Issue #122 | October 25th, 2026
Hey Reader 👋
I just blew out my birthday candles. 49. 🎂
And it’s funny… that’s the age where you stop seeing who you’d like to be, and start seeing who you actually are.
The shy kid in the room
If you met me today, you probably wouldn’t believe this.
You’d see a guy who’s comfortable talking to you. Comfortable speaking in public. Comfortable on camera. And if I told you I’m actually pretty shy, you’d think I was building some kind of story about myself.
But it’s true.
I was the shy kid. The lonely one. An only child who spent his entire youth playing guitar alone in his room. That room was my whole world.
And somehow… I carried that room with me into adulthood.
When I started working on my own stuff, it was always easier to just do everything myself than to reach out, ask someone, collaborate. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a good team player. I’ve led teams, I love sharing the work, and once I’m in, I’m all in. But going out and looking for those people? That’s the part I never did.
My mom told me. A couple of friends told me. There are things I never did in my life because I was alone, and they would have been so much better with someone next to me.
I never really got it. Because if I had waited for someone to do things with me… I would never have done anything at all. 😅
The moment it clicked
This week I was building my new website with Claude. Just me, dictating what I wanted, going back and forth.
And at some point, it really felt like someone was sitting right next to me. Working with me. Two sets of skills mixed together, and the result was better and way faster than anything I’d have done alone in my room.
I could have stopped at “wow, AI is crazy.”
But that’s not what hit me.
What hit me is that this is exactly what I’d been missing all those years. Not AI. People.
I won’t call it a mistake. Mistakes come with regret. But I’m pretty sure I would have made it way earlier if I’d built with others instead of alone. When I see teams creating together, I envy them a lot… because I know how powerful that is.
And honestly? At 49, it’s hard to get out of your own skin.
Talent isn’t the whole game
So here’s what I want you to take from this.
Talent gets you ready. People get you seen.
You cannot work in a vacuum and expect the world to explode the day you get “discovered.” To reach a certain level, you need feedback, connections, collaborators.
And putting yourself out there is a skill nobody teaches. Especially now, when everything is this noisy and crowded.
So if you’re working alone all the time… reach out. Go to animation festivals. Meet people. Show your work. Ask for feedback. Use whatever you’re comfortable with, social media, a meetup, a coffee with another animator in your town. Just do something.
Don’t stay in your room hoping the internet finds you.
That’s exactly why I’m rethinking the Freelancing for Animators community.
Not reopening the old one. Building a brand new one, completely rethought from the ground up.
A place where you’re not just figuring it all out by yourself.
The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced. Community is the way to go. For you… and honestly, for me too. 😊
It’s not open yet. But if you want to hear all the news and updates as it comes together, you can sign up to the list HERE.
Alright. Let’s get into this week’s issue. 🔥
The Spotlight
Teo survives alone in an isolated house that’s constantly besieged by a horde of stray dogs. Every day is the same fight… just trying to get out.
It’s Halloween season, and my feed has been flooded with black and white horror shorts. I had to pick one. I’m not even sure why I landed on this one… but it stayed with me.
The very first frame reminded me of Peripheria, one of the first films I ever spotlighted here, and one that still lingers with me today. And I’ll be honest with you. This is probably the first truly terrifying film I’ve shared in this newsletter.
Not spooky. No jump scares, no screamers. It’s something else. It’s dirty. Gross. Fleshy. Weird. Black and white and grimy, and violent without ever really showing violence. It’s terrific.
Let’s talk about the look
No sugarcoating it. It’s ugly.
This is stop motion where absolutely nothing is meant to be beautiful or polished, and I don’t think the directors cared about that for a second. The puppets are balsa wood, wire and fabric, and it’s rough everywhere. There’s just enough design for you to read what Teo is feeling and where he’s looking. That’s it.
The emotions stay flat for the whole film too. He’s scared. There isn’t a single smile, nothing positive anywhere. It’s a horror movie from the first second to the last.
And it works.
Where it really shines
The cinematography, the editing, the storytelling, even the writing… they’re really good. All the beats fit together. It’s well thought out.
You’ll see what I mean with the relationship between the boy and the old man, what happens to him, and then the girl who shows up. It all builds this behind-closed-doors feeling, and the character dynamics carry the whole thing.
And then there’s the sound
Like in every horror film, this is huge. The sound design is a fully crafted, artistic piece of work on its own. But the music… it’s completely insane.
It’s always there, lingering in the background, going up and down, super stressful. Those synth pads, those saw-wave textures, they fit perfectly and keep the tension climbing the entire time.
