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 most money I've ever made from a product
Published 4 days agoΒ β’Β 9 min read
Issue #112 | August 16th, 2026
101 Dalmatians
Hey Reader π
This week was a finishing week. Everything landed at once.
I finished the floor in the living room. Actual, real, done floor. I shipped a nine-minute film to my client. Full and final. I finished two storyboards. And I'm about to send Citron over to aescripts.
That last one has been a whole thing. The onboarding is way more involved than I expected⦠so much marketing material to prepare, so many little assets. But it's nearly there.
New clients coming in too. And in September I renegotiate my contract on the Unreal series. We might change the terms. We'll see where it goes, but hopefully in a direction that works better for me.
It's a lot. And I'm genuinely happy to be this busy.
The studio is close
Middle of September, I should start painting it.
I've been waiting for this one for a long time. Right now I can't shoot video properly. I have to wait until nobody's in the co-working space, which has gotten⦠let's say annoying. Having my own room to just hit record is going to change everything.
The course
The Skool community is on standby for the summer. Quiet on purpose. I'm putting the time and energy back into it in September.
Meanwhile I'm finishing the shooting of the Freelancing for Animators course.
It lives inside the community. Which at $29 a month is honestly a hell of a deal, because you also get a weekly call with me, and you get a room full of freelancers and entrepreneurs trying to do exactly what you're trying to do. That last part matters more than people think. You're not doing it alone.
And if the community isn't your thing, there'll also be a standalone course option. A bit more expensive, but it works the same way.
Ten modules. It takes you from absolute zero to landing your first client. How to price yourself, how to invoice, how to find people who'll pay you. Exactly what I do every single day here.
There's also a mindset module, and I think it might be the most important one. Because if you've spent your whole career employed in a studio, going freelance isn't a change of status. It's a change of understanding. That part nobody prepares you for.
It's an accelerator, basically. So you don't make all the mistakes I made.
If you want to know when it's out, get on the list below and I'll tell you.π
Citron is the most money I've ever made from a product sold online.
I started this shift about four and a half years ago. I'd been freelancing my whole life, but the moment I started building products and learning digital marketing, something changed. I stopped feeling like a freelancer and started feeling like a solopreneur.
What I love about it is the model. People call it a lifestyle business - you imagine the life you actually want, then build the business around it. That's exactly what I did. Which means not spending hour after hour after hour in front of my computer. More time for my family. For making music. For travelling. For surfing.
And if an idea doesn't fit that model, I drop it. Completely. Even if it's a good idea. Because it just becomes selling your hours to someone else again.
You put in insane work at the start. But it compounds.
And here's the thing I've been dreaming about for years.
Watching Netflix, or coming in from a surf session, walking back up the beach, phone buzzing in my pocket. I check it and there's $300 sitting there. Made while I was in the water.
That's the fantasy. That's the whole thing I've been chasing.
Citron gave me the first taste of it.
And I'm freaking addicted.
That's about as close to freedom as I've ever gotten.
I don't want it fully passive either, to be clear. I like building things. I like making tools for people and actually caring whether they work.
And this is the part I really want you to hear
If you're struggling to find a job right now - and a lot of you are - think seriously about this path.
Because AI opened it up.
People with my profile, builders with ideas and no capital behind them, have been throwing away good ideas for decades. You couldn't hire a team of developers. You couldn't go raise money for a plugin. So the idea died.
Now? With AI, and specifically with Claude Code for me, a lot of what I've been dreaming about for twenty years suddenly became possible.
That's beautiful. And a lot of people are about to discover it.
One more thing
I had a call this week with a very good friend of mine who runs Motion Boutique. He's been developing Newton for seventeen years. If you don't know it, it's one of the biggest plugins out there - it brings real physics into After Effects. And it's a full plugin, not a CEP panel, not a script.
We met years ago at one of the schools where I was teaching animation. He was teaching After Effects. We both surf. So catching up is always easy.
It was great to get his feedback on Citron and hear his experience selling on aescripts. Seventeen years of it. That's a lot of hard-won knowledge in one conversation.
So we'll see what happens.
Citron goes live on aescripts very soon, with 30% off for the first two weeks. If you want the heads up, hop on the list right below and I'll email you the moment it's out.
Alright. Enough from me. Let's get into this week's issue π₯
The Spotlight
A quiet cul-de-sac. Ordinary people. And then everything goes wrong in the most mundane ways possible.
I've featured Birdbox stuff here before, but this one is different. Longer format, ten minutes plus, and it's a choral film. You're watching something like ten stories unfold at once. A squirrel that can't make the jump into a tree. A couple whose story runs the whole ten minutes and actually needs following. β All of it braided together in one neighbourhood.
What I love most about Birdbox is always the design. But here it's the design and the animation and the comic timing all firing together. They've mastered that last one in a way almost nobody else has.
There must be a million gags in ten minutes. Fast, relentless. And not one of them is misplaced. Every single one either pushes a story forward or collides with another thread. Nothing is there just to be funny in a vacuum. To me that's the highest form of it.
β
They catch me off guard constantly. Ten minutes in and they're still finding new ways to do it.
Now, honest note - this humour won't be for everyone. It's dry, it's British, it's very much a specific taste. It is absolutely my taste and I laughed out loud more than once. But if that's not your register, you'll bounce off it.
