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🎃 Issue #123 | November 1st, 2026 🎃

Hey Reader 👋

This week was a little wild.

Things are moving on a lot of fronts… and you know me, I can’t keep it to myself. So let me just throw it all at you.

I built my own app. In 2 days.

For months I’ve been stuck on the same YouTube question. Do I go full spontaneous, no script? Or do I use a teleprompter?

Spontaneous, I can do. I’ve spoken in front of a lot of rooms, in schools and in presentations. I’m comfortable there.

But video is different. You want something in-between. Natural, but without an hour of editing because you tripped on one word, or explained an idea in a way you didn’t love. With a prompter, I can write exactly what I want to say… and say it in 10 minutes instead of 30.

So I went looking for a teleprompter app.

Small problem. I don’t have the fancy setup. No Elgato, no second monitor, no budget for that. Just my iPad sitting in a basic prompter, and it needs to talk to my Mac.

And here’s the thing about that kind of tool. It has to be frictionless. On camera, you’re under a microscope. The tool has to be completely invisible to the audience.

So I did the trials. Paid a few subscriptions. Ended up on a Java app that was heavy, laggy, crashed constantly, and was ugly as hell 😅 And honestly? They were all like that. None of them did exactly what I needed.

Last week I told you about that “reverse engineer anything” repo on GitHub. I didn’t even bother. I didn’t like any of these apps enough to copy them.

Instead I wrote down my list of features, opened Claude Code, and described the app I actually wanted.

Two days later, I had it.

A native Mac app, written entirely in Swift. It sends to my iPad through Sidecar, everything synced, nothing to touch. And right now it’s getting its own MCP, so every script I write with Claude lands straight in the prompter.

It’s f*cking incredible. I’ve never had a tool this good for myself.

So… do I sell it?

I actually asked Claude what a go-to-market would look like. Maybe a side income for 2027?

Maybe. Not now.

I know myself. Starting too many things at once is a disease, and I have it bad 😅 Right now, my focus is getting to expert level at distribution with Citron🍋.

Because here’s what I’m learning:

Making the product better is not the hard part. Knowing how to sell it is.

If your product solves a real pain, and you know exactly how to put it in front of the people who feel that pain… you can sell almost anything online.

Same for us animators, by the way. Your skills are the product. Most of us keep polishing the product and never learn the distribution.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes

Most of my week went into Freelancing for Animators and Jem Studio, my new animation and motion design studio. I’m building my CRM right now, with AI agents helping me find clients. If you want the full process, you’re in the right place. You can subscribe to the newsletter HERE 👉www.animatornow.com​

Sorry for being this geeky in an animation newsletter. But you know me. If I only talked about animation up here, it would get flat fast. I digress. It’s who I am.

One more thing

Everything you just read? One take. Me talking for ten minutes, turned into text.

Next week I’ll have something important to ask you. And I might do it on video, recorded with my new prompter. So instead of reading the transcript, you’ll just watch it.

Hey by the way... Thanks for being here. Really.❤️
I don't say it enough but every week, reading your answers, and feeling I'm not speaking into a void, that's priceless.
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That's probably why we are at issue#123 and counting 😊 Thanks to you.
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​Oh, and my youngest son wanted to say hi, by the way 😊

Getting him to look at the camera is basically impossible… so sorry about the zero eye contact 😅

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

The Spotlight

A daughter sits down with her parent, Neal, the person she once called Mom, and asks him to tell the story of his transition. That’s the whole film: nine minutes of a real conversation between two people who love each other, painted frame by frame.
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I think this is the first time I’ve put an animated documentary in this Spotlight. I’ve always gone for stories, more or less fictional ones. But this week I had a bad night, I was tired, a little melancholic maybe… and the title alone told me exactly what this was about. I just wanted to listen.

And I’m really glad I did.

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There’s something sweet about a kid turning around and looking back at their parent’s life. Not all the time, but sometimes. Hannah Saidiner, who directed the film, does exactly that, and she asks great questions, by the way. You’re just sitting there listening to a daughter and her dad talk, and it’s so intimate. Very touching.

Visually, it’s a pleasure to watch. Colorful. Never dark, never heavy, even though the music and the tone carry a real melancholy. It’s rotoscoped: thousands of frames traced digitally, then hand-painted. Most of the reference was shot at home, during the pandemic. And the drawings are never still. Everything keeps flowing from one drawing into the next, like the conversation itself.

That’s what grabbed me the most. A lot of animated documentaries just illustrate what’s being said. Here, the animation adds an extra layer of understanding on top of the conversation. It doesn’t illustrate the talk. It makes it bigger. It pushes every moment a little further toward whatever Hannah wants you to feel.

And honestly… it took me back to something I’ve never understood. People who are against gay people, trans people, all of that. Who gives a f*ck? When there’s love, whatever is happening between two people doesn’t touch your life at all. You just see love. And that’s beautiful. It warms your heart.

