We never wanted to write this post.

After some recent discussions, we’ve made the difficult decision to stop producing any new content for this Substack, effective June 30, 2026, though previously scheduled articles will continue until the end of the year. Every article, video, and interview that was previously behind the paywall will now be free, permanently. If you’re a monthly subscriber, your billing stops June 30. If you’re an annual subscriber, you’ll get a prorated refund based on when you signed up.

Two things drove this difficult decision:

First, we couldn’t grow our Substack the way we had envisioned. We started over two years ago hoping to build a real community around visual storytelling, but that never quite materialized — engagement and subscribers plateaued, and it remained flat for months. That’s on us, not on you. Our skill at marketing and audience-building never caught up to our skill at the actual craft. It was a lesson well-learned and hopefully it’s useful somewhere down the line.

Second, the ground shifted under the entire visual storytelling industry since we started this. The fields this Substack covers — comics, animation, and especially storyboards and film — are all facing real external pressures right now, and we haven’t been immune to it personally. We don’t want to turn this into an essay on why; that’s a much longer conversation. But the climate at the beginning of 2024 isn’t the same climate in mid 2026. We wanted to be a steady light through it. Eventually the waters became too rough and even we were short on answers.

Thank you to everyone who showed up for this — every comment, every share, every conversation it sparked, here and on our Beyond The Process YouTube channel. And a special thank you to everyone who saw the value in what we were doing and supported us financially. We couldn’t have done it without you.

Be well.

Lance & Shane

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Storyboarding · Animation · Comics · Pre-Production · Tools & Pipeline

Happy Friday, and welcome back to The Final Cut — your weekly roundup of what’s moving in the world of visual storytelling.

It was Annecy week, and the festival delivered. The biggest news: Genndy Tartakovsky is officially making a Conan the Barbarian animated series for Prime Video. The show is called Queen of the Black Coast, it centers on Conan and the pirate queen Bêlit, and it marks Tartakovsky’s first IP adaptation since the Clone Wars micro-series in 2003. He’s been pitching a Conan project since 2008. That it’s finally happening — and that it’s going to a streamer with the runway to let him do it right — is the kind of news worth stopping to appreciate.

Also out of Annecy: the final film of Richard Williams — the animator who spent his career chasing an impossible standard of craft — will have its world premiere Saturday night as the festival’s closing film. Lysistrata is a posthumous short. That it exists at all is something worth marking. Plus: Brad Bird’s Ray Gunn has a release date, Adventure Time has another spinoff on the way, Hollywood writers are training the AI that’s competing with them for work, and the DGA wrapped its negotiations without a strike. Grab a coffee. Let’s get into it.

Animation — Industry

Genndy Tartakovsky Is Finally Making His Conan the Barbarian Series — for Prime Video

Announced at Annecy 2026, Genndy Tartakovsky and Cartoon Network Studios are developing Conan the Barbarian: Queen of the Black Coast for Prime Video. This is Tartakovsky’s first IP adaptation since the Star Wars: Clone Wars micro-series in 2003, and a project he’s been trying to get made since 2008. The show’s logline: “After finding love in the pirate queen, Bêlit, a battle-hardened Conan defies gods, fate and even death to save her from a dark sorcery that threatens to destroy everything.”

Tartakovsky’s visual vocabulary — built across Samurai Jack, Primal, and the Hotel Transylvania films — runs on economy of movement, weight, and negative space. Robert E. Howard’s Conan material is pulp in the best sense: mythic violence, strange gods, elemental emotion. Watching Tartakovsky apply that language to Howard’s world is the kind of creative pairing that makes you actually look forward to something. This one has been a long time coming.

Source: Polygon · Also: The Wrap

Short Film — Legacy

Richard Williams’ Final Film, Lysistrata, Will Have Its World Premiere at Annecy

The 2026 Annecy Animation Festival closes Saturday with the world premiere of Lysistrata — the last, posthumous work of Richard Williams, the animator behind Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and the unfinished masterpiece The Thief and the Cobbler. Williams died in 2019 at age 86. Anyone who’s read The Animator’s Survival Kit — still the clearest, most demanding text on animation as a craft — knows what he stood for. A standard that never moved, regardless of whether the industry was willing to meet it.

The Thief and the Cobbler was taken from Williams before it could be completed, and he spent his final years working independently. That Lysistrata exists and is receiving a proper world premiere at the festival that has long honored serious animation work is genuinely worth noting. The closing night slot at Annecy is not given lightly.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Animation — Feature Film

Brad Bird’s Ray Gunn Gets a December 18 Netflix Date — and Annecy Saw the First 7 Minutes

Netflix has set December 18, 2026 as the release date for Brad Bird’s Ray Gunn. The announcement came at Annecy, where the 1,400-capacity Bonlieu theatre got a full clip and the first seven minutes of the film — introducing private eye Raymond Gunn (Sam Rockwell) in the city of Metropia, an alternate-future metropolis viewed through a 1939 lens. Scarlett Johansson voices Venus Nova, a multimedia star at the center of a murder case; Tom Waits plays Gunn’s alien sidekick Eyera. Peter Lord of Aardman interviewed Bird onstage.

