strong that it carries.
Six minutes and forty-nine seconds. Go watch it.
🎬 Credits
Directors: Pierre-Marie Bavay, Laurie Beldent, Joan Haubois, Maëlle Le Bris, Camille Lequeux, Malo Lescop, Clara Navoizat, Emma Rateau
Production: ESMA - Nantes campus, class of 2024
Music: Nicolas Pansieri
Sound: José Vicente, Yoann Poncet, Baptiste Leblanc - Studio des Aviateurs
Voices: Hélène Mignard (Patsy), Clara Thébault (Jane), Nicolas Eon (Paul)
The Job Fair
- Motion Designer - Jones Knowles Ritchie · London, UK (Hybrid)
Brand films, motion identities, and social content out of JKR's Shoreditch studio, reporting straight to the Motion Director. They're asking 0 to 5 years and strong After Effects, and they say outright they care more about the ambition of the work than the number of years behind it. Rare to see a door left that wide open at an agency this size.
Posted: August 11, 2026
- 3D Animator - Think Tank Academy · Liverpool, UK
A contract role covering 3D animation and motion graphics through to editing the final interactive e-learning courses. Broader than a pure animation seat, so you'd be touching several parts of the pipeline rather than sitting in one. Worth a look if you want creative variety and steady contract work over a shot quota.
Posted: August 5, 2026
- Freelance Designers and Animators - Iamstatic · Toronto, Canada (Hybrid)
Not a single role, a roster call. Iamstatic is expanding its network of trusted freelance partners and wants 2D, 3D, and motion design people across all disciplines. They're upfront that applicants who can get into the studio some of the time will be prioritised, because they believe in what happens in the room. Submit a portfolio, no CV gymnastics.
Posted: August 7, 2026.
The Random Stuff
👀 How Rick and Morty and Family Guy Are Actually Animated
Maximus Pauson, who's worked on Rick and Morty, breaks down the difference between how that show gets made and how Family Guy gets made. Cutout and rigged puppets on one side, full drawn animation on the other, and all the hybrid territory in between.
Five and a half minutes. No fluff.
Here's what struck me watching it. We get behind-the-scenes breakdowns constantly for CG. Every Pixar and DreamWorks release comes with a making-of, a rig demo, a shot progression. Maybe it just photographs better, I don't know.
But for 2D? Almost nothing. The techniques stay invisible, even on shows that hundreds of millions of people watch every week.
So if you work in 2D, or you're curious how the biggest adult animated shows on TV actually get put together frame by frame, this is worth your five minutes.
🎬 Turning Point: Generation 9/11
I'm 48. I remember exactly where I was and who I was with when it happened.
Watching those towers come down live on TV, from France, in the middle of the afternoon. And it has never really left me since. Once a month or so I still find myself going back. Old footage, a new documentary, some angle I hadn't seen.
I went down the conspiracy rabbit hole too at one point. Deep. Read the architect reports, the whole thing. I don't know exactly what I was looking for in there. Probably some version of an explanation that made more sense than the one we got.
Netflix drops a new one on September 2nd. Twenty-five years.
This one isn't about the day itself, which is what caught my attention. It's about everyone shaped by it afterwards. Kids who lost a parent and grew up in the shadow of it. Journalists who started their careers covering the wars that followed. Young Afghans and Marines who got handed the fallout of the Kabul withdrawal.
We're at the point where more than half of Americans either weren't born yet or were too young to remember. And they're still living inside the decisions made that week.
An hour and thirty-seven. It's on my list for the 2nd.
🌒 Waveform recorded a live episode under a total eclipse
The MKBHD crew flew the whole operation to Spain, hauled a mountain of gear to Zaragoza, and recorded a live podcast during totality. About ninety seconds of it.
Loads of eclipse facts, good conversation, and if you never got to stand under one yourself, this is about the best way to see it.
I'm in the southwest of France, so I wasn't in the path. Close to Spain, but not close enough. What I got was the light going strange in the middle of the day, everything dimming down like someone slowly pulling a fader.
Still nice. Not the same thing.
Watched this one with something else open in the other window, which is exactly what it's good for.
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
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