I wish more people were this open-hearted. This curious. This empathetic.

I found it through The New Yorker’s YouTube channel, which has a whole playlist of these documentaries. I’ve spotlighted them before, and I hadn’t been back in months. This was the first one on the page… the colorful thumbnail and the title got me straight away.

Thank you, Neal, for sharing. And thank you, Hannah, for shining a light on your beautiful story.

🎬 Credits​
​Director: Hannah Saidiner
​Production: CalArts Experimental Animation thesis film - presented by The New Yorker Studios​
​Animation: Hannah Saidiner, with animation assistance by Eva Minh-Chau Liebovitz
​Music: Max Sarkowsky
​Sound: Judy Kim

Share this film with your animator friends ❤️

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The Job Fair

• ​2D Hand-drawn Toon Boom Animator​
  Confidential Creative · Remote (part-time freelance)​
  Confidential Creative is crewing up for an animated short that starts around November 2 and runs until the end of the year. They want rough and clean-up animators who ideally take one character from roughs all the way through cleans, plus color artists. You need your own Toon Boom license, and they ask for your rate, time zone and start date in the application.
  ​Posted: October 26, 2026.
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• ​CG Storyboard ArtistAtomic Cartoons · Remote within British Columbia, or hybrid in Vancouver, Canada​
  The studio behind LEGO, Star Wars and CoComelon projects needs a storyboard artist for one of its ongoing CG series. You'll need 2+ years boarding on CG productions and real Storyboard Pro experience, with Blender as a bonus. BC-based artists get priority, and the pay is $1,500 to $1,800 CAD per week.
  ​Posted: October 28, 2026.
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• ​Grease Pencil Animator ("American Anime" Pilot)HAMPA Studio · Remote
  ​Borja Meléndez, Animation Director at HAMPA Studio, is putting a team together for a pilot in an "American anime" style that starts soon. They're after very specialized profiles: anime-style animators who already work in Blender's Grease Pencil. To apply, DM him on LinkedIn or comment on his post with a reel that shows off your Grease Pencil work.
  ​Posted: October 29, 2026.

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The Random Stuff

👀 Big Little Lies

Okay, confession time. I completely missed Big Little Lies when it came out… and I’m finally catching up. It’s on HBO, not Netflix. Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern… and Meryl Streep joins them in season 2. All set in Monterey, California. The acting, the writing, everything. It’s just incredible.

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Now the embarrassing part 😅 I stream to my TV with Airflow, and the episodes were in the wrong order in my list. Never happened to me before. Ever. We started with episode 7. The finale. We spoiled ourselves right away and didn’t even notice… we just thought what came next was one huge flashback. Shows do that sometimes, right? So we went 7, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6… and only at 6 did I go “wait, we already watched 7, but we never watched episode 1.”

And somehow it still worked. That’s how well written it is. Weird, but kind of brilliant. Don’t try this at home if you care about suspense. We definitely lost some of it. We’re on season 2 now, and it’s still awesome. Watch the trailer.

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🧠 Obsidian (and my second brain)

If you’ve never heard of it, Obsidian is a note-taking app. It only deals with Markdown files, plain .md text. That’s pretty much it.

A lot of people get fancy about it because of one view, the graph view. It takes all your notes, draws every connection between them, and turns the whole thing into a map you can click around in. That’s the idea behind what people call a second brain, a concept I’m really into. I even read Tiago Forte’s book about it.

Here’s mine 👀

But here’s the thing. I’m not a big note-taker. At all. No sitting down and writing scholarly notes by hand. If you’re like me, you just keep quick traces. A link. Maybe a title and a link. And then a year later it’s “wait, what was that thing I saw?”… and you redo the whole search from scratch, because you never wrote it down.

That’s exactly the point. A tiny bit of notes, so you can go back in time without having to remember. Your brain is designed to create, not to store information. Let something else do the storing.

What you’re looking at is a map of everything I’ve been doing. The big clusters are my main topics. Animator NOW. The yellow one is Citron. The blue one is my Jem Studio CRM, all the contacts I’m finding with AI. Then there’s gear and shopping, job search, and plenty of little satellites around them.

It’s not for everyone. But I highly recommend you go check it out and see if you can build something cool with it.

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🎬 Adam Savage inside LAIKA’s Wildwood

Every behind-the-scenes Adam Savage makes is gold. This one is no exception. He goes inside LAIKA, the stop-motion studio behind Coraline and Kubo, to see how they’re making their new film, Wildwood.

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And honestly… it left a sour taste in my mouth. Not because of the film. The craft is unreal. Pure craftsmanship, every single frame. But I know these films don’t make a dime. LAIKA exists because Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, finances it. His son Travis runs the studio and directed this one.

So every film feels like it could be the last one. Always survival mode. It’s always been painful to watch, even while I’m in awe of what they make. Go watch it. And when Wildwood hits theaters near you, go see it. That’s the only vote that really counts.

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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