Bird explained the film’s origin as a “goofy misunderstanding” — mistaking the B52s’ “Planet Claire” for Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn theme — and described it as “film noir and a hard-boiled detective story, but with a lot more comedy and action than the average film noir.” The project spent years in a Warner Bros. filing cabinet before Bird negotiated to get it back. It’s a Skydance Animation production with John Lasseter producing. December 18 is a serious release slot.

Source: Deadline

Animation — Industry

Adventure Time: Bubblegum and Marceline Gets a 10-Episode Straight-to-Series Order on HBO Max

Also announced at Annecy: HBO Max has given a 10-episode straight-to-series order to Adventure Time: Bubblegum and Marceline, a new spinoff centered on Princess Bubblegum and Marceline the Vampire Queen. Adam Muto — who served as showrunner on the original series and on Fionna & Cake — returns in the same role. The logline: the two characters “journey across the farthest reaches of Ooo, encountering familiar faces and new dangers.” It’s being produced by Warner Bros. Animation and Cartoon Network Studios.

Bubblegum and Marceline have been fan favorites for over a decade, with their relationship confirmed (via a kiss in the 2018 series finale) after years of fan advocacy. The show is the fourth Adventure Time spinoff, following Distant Lands, Fionna & Cake, and Side Quests (debuting June 29 on Disney+/Hulu). The franchise continues to expand, with Muto at the center of it.

Source: Variety

Tools & Pipeline — Industry

Hollywood Creatives Are Moonlighting as AI Trainers as Traditional Jobs Dry Up

The Hollywood Reporter profiles writers, musicians, visual artists and other entertainment workers who are supplementing thin income by doing reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) gigs through platforms like Handshake — training the AI systems that are reshaping the same industry they worked in. Writers can earn up to $44/hour; music professionals with advanced degrees can earn up to $100/hour. The share of arts-category job postings that require AI skills doubled from roughly 5% to 11% between May 2025 and April 2026.

Reporting this one neutrally and letting the situation speak: the economic pressure is real enough that some working creatives are now helping refine the systems competing with them for work. It doesn’t get any more meta than this. The piece doesn’t advocate or moralize, and neither will this newsletter. It’s worth reading, particularly if you’re thinking about where the labor market is heading for people who work in and around visual storytelling.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Industry — Film & TV

The DGA Has Reached a Tentative Four-Year Deal With the Major Studios

The Directors Guild of America reached a tentative four-year agreement with the AMPTP in June, completing this year’s major labor negotiations following the WGA (approved April) and SAG-AFTRA (ratified last month). The deal includes AI protections and provisions around the health fund, which has run deficits in recent years. As with the other guilds, specific terms won’t be made public until the DGA National Board completes its review and sends the contract to membership for ratification.

All three above-the-line guilds settled on four-year terms — longer than the standard three-year contracts that have been the norm since the 1980s, driven by studios’ stated goal of securing a longer period of labor stability after the 2023 strikes. The contracts won’t stop the industry from changing, but four years without a strike threat is a meaningful runway for everyone trying to build or greenlight something.

Source: Variety

From the Community — Worth a Restack

Three posts from visual storytelling Substackers published this week — all worth your time and a restack.

Animation Obsessive · 72,000+ subscribers

Pixar’s Believable People

Animation Obsessive digs into Pixar’s long and often-underappreciated struggle with human characters — from the early experiments of Toy Story through the advances in The Incredibles, Up, Brave, and beyond. A technical history with craft implications. If you’ve ever wondered why animated humans are so much harder to get right than animals or toys, this is a good place to start.

Published June 21, 2026 · 159 likes, 18 restacks

Creating Comics · K. Woodman-Maynard

The Things I’ll Do For a Graphic Novel

Woodman-Maynard writes about what research actually looks like when you’re making a graphic novel — the trips, the deep dives, the weird rabbit holes that most readers will never know about but that show up in the work anyway. An honest look at the effort behind visual accuracy and authentic place.

Published June 21, 2026 · 56 likes

Gurney Journey · James Gurney

More Dazzling Dexterity

Gurney continues his look at technical mastery in painting — the kind of physical command over a medium that comes from years of practice and isn’t replaceable by shortcuts. His posts have a way of making you want to pick up a brush. Practical observations about what skilled execution actually looks like, and why it still matters.

Published June 22, 2026 · 45 likes

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And that’s a wrap for this week.

Beyond The Process is a newsletter for working creatives in visual storytelling — storyboarding, animation, comics, illustration, and film pre-production.

You’re receiving this because you subscribed on Substack. If this was forwarded to you, you can subscribe below:

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Storyboarding · Animation · Comics · Pre-Production · Tools & Pipeline

Happy Friday, and welcome back to The Final Cut — your weekly roundup of what’s moving in the world of visual storytelling.