Go watch it
It’s long-ish, almost 17 minutes. And halfway through you’ll still be asking yourself “what the heck am I watching?” But you’ll want to know where it goes. It’s unconventional from beginning to end, and I was not expecting it at all.
Turn the lights off. 🐕
🎬 Credits
Director: Marc Riba & Anna Solanas
Production: Marc Riba & Anna Solanas - I+G Stop Motion
Sets: Marc Riba
Animation: Núria Riba
Camera: Anna Molins
Music: Aleix Pitarch
Sound: Anna Solanas
The Job Fair
- Senior Motion Designer
Perplexity · New York City, USA (Hybrid)
The AI search company is hiring a senior motion designer for its in-house brand studio, taking launches and campaigns from concept and boards to final animation, mostly 2D with some 3D. They want strong timing and spacing fundamentals, After Effects mastery and comfort in Figma. Pay is $180K to $210K plus equity, which says a lot about what non-animation companies will pay for good motion.
Posted: October 21, 2026.
- Character Design & Animation Intern
Olive · Remote (United States)
Olive, a plant-care app fresh out of the gBETA accelerator, wants a student to refresh its four mascots, build an expression sheet for each, then bring them to life in Rive with idle loops, a welcome moment and little reactions. You get weekly mentorship from their design team and shipped, credited work in a live product. Aimed at students graduating around 2027 with original character design in their portfolio.
Posted: October 22, 2026.
- 2D Rigger and Animator for Character Paintings
Ink It Thru Publishing · Remote (contract)
Indie author Asha Nyr hand-paints the characters of her Healing Fate novel series and wants them brought to life with a subtle, loopable 20 to 30 second idle: blinks, small head turns, shifts in expression. Everything must be rigged and animated by hand, no generative AI, and with twenty portraits and counting, one good job can turn into many. You propose your own rate, deadlines are flexible, and they want a reel with facial animation.
Posted: October 20, 2026.
The Random Stuff
🤖 I just turned on DLSS (yes, in 2026)
Okay, I’m super late to the game on this one. Literally. 😅
I just realized I had never turned on DLSS on my graphics card. I have an RTX 4070 Super that I use for my Unreal work… and it was sitting there with one of its best features switched off this whole time.
What made me notice? I ended up watching NVIDIA’s DLSS 5 reveal. It’s a new AI-powered rendering model that adds photoreal lighting and materials to games in real time, and the before and after is honestly hard to believe.
DLSS 5 isn’t out yet. But DLSS 4.5 is, and it runs best on the 40 and 50 series cards. So if you have one, go check your settings. Right now. You might be sitting on free performance like I was.
And the timing is perfect. I’ve just wrapped my client work in Unreal, and now I want to dive into something that has interested me from the very beginning: building worlds. Real, super photorealistic environments.
Every time I look at William Faucher’s work, I get inspired all over again. If you don’t know him, his Unreal Engine tutorials are some of the best out there. Go have a look.
🎸 Current Mood with John Mayer
I’ve been a huge John Mayer fan for pretty much 20 years, for a lot of reasons I won’t get into here. But there’s one thing of his I miss so much.
For a while, John hosted a show on Instagram called Current Mood. Straight from his home, with a cardboard-looking set and decor that felt totally homemade. Filmed in portrait mode, believe it or not. He’d have guests over, and I had some really great laughs with them.
What I love most is how rudimentary all of it is. No big production, no polish. Just a guy sitting there, being himself, having fun with his friends. And it works.
There’s a lesson in that for everyone who thinks they need the perfect setup before they start creating. 😅 If you like John the musician, but also John the person, you’ll love him in these episodes. Dive in.
🛠️ REA: Reverse Engineer Anything
I’m getting ready to really start posting on YouTube, and for some of those videos I’ll probably use a teleprompter. And for some weird reason… there’s no truly great, top-of-the-game teleprompter app out there. Not one.
So at some point I thought, why not make my own? In 2026, that’s something we can actually do now. And one smart way to go about it is to study an existing app, understand how it behaves, and build a better version of your own.
That’s exactly what this GitHub repo does. It’s called REA, short for Reverse Engineer Anything. It plugs into AI coding agents and gives them the tools to pick apart how an app works, from what it does on screen all the way down to the code underneath. It landed at the perfect moment for me. Here’s a video that walks through it:
I haven’t tested it myself yet. But I’ve watched a couple of videos and I can’t wait to throw it at many, many things. 👀
And think about what this means for us animators. That tool you’ve always wished worked a little differently… the plugin missing that one feature… you don’t have to wait for someone else to build it anymore. You can.
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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