β
Also worth saying: it's not really a short film in the traditional sense. It's a system of small stories that lock together. Which is a completely different structural problem than writing one short, and honestly a harder one.
β
Go watch it. It's just fun.
Blades also created It's Pony, in case you want to go down that rabbit hole afterwards.
π¬ Creditsβ β Director / Writer: Ant Blades β Production: Birdbox Studioβ β Producer: Myf Hopkins β Client: BBC β Executive Producers / Curators: Ben Caudell, Roya Eslami β Animation: Chris Bowles, Gemma Wilmott β Storyboard: Hugh La Terriere β Backgrounds: Niccolo Magni β Post Production: Outpost β Music: Mike Rubino β Sound: Fuse Post SFX Editor: James O'Brien
βAfter Effects 2D Animator - OverSimplified Β· Remoteβ The huge YouTube history channel is hiring an experienced 2D animator working in After Effects. They want style adaptability, strong comic timing, and someone comfortable animating from verbal storyboards rather than finished boards. Note this is a relisting - they've added a short paid-style animation task to the process, so even previous applicants need to reapply through the form. βPosted: August 10, 2026.β β
β3D Artist (Animation) - TikTok Β· Sydney, Australia (remote applicants considered)β Sits inside the TikTok LIVE Gifts & Effects design team. The title says 3D Artist but the actual work is animation - you own the concept, production and launch of animated virtual gifts for European and international markets. Unusual brief: you're animating for engagement metrics as much as for craft, and researching aesthetic preferences across different countries. βPosted: August 13, 2026.
The Random Stuff
π½οΈ XGIMI Elfin Flip 4K
I've always been projector-curious.
Never actually owned one. I've had flat TVs my whole life. But I've got a few friends who went the projector route and every single time I walk into their place I'm blown away. That gigantic picture straight on the wall. It just instantly feels like a theatre.
What always held me back was two things. Brightness, because I don't want to close every curtain in the house just to watch something in the afternoon. And price, because a genuinely good projector gets expensive fast.
The XGIMI Elfin Flip 4K. And the appeal for me is really the form factor. It's book-sized, about 1.5kg, and the base folds over to protect the lens and double as a handle. You drop it on a coffee table facing a wall and it aligns itself. Done.
I won't pretend to be an expert on triple laser tech. But the numbers are 4K, RGB triple laser, 1,600 ISO lumens, and it runs Google TV built in so you don't need a separate box.
$999. Which for a 4K triple laser projector is honestly cheap.
Now, the honest caveat. Engadget measured about 1,200 lumens in the natural-looking Movie mode, closer to 1,550 in the brightest setting but with a green tint. So this is still a dark-room machine. It won't beat daylight. If that's what you need, you're looking at something like the Nebula X1 at more than double the price.
But for evening movies on a wall? For under a grand?
I'm going to look into this one more. If you've been projector-curious too and don't have an insane budget, start here.
β¨οΈ Klack
Okay this one is properly geeky, I'm warning you now π€£
I've been on a Logitech MX keyboard for years. Best keyboard I've ever owned, and same story for the MX mouse. No complaints at all.
But lately I've had this itch for a mechanical keyboard. And once the studio is finished I'll actually be able to have one, because I won't be sitting in a co-working space annoying everybody around me with the noise.
So I started looking around. Before buying anything though, I found this app.
β
It's called Klack, and all it does is put mechanical keyboard sounds on whatever keyboard you already have. I'm typing on my MacBook Pro right now and it sounds like a full mechanical setup.
Obviously it's not the same as the real thing. There's no travel, no feel under your fingers. But there's something genuinely ASMR about it.
And here's the part that surprised me. I don't really like typing. I write almost everything by dictating into Wispr Flow these days. But since installing this, I kind of want to type again. Just because it sounds beautiful.
Five bucks, one-time, on the Mac App Store. You pick your switch sound, it runs in the menu bar, and you can kill it instantly when you're on a call.
Sometimes when I'm hunting for something to watch, it depends entirely on the mood I'm in. And when I want something that's just very good production-wise, I go straight to Apple TV and see what's there.
I've found a few gems that way. Right now I'm deep into this one: Your Friends & Neighbors, with Jon Hamm.
I love Jon Hamm. Huge fan since Mad Men, obviously. But what I've realised over the years is that the guy is actually funny. He's a regular on SNL and he's brilliant there. That range is just beautiful to watch.
The setup: a hedge fund manager loses everything. His job, his marriage, the whole thing. But losing everything when you're a rich middle-aged guy in an obscenely wealthy neighbourhood is a very particular kind of losing everything.
So he starts stealing from his neighbours.
And because he's inside the circle, nobody suspects him. Nobody's afraid of him. He just walks in.
Season two dropped this spring and there's already a third on the way. Must-watch. Go check the trailer at least. It's amazing.
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.
Issue #111 | August 9th, 2026 The Prince of Egypt Hey Reader π Something happened this week. I got asked to work on a production. As an animator. A real gig, real film, real studio. I saw the teaser. And I said no. I've been sitting with that ever since, because saying no to an animation job in 2026 - when so many animators I know are refreshing their inbox every morning hoping for exactly that message - felt genuinely strange. But here's the thing. It also felt like relief. The honest...
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