Two very different kinds of milestones landed this week. Toy Story 5 opens tomorrow tracking for a franchise-best $140 million domestic opening — the kind of number that puts Pixar back at the center of the conversation after a few bumpy years. And across the Atlantic, Aardman’s co-founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton became Sir Peter and Sir David in King Charles III’s Birthday Honours, as the studio marks its 50th anniversary. One is a box office event. The other is half a century of work recognized. Both feel significant in different ways.

Also a bit of sad news this week: we lost Daveigh Chase — voice of Lilo in Lilo & Stitch and Chihiro in the English dub of Spirited Away — at just 35. Skibidi Toilet somehow secured $25 million in VC. Fox bought Roku for $22 billion. And two shorts you’ve probably never heard of just earned their Oscar qualifying runs. Let’s get into it.

Animation — Feature Film

‘Toy Story 5’ Is Tracking for a Franchise-Best $140 Million Opening

Thirty-one years after the original Toy Story, the fifth installment is tracking for a $140 million domestic opening weekend — which would make it the biggest debut in the franchise’s history, topping Toy Story 4‘s $120.9 million in 2019. Global projections sit around $275 million. Directed by Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, WALL-E) and co-directed by Kenna Harris, the film centers on children’s growing attachment to technology and what that means for the toys who live on the other side of that relationship.

The timing matters. Pixar has been rebuilding confidence since the streaming-first years, and the success of Hoppers ($372M worldwide earlier in 2026) gave them a running start. A franchise-best opening for Toy Story 5 would be a convincing argument that the studio still knows how to make movies audiences will show up for — and that theatrical animation isn’t going anywhere.

Source: Cartoon Brew

Animation — Industry

Aardman’s Peter Lord and David Sproxton Are Now Sir Peter and Sir David

King Charles III’s Birthday Honours included two names that should mean something to anyone who grew up with clay: Peter Lord and David Sproxton, co-founders of Aardman Animations, have both been knighted for services to animation and the creative industries. The honor arrives as Aardman marks its 50th anniversary — the studio was founded in Bristol in 1976 and grew into the home of Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, Morph, Creature Comforts, and Chicken Run.

In their joint statement, Lord and Sproxton said they accepted the recognition “not just for ourselves, but on behalf of all the wonderfully talented people who have helped shape Aardman into what it is today.” That framing matters. Aardman has always been a studio defined more by its people and its craft than by its IP — studios like this one are rare, and the fact that it’s still independent and still making things at 50 is worth pausing on. Also honored: Georgina Hurcombe, creator of the preschool series Pop Paper City, who was awarded an MBE for services to television and the creative sector.

Source: Cartoon Brew

Animation — In Memoriam

Daveigh Chase, Voice of Lilo and Spirited Away’s Chihiro, Dies at 35

Daveigh Chase died Tuesday in Los Angeles. She was 35. Chase voiced Lilo Pelekai in Disney’s Lilo & Stitch (2002) — winning an Annie Award for the performance — and also voiced the lead character Chihiro in the English dub of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, released in the same year. Two of the most beloved animated characters of the 2000s, voiced by the same person, in the same summer.

According to Variety, Chase had been struggling with addiction since her teens and had been homeless in Los Angeles with her boyfriend, who confirmed her death. Her father said she died of meningitis and a blood infection after being hospitalized for malnutrition. She was 13 when she got her first major role. Both Lilo & Stitch and Spirited Away are films about children navigating strange and difficult worlds — finding their footing in places that weren’t built for them. The voice behind both of them deserved better than the world she got. She was remarkable in both.

Source: Variety

Creator Economy — Business

Skibidi Toilet’s Hollywood Ambitions Just Scored $25 Million in Venture Capital

The media company behind the Hollywood expansion of Skibidi Toilet — Invisible Narratives, founded by former Paramount Pictures president Adam Goodman — has secured $25 million in new venture capital financing. The money is earmarked for production, licensing, and franchise-building around several internet-native properties, with Skibidi Toilet as the flagship. Michael Bay remains attached to what Invisible Narratives has described as a cinematic adaptation of the property.

If you’re not familiar: Skibidi Toilet was created by animator Alexey Gerasimov using Valve’s Source Filmmaker — the same free toolkit that’s been generating fan films and machinima for decades. It launched on YouTube in 2023 and accumulated billions of views through sheer surreal energy. The path from “free software + one person + YouTube” to “$25 million in VC + Michael Bay” is genuinely strange, and it says something real about how animation’s entry points have shifted. Whether the film is good is a separate question. That it’s happening at all is the story.

