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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The animation industry is not where the money is
Published about 22 hours agoΒ β’Β 9 min read
Issue #117 | September 20th, 2026
Pinocchio from Del Toro
Hey Reader π
I'm writing this one sick, which almost never happens to me.
Genuinely. If I count the days I'm ill in a year, it's not even a handful. But it's been a stressful few weeks, and stress quietly takes your immune system apart while you're busy not noticing. Then my son went back to kindergarten and brought home whatever was going around.
So here I am. Exhausted, foggy, and dumping everything in my head onto the page before it closes for the day. Bear with me.π
Something new, with someone good
This week I started building something with a friend of mine.
He's one of the co-authors of Newton. If you've been in After Effects for any length of time you know Newton. It's an OG of the AE scripting world.
He called me up to brief me on an idea he'd been sitting on, and it's just... fun. Really fun. I'm not going to say what it does yet. It's animation, obviously, and it touches rigging. A playful way of animating things with rigs.
No name yet. We'll release it when it's ready.
What I didn't expect was the side effect. Working on it cracked open about fifteen other ideas for tools I want to build for the Animator NOW tool library. That's the part that got me. You have a thing in your head, and now you can just make it exist. That wasn't true for me two years ago.
Copy and paste on eases. Ghost curves, buffer curves, velocity curves and expression curves visible in the background while you're working your motion curve. A foldable toolbar, so you collapse whatever sections you don't need instead of staring at all of them.
Plus a pile of fixes and smaller improvements.
If you already own Citron, go back to where you bought it and grab the update. It's free for you.
I've got a long list of ideas for this graph editor. This is the beginning of it, not the end.
Everything else
The Freelancing for Animators newsletter is growing nicely, which makes me happy every single week.
The community is another story, and I want to be straight with you about it, because I think the reasoning is more useful than the news.
Freelancing for Animators community is paused. I'll open it again in early 2027.
Here's why. It lives on Skool, and Skool is a platform where you can genuinely do very well, but it asks for real commitment. Not money. Time. You have to actually be there, for everybody, consistently. A community where the person running it shows up when he can is not a community, it's a forum with a price tag.
And right now I'm not in a position to give that. The house is mid-renovation, the studio isn't finished, I have a big film to deliver by the end of September, and clients to keep steady through all of it.
So it waits until those things line up.
Knowing when to put something on standby and when to push through is the thing you only really learn by getting it wrong a few times. Early on I would have opened it anyway, half-present, and slowly made it worse. Now I'd rather open it late and open it properly.
If you were waiting on it: early 2027, and it'll be worth the wait.
I also have that film to finish. Once it's off my desk I get real time back to build, which I am itching to do.
And the studio is close. We're days away from moving the bed upstairs and freeing the room. Then I paint it and it's mine. Maybe this weekend, maybe next. Not much further than that. π¨
That's it. A head-down week, nothing dramatic, just work and a virus. β βOne last small thing π
You've probably noticed there's a sponsor section right below now.
That's what keeps this running. Sending this every Sunday costs actual money, the platform, the tools, all of it, and the sponsor help to covers that.
Here's the part I want to be clear about: I'm not asking you for money. Ever.
If you want to help, click the sponsor link. Once. That's genuinely it. π β Thank you a million times for that. π
Let's get into this week's issue. π₯
This week's sponsor
The Spotlight
Montreal, at the dawn of the 20th century. A poor boy in a falling-down house finds a hole in the wooden wall, and through it, the girl next door. She cries every night. Her tears turn into pearls. He starts selling them to a pawnbroker. The pawnbroker wants more.
That's the setup. The rest is a fable, and I'm not spoiling it.
Bigger film than we usually run here. Seventeen minutes of stop motion, opening film at Annecy, Best Canadian Short at TIFF, and the Oscar for Best Animated Short in March.
They shot the entire film in live action before touching a puppet
No storyboards. None.
Rough mock-ups of the sets, actors brought in, the whole script filmed from multiple angles on handheld cameras. That footage became the animatic, and the camera moves in the final film were programmed from it. Six people are credited as reference performance actors, which tells you this wasn't a quick reference pass. It was a shoot.
And you feel it. There are stretches where the puppet isn't being animated, it's performing. Loose, slightly off-balance, the way real people are. Stuff storyboards usually sand off before anyone picks up a camera.
β
The mouths, which is where I had to pause the film
Twenty minutes into a behind-the-scenes before I finished watching. Bad viewer. Curious animator. Oops π
They wrote a script heavy on dialogue and narration. The budget covered three minutes of mouth animation. The film is sixteen.
Most people rewrite at that point. They didn't. CG mouths for the present-day scenes only. Everything set in the past has fixed faces and acts through gesture and pantomime alone, painted in oil so the puppets read like old wooden church idols.
β
The constraint became the design.