Source: Cartoon Brew

Distribution — Industry

Fox’s $22 Billion Roku Deal Is the Latest Power Grab in a Shrinking Ecosystem

Fox Corporation is acquiring Roku for $22 billion, giving Rupert Murdoch’s media empire control over a platform that reaches more than 100 million households worldwide. Roku’s operating system, advertising technology, and content discovery tools will now sit inside a portfolio that already includes Fox News, Tubi, broadcast networks, and cable channels. As Cartoon Brew’s editor Jamie Lang put it plainly: “Fox isn’t buying Roku because it wants to sell streaming devices. It’s buying one of the most influential distribution platforms in television.”

For independent studios, animators, and small distributors, the significance is structural. Roku was valuable precisely because it functioned as a neutral gateway — it didn’t produce content and had no stake in which shows audiences chose. That neutrality is now gone. The same consolidation pressure squeezing the Paramount–WBD deal is eating another piece of the landscape. When fewer companies control both what gets made and how it gets found, the space for work that falls outside the mainstream gets smaller.

Source: Cartoon Brew

Short Film — Awards

‘18 Months’ and ‘Porque Hoy Es Sábado’ Earn Oscar Qualification at Animayo Gran Canaria

Two animated short films earned Academy Award qualifying runs through their wins at the Animayo Gran Canaria festival: 18 Months and Porque Hoy Es Sábado (Because Today Is Saturday). Both films now have a path into the Oscar short film conversation — and both would likely be unknown to most readers if not for the festival circuit doing what it exists to do.

Animayo Gran Canaria is one of a handful of international festivals whose top animation prize carries Oscar qualifying status, alongside events like Annecy, Zagreb, and Stuttgart. Winning one of these opens the road to the Academy — and in the short film category, that qualifying win can be the difference between a film that travels internationally and one that lives on a hard drive. Worth keeping an eye on both titles as the eligibility window opens.

Source: Cartoon Brew

From the Community — Worth a Restack

Two posts from this week’s visual storytelling Substackers worth your time.

Animation Obsessive · 72,000 subscribers

Congolese Animation That Needs to Be Seen

Animation Obsessive spent most of 2026 negotiating an exclusive two-week online release of Machini (2019), a short animated film by Frank Mukunday and Tétshim — two artists from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who specialize in animating with stones, chalk, and found materials. The result is unlike anything else: characters made of actual rocks from the Lubumbashi streets, chalk-drawn landscapes, and a film that’s literally built from the exploited land it’s about. The piece traces the directors’ decade-long path from candlelit test shoots with borrowed cameras to Belgian production residencies and international festival wins — and makes the case that Machini is one of the most visually inventive shorts of recent years. If you have twelve minutes in the next two weeks, watch the embed. It earns it.

Published June 14, 2026 · 175 likes, 36 restacks

Creating Comics · K. Woodman-Maynard

A Drawing Game for Your Next Artist Meetup

Woodman-Maynard shares the drawing game she developed for artist meetups — an exercise that started as a way to fill Zoom time and evolved into a structure she now uses at in-person retreats in Maine. The piece is practical (there’s a game you can actually run) and thoughtful about why shared creative constraints work differently in a room than they do solo. If you lead workshops, run a study group, or just get together with other artists and find yourself wondering how to make the time generative rather than social-but-idle, this is worth reading.

Published June 14, 2026 · 44 likes, 4 restacks

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And that’s a wrap for this week. We’ll be back next Friday with more industry news.

Beyond The Process is a newsletter for working creatives in visual storytelling — storyboarding, animation, comics, illustration, and film pre-production.

You’re receiving this because you subscribed on Substack. If this was forwarded to you, you can subscribe below:

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Finally, after so many years I’ve finished what I started. Did I tell you that I actually had approached three different people to draw this story. They were all excited, only two did a few character sketches, but ultimately no follow thru. C’est la vie.

What’s that saying about doing things yourself? 🤔 Yeah, that!

Unfortunately, I still want to collaborate with people and if money is the point of entre then...that’s gonna be a no-show for most people much to my chagrin.

Anyway, here are the remaining pages of the story for you to check out.

But, do you want to see something crazy?

Here’s the way I had originally colored this story:

It’s normally how I see color and light when coloring comics.

But part of the problem I was having and the trap I was falling into, was that I was burying the inks. Something I’m always railing against...and thought I was avoiding.

But no. I was doing myself a disservice. As much as I love pushing rich colors I was doing myself no favors.

What ends up happening is that the lighting and color become the predominant thing. The cinematography, while accurate to my taste and serves the tone of the story does not add to the conversation that the inks started.

If I had simplified the brushwork and didn’t put as much texture in there then yeah, we’d be looking at these pages as the final. Inherently, I still love a lot of these colors. They’re seductive, they feel right...but unfortunately, they don’t play well with others.

I think it was around this page is when I realized something wasn’t working but I couldn’t figure out what exactly.

That’s why it’s important to share the work with friends and people you trust, swallow your pride, and ask for feedback. When I did, mostly everyone loved these pages.

Maybe it was the excitement of seeing something new. But later, when I had a conversation with a close friend, I told him I still didn’t feel like these were it. I said I think I might have to lighten the pages or recolor it or something. He agreed. Hearing his agreement was like getting permission to try something. And yet...how much work was it going to be?

It turned out not to be too much trouble at all. I went in and literally lightened everything BY HALF. 50% lighter and I cranked up the saturation to bring the colors back from being washed out. I mean comparing the two sets of pages, it does look washed out BUT...nobody outside of our friend group will see what had come before.

The other saving grace about this decision is that colors have a tendency to print darker by 10-20%, especially with the ubiquity of digital printing these days. If I thought the color was burying the line on my computer then, there was no chance in hell I’d like the end result.

As of this writing, I think it’s been about 4 years, this project still hasn’t come out. Apparently, there’s been a spate of bad luck all along the way that has delayed this from hitting the market. It’s sad really. I would never want to take on something where you have to herd so many creative cats who are all doing work for free.

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At least now, I have hope that it’ll be readable, that the beautiful black brushstrokes will ring true. Fingers crossed. You never know how these things will turn out, no matter how much effort you put in.

=s=

Storyboarding · Animation · Comics · Pre-Production · Tools & Pipeline

Happy Friday, and welcome back to The Final Cut — your weekly roundup of what’s moving in the world of visual storytelling.

This week feels like two conversations happening at the same time. On one side, there’s Floyd Norman — 86 years old, the first Black artist ever hired by Walt Disney, and as of Thursday the recipient of an Honorary Oscar from the Academy. It’s a recognition that’s been a long time coming, and there’s something genuinely moving about the industry finally making it official. On the other side, the Art Directors Guild had to put out a public statement this week pushing back after Martin Scorsese lent his name to an AI storyboarding tool — which is exactly the kind of thing that sends a chill through a room full of working storyboard artists (unfortunately a rare breed these days). Both stories tell you something true about where this industry is right now. Plus: Pixar just dropped the first teaser for Gatto, Enrico Casarosa’s follow-up to Luca — and it looks nothing like what you’d expect. Annecy is also mid-run this week (through Saturday), so keep an eye on Cartoon Brew and AWN for awards coverage as it comes in.

Grab a coffee. Let’s get into it.

Animation — Industry

Floyd Norman, First Black Artist Hired by Disney, Voted an Honorary Oscar by the Academy

The Academy’s Board of Governors voted on Thursday to award an Honorary Oscar to Floyd Norman, 86 — the first Black animator ever hired by Walt Disney Studios, where he joined in 1956 and worked on films including Sleeping Beauty, 101 Dalmatians, and The Jungle Book. He went on to work at Hanna-Barbera, Filmation, and later Pixar, where he contributed to Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc. — and was still showing up to the Pixar campus as a salaried employee into his 80s.

Norman has also spent decades writing and speaking about animation history, and was the subject of the 2016 documentary Floyd Norman: An Animated Life. The Honorary Oscar will be presented at the Governors Awards in November. It’s a long-overdue recognition for someone who spent most of his career proving that talent wins out — even when the system wasn’t built for you.

Source: Cartoon Brew

Tools & Pipeline

Art Directors Guild Fires Back After Martin Scorsese Endorses an AI Storyboarding Tool

The Art Directors Guild issued a sharp public statement this week after Martin Scorsese lent his endorsement to an AI-powered storyboarding tool — calling it a direct threat to the livelihoods of storyboard artists, set illustrators, and graphic artists the union represents. The ADG’s response confirmed via tweet that they were responding to real professional harm, not hypothetical future concerns: storyboard artists are already losing work to tools being pitched partly on the credibility of filmmaker endorsements.

The story cuts to the heart of a tension that’s been building for years: AI tools designed for visual development workflows are increasingly being sold not just to studios, but to directors — with the implicit message that human illustrators are an optional step. When a director of Scorsese’s stature puts his name on that pitch, the ADG’s job is to make the cost of that visible. The DGA’s own contract expires June 30, which means this conversation is about to get a lot louder.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Feature Film — Pre-Production

Pixar Drops First Teaser for ‘Gatto’ — and the Painterly Look Is a Real Departure

Pixar released the first teaser for Gatto, the next original feature from director Enrico Casarosa (Luca). The title means “cat” in Italian — and the teaser reveals a visual aesthetic that’s a deliberate departure from the studio’s polished photorealism. The look is more painterly and illustrative, with visible texture in the lighting and a softer, more hand-crafted quality to the surfaces. Whether it holds up through production remains to be seen, but as a teaser it signals that Casarosa is leaning into what made Luca distinct rather than away from it.

Casarosa has been one of the quieter success stories inside Pixar — a director who came up through the story department, who made his short La Luna, and who brought a genuinely Italian visual sensibility to Luca that felt different from anything the studio had done before. The fact that Gatto appears to be pushing further in that direction rather than reverting to type is encouraging.