Then the tracking problem. Latex puppets, delicate hand-painted faces, and directors who refused to modify them or stick visible markers on them. Their technical director went through highlighters and glow paints that faded into the porous latex, and landed on a security-grade UV invisible ink pen. Dots that vanish under normal light and glow under ultraviolet. Second exposure under UV, tracking data, CG mouth on a puppet nobody touched.
Those dots apparently still glow six years later.
I'd heard of matching a live plate for eyes. Never a mouth, and never on the face of your lead for seventeen minutes.
β
And it's animated on ones
Three animators. Laura Stewart, Laura Venditti, Peggy Arel. Seventeen minutes of stop motion at 24 frames per second.
Sit with that. Most independent stop motion runs on twos because twelve a second is already brutal. Laika and Aardman shoot ones with feature crews. Three people did this.
What didn't fully land for me
The smoothness, honestly. It's so complete that a few shots tip out of stop motion into something else, and you lose that faint stutter that tells your eye a hand reached in and moved something. On a film this obsessed with the handmade, that seam is worth watching for.
Where the pearls came from
Not a book. Not a folk tale.
On the set of Madame Tutli-Putli in 2007, a puppet's pearl necklace broke and scattered. They looked at the image of tears pooling into pearls where they landed, and spent roughly eight years working out what film went around it.
Eighteen years from a dropped necklace to an Oscar. Keep your accidents.
β2D Character Animator - Legacy Animation StudiosLegacy Animation Studios Β· Remote (contract)β Traditional hand-drawn character animation on the upcoming feature film Dawgtown. They want classic Disney level figure drawing, strong lip sync and real facial acting, with TVPaint preferred but Harmony and scanned paper both accepted. Pay is per foot and negotiable, and they explicitly do not want cut-out, limited or anime style reels.β βPosted: September 16, 2026. β
βStoryboard Revisionist, CG - WildBrain StudiosWildBrain Studios Β· Vancouver, British Columbia, Canadaβ Full time revisionist role working from directors' notes to fix problem sequences and punch up poses and expressions on CG series boards. Speed and the ability to take direction count as much as draftsmanship here. Around 1,150 CAD per week, and you need to be based in BC. βPosted: September 18, 2026. β
βStoryboard Artist - Nova Sky Stories Stories Β· Berkeley, CA, USA (remote friendly) βBoarding large scale drone light shows, turning scripts and concepts into sequences with real pacing, composition and cinematic intent. You work alongside creative directors on live performances rather than film or TV. The range is 115,000 to 130,000 USD a year. βPosted: September 14, 2026.
The Random Stuff
ποΈ Wispr Flow, and the note-taking feature nobody talks about
Quick confession: I don't really type anymore.
Not long emails, not prompts, not even this newsletter. Most weeks this thing starts with me talking to my computer for ten or fifteen minutes like it's a therapist, and something on the other end turns it into text.
I switched from Superwhisper to Wispr Flow a while back and I'm not going back.
But the thing I actually want to tell you about is newer. It has a note-taking mode. I had a few Zoom and Meet calls recently where I just let it listen. It asks first, you say yes, and it sits there capturing the date, the time, and everything that gets said, then hands you a clean, structured note at the end.
β
Other tools do this. I know. But if you've ever sat in a production meeting where six people are firing notes at you and you're trying to write and listen at the same time, you know that's a losing game. Production assistants, producers, anyone taking notes for a team: go try this. It doesn't miss anything, and it lays it out properly.
That's fifteen minutes a day you get back. Which is fifteen minutes you could spend animating.
π¬ Prisoners
You know that feeling where you're not totally sure if you've already seen a film? That was me and Prisoners this week.
Denis Villeneuve, before Arrival, before Dune. Jake Gyllenhaal and Hugh Jackman.
I put it on for the actors, not the story. Gyllenhaal is extraordinary. But Jackman is the one who stayed with me. He's not the villain, not really, and he's still the most terrifying thing in the film by a distance.
What I keep coming back to is the filmmaking. Villeneuve shot a studio thriller with blockbuster leads and framed it like an independent film. Cold, patient, nothing hurried. That combination is rare and it's exactly the kind of thing I want more of.
If you haven't seen it, watch the trailer. You'll know in ninety seconds whether it's for you.
π οΈ Craft MCP, or how I stopped drowning in Markdown files
You probably know I work a lot with Claude, and increasingly with Claude Cowork and Code (that's how I've created Citron).
Quick version for anyone who doesn't: Cowork gets access to your file system. You point it at a folder, and every time it produces something, a doc, a summary, a plan, it drops a real file in there instead of leaving it trapped in a chat window.
Great in theory. In practice you end up buried. Folders inside folders, versions of versions, Markdown files scattered across your drive that you will never open again.
I've been using Craft for notes instead of Apple Notes for a couple months now. Paying for it, which for me is the real signal. And they shipped their MCP, which means Claude can now write directly into Craft, into the folder structure I already built.
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.
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