Source: Cartoon Brew

Animation — Stop Motion

Mackinnon & Saunders Teams With Nihil Declarandum to Develop Gothic Stop-Motion Feature ‘Heads’

Mackinnon & Saunders — the UK puppet-making studio responsible for the armatures and silicone figures in Corpse Bride, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Frankenweenie, and dozens of commercial productions — is partnering with debut feature studio Nihil Declarandum to develop Heads, a gothic stop-motion animated feature. The collaboration involves developing new puppet construction techniques specifically for the project, which is currently in development.

Mackinnon & Saunders has long occupied a specific and essential role in the stop-motion world: they build the puppets that directors dream up, and the technical depth of what they do is rarely seen by audiences who watch the finished films. Their involvement in a feature from the ground up — rather than as a fabrication contractor — is a different kind of move, and the fact that they’re developing new technique for it makes Heads worth watching closely.

Source: Animation World Network

Comics & Illustration

Archie Comics Is in Legal Trouble — Private Equity Dispute Threatens Ownership and a Universal Movie Is in the Mix

Archie Comics is facing a cascade of legal problems tied to a private equity ownership dispute that has created genuine uncertainty about who controls the company. The situation puts at risk not just the publisher’s day-to-day operations but also a live-action movie adaptation in development at Universal — the kind of IP deal that typically signals a stable future for a comics company, not a messy ownership fight.

Archie has survived multiple near-death experiences over the decades — usually through creative reinvention (the Waid-era revivals, Afterlife with Archie, the CW’s Riverdale) more than financial stability. But private equity entanglements have a way of turning creative properties into collateral. If you care about Riverdale’s original residents continuing to exist as a creative concern rather than a licensing asset in receivership, this is worth keeping an eye on.

Source: The Beat

Animation — Labor

SAG-AFTRA Ratifies New 4-Year Deal With AI Provisions — DGA Contract Expires June 30

SAG-AFTRA members voted to ratify a new four-year contract that includes AI consent and compensation provisions — covering performer likeness rights, synthetic voice regulations, and required approval for AI-generated versions of union members’ performances. The ratification closes one major labor negotiation cycle while another is about to open: the Directors Guild of America’s current contract expires June 30, putting the DGA’s AI language directly on the table.

For the animation and visual storytelling community, the DGA negotiation is the one to watch. Directors, including storyboard artists covered under some DGA agreements, will be negotiating protections for work that AI tools are increasingly being positioned to replace or assist. The ADG’s public response to the Scorsese AI tool story this week is a preview of the arguments that are going to shape that conversation over the next several weeks.

Source: Variety

From the Community — Worth a Restack

Two recent posts from visual storytelling Substackers that are worth your time this week.

Animation Obsessive · 72,000 subscribers

Slow Stories Don’t Have to Be Boring

A deep historical look at pacing in animation — tracing the tension between Miyazaki’s deliberate, breath-taking approach and the Katzenberg-era pressure for non-stop entertainment. The piece makes a real argument: that slow storytelling builds the kind of emotional investment that action and spectacle never can, and that audiences actually want it when they’re offered it well. Essential reading if you work in story or storyboarding.

Published June 7, 2026 · 150 likes, 21 restacks

Creating Comics · K. Woodman-Maynard

ICE Out Comics: From Minneapolis to Germany

Woodman-Maynard reflects on how her diary comics practice — a simple set of constraints: four panels, one shade of blue, one hashtag — sparked an international movement. Nearly 300 cartoonists contributed. The work is now on exhibition at the Erlangen International Comics Salon in Germany, and she was part of a virtual panel at the festival this week. It’s a compelling case study in how craft constraints and community can make work that travels further than you expect.

Published June 7, 2026 · 71 likes, 21 restacks

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And that’s a wrap for this week. We’ll be back next Friday with more industry news.

Beyond The Process is a newsletter for working creatives in visual storytelling — storyboarding, animation, comics, illustration, and film pre-production.

You’re receiving this because you subscribed on Substack. If this was forwarded to you, you can subscribe below:

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Storyboarding · Animation · Comics · Pre-Production · Tools & Pipeline

Happy Friday, and welcome back to The Final Cut — your weekly roundup of what’s moving in the world of visual storytelling.

This week started with an ending. Marjane Satrapi — creator of Persepolis, the first woman ever nominated for a Best Animated Feature Oscar, and one of the most influential cartoonists of the past 30 years — died in Paris yesterday at 56. Her family said she “died of sadness” a little over a year after losing her husband. On a lighter note: the team behind Scavengers Reign just landed another Netflix order, which tells you everything about what that streamer will still greenlight when the work is genuinely singular. Plus, The Amazing Digital Circus hits theaters today for its actual series finale — real audiences, real cinema, for a show born entirely on YouTube. That still kind of blows my mind every time I think about it.

Grab a coffee. Let’s get into it.

Comics & Illustration

Marjane Satrapi, ‘Persepolis’ Creator and Co-Director, Dies at 56

Marjane Satrapi — the Iranian-French cartoonist, filmmaker, and co-director of the Oscar-nominated animated feature Persepolis — died in Paris on June 4, 2026. Her family confirmed she “died of sadness” a little over a year after the death of her husband, Swedish producer Mattias Ripa. She was 56.

Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel and its 2007 animated adaptation redrew the boundaries of what animation could do — the film shared the Jury Prize at Cannes, earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature (making her the first woman ever nominated in that category), and became one of this century’s most enduring works of personal filmmaking. For a generation of readers and animators, Persepolis was a first proof of concept: that a single life, rendered honestly in ink, could carry the weight of history.

Source: Cartoon Brew

Animation — Industry

Netflix Orders ‘Dealies’ — Another Swing From the Team Behind ‘Scavengers Reign’ and ‘Common Side Effects’

Netflix has ordered Dealies, a new adult animated workplace comedy from Joe Bennett and Ted Travelstead, produced through Green Street Pictures — the same studio behind the critically lauded Scavengers Reign and the recent Common Side Effects. The series follows the staff of DEALIES, a big-box retail store staffed by, among others, a savant salesman, a gentle gladiator, and a summoner of the divine.

The greenlight is a meaningful signal: Netflix is still willing to bet on bold, distinct adult animation when the creative team has earned the trust. Dealies is currently scheduled to premiere in 2027.

Source: Variety

Pre-Production

‘Warrior Cats’ Animated Series Lands A.C. Bradley as Showrunner and Rodrigo Blaas as Director

The long-gestating animated adaptation of the Warrior Cats fantasy novels has officially entered production, with Emmy-winning writer A.C. Bradley (What If…?, Ms. Marvel) as showrunner and Pixar veteran Rodrigo Blaas (Star Wars: Visions, animator on Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up) as director. The series is a co-production between Coolabi Group and Tencent Video, with animation handled by Original Force — the studio behind Ne Zha 2.

The first series adapts Warrior Cats: The Prophecies Begin and is targeting a 2028 debut. Blaas’ involvement is the headline here: a director who cut his teeth on Pixar’s golden run stepping into a franchise beloved by millions is exactly the kind of pedigree-meets-IP appointment that tends to produce something worth watching.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Animation — Industry

The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act Opens in Theaters Today — $7.5M in Presales, Episodes 8 and 9 Combined

The series finale of The Amazing Digital Circus is in theaters as of today (June 4–18), combining Episodes 8 and 9 into a feature-length theatrical event via Fathom Entertainment. The run surpassed $7.5M in U.S. presales across more than 2,000 screens, making it one of the largest theatrical events ever for a fully independent, YouTube-native animated series. Audiences will see Episode 9 fifteen days before it drops on YouTube and Netflix on June 19.

The show, created by Gooseworx and produced by Glitch Productions, has now crossed one billion online views since its 2023 debut. The theatrical run is a meaningful marker for where independent animation can go when it builds a real audience before asking for a distributor’s permission.

Source: Fathom Entertainment

Tools & Pipeline

Psyop Launches Independent Media Group, Connecting 20 Studios Across Visual Storytelling and IP Development

New York-based creative studio Psyop has launched Psyop Independent Media Group, a new collective connecting 20 independent studios across visual storytelling, entertainment, design, and IP development into a shared infrastructure for end-to-end productions. The network spans disciplines from live action and mixed media to animation, artist-authored AI pipelines, and autonomous character agents, with studios operating across New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, Berlin, London, Paris, São Paulo, and Melbourne.

Member studios include Sun Creature, CRCR, Le Cube, Meat Dept., Studio Showoff, and others. The model is designed to give independent studios a collective point of contact for larger productions while preserving their individual creative identities — which is an interesting structural answer to a problem a lot of mid-sized studios have been navigating since the post-pandemic commissioning slowdown.

Source: Animation World Network

Animation — Short Film

Anna Mantzaris Returns to Stop-Motion With ‘Please,’ Featuring Stellan Skarsgård — Premieres at Zagreb June 8

Anna Mantzaris, the stop-motion director behind Good Intentions, Enough, and the Emmy-winning Apple short Fuzzy Feelings, is back with a new short — Please, a comedy about love, neediness, and the desire to be wanted, co-produced by Passion Paris, Apparat Filmproduktion, and Miyu. The film features a starring voice performance from Stellan Skarsgård as Winston and will world-premiere at Animafest Zagreb in the Grand Competition on June 8.

Mantzaris is one of the sharpest voices in stop-motion short filmmaking, and a new film from her is always worth paying attention to. Please is also in this year’s Annecy lineup.

Source: Skwigly Animation Magazine | Cartoon Brew

From the Community — Worth a Restack

Three recent posts from visual storytelling Substackers that are worth your time this week.

Animation Obsessive · 72,000 subscribers

Three Follow-Ups

A Thursday deep-dive continuing research from three earlier 2026 pieces — going further on Miyazaki’s Sherlock Hound, the Xerox workflow that shaped 101 Dalmatians, and the character design of Mulan. The kind of animation history writing that only gets better when the team has had extra time to sit with the source material.

Published May 28, 2026 (paid post — free trial available)

Creating Comics · K. Woodman-Maynard

Nobody Said You Have to Draw People

A practical, liberating short piece for anyone who lets “I can’t draw people” stop them from making comics — Woodman-Maynard makes the case that you can stand in for yourself with inanimate objects and still tell a completely honest story. It’s a workshop insight that works whether you’re making diary comics or pitching a series.

Published June 1, 2026 · 79 likes, 9 restacks

The Habit of Art · Kelcey Ervick

Nature Journals for People Who Get Attacked by Geese, Can’t Draw Trees, and Generally Prefer to Be Indoors

Ervick makes the case for nature journaling in comic form — accessible, funny, and full of actual examples from someone who clearly has a complicated relationship with local wildlife. A good nudge toward getting off the screen and making something observational.

Published May 25, 2026 · 140 likes, 23 restacks

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And that’s a wrap for this week. We’ll be back next Friday with more industry news.

Beyond The Process is a newsletter for working creatives in visual storytelling — storyboarding, animation, comics, illustration, and film pre-production.

You’re receiving this because you subscribed on Substack. If this was forwarded to you, you can subscribe below:

Subscribe now

Storyboarding · Animation · Comics · Pre-Production · Tools & Pipeline

Happy Friday, and welcome back to The Final Cut — your weekly roundup of what’s moving in the world of visual storytelling.

A wild week. Netflix Animation’s production workers just ratified their first union contract with The Animation Guild — 89% in favor — and three days later Dark Horse Comics workers announced they’re unionizing too. Meanwhile Amazon dropped a GenAI animation slate that pulled Jorge Gutierrez in and a BuzzFeed-revived “Good Advice Cupcake” project that the show’s actual creator publicly torched as “an assault on artists everywhere.” That all happened in 72 hours.

Grab a coffee. Let’s get into it.

Industry — Animation (Labor)

Netflix Animation Production Workers Ratify Their First Union Contract With The Animation Guild

Feature production workers at Netflix Animation Studios voted 89% in favor of ratifying their first contract with IATSE Local 839 (The Animation Guild) on May 28. The agreement, hammered out over two weeks of bargaining this month, sets wage minimums, dismissal pay, and workplace protections for production workers — a group that’s been organizing across studios in waves since 2023. TAG framed it as foundational, and it now becomes the template every newer NAS-style unit will negotiate against.

Source: Animation World Network · May 28, 2026

Comics & Illustration (Labor)

Dark Horse Comics Workers Announce They’re Unionizing — On The Studio’s 40th Anniversary

Workers at Dark Horse Media went public on May 27 as Dark Horse Workers United (DHWU), asking interim CEO Jay Komas and Dark Horse leadership to voluntarily recognize the union by June 3. Their stated goals: job security, transparent decision-making, and a seat at the table on choices that affect creators and staff. This lands in the same week as the Netflix Animation ratification — and signals that visual storytelling labor organizing isn’t slowing down, it’s spreading from animation studios into traditional comics publishing.

Source: The Beat · May 27, 2026

Tools & Pipeline

Amazon Unveils Its First GenAI Animation Slate — Including A Jorge Gutierrez Series

Amazon MGM Studios and AWS announced a three-title slate built around generative AI production tools: Cupcake & Friends from BuzzFeed Studios, Love, Diana Music Hunters from former Nickelodeon exec Albie Hecht, and — most unexpected — Punky Duck from Book of Life and Maya and the Three filmmaker Jorge R. Gutierrez. Gutierrez clarified afterward that he plans to use AI cautiously with “artists driving tech, and not the other way around,” and noted the project hit greenlight two months after pitch. The slate marks Amazon’s first formal push to bring generative AI tools into commissioned animation pipelines.

Source: Cartoon Brew · May 27, 2026

Comics & Illustration

‘Good Advice Cupcake’ Creator Loryn Brantz Slams BuzzFeed’s AI Revival Of Her Character

One of the Amazon slate’s titles — Cupcake & Friends — revives “Cuppy,” the character Loryn Brantz created as Good Advice Cupcake while at BuzzFeed. Brantz, no longer at the company, posted that BuzzFeed is moving forward without her using generative AI and called it “an assault on artists everywhere.” BuzzFeed responded that Brantz had been invited to participate but declined due to her opposition to generative AI, comparing its use to Disney’s adoption of Xerox for inbetweening. The split — IP holder vs. original creator — is a preview of fights working creatives can expect when companies revive owned characters using AI without the people who designed them.

Source: Cartoon Brew · May 28, 2026

Industry — Film & TV

Louis Clichy’s Hand-Painted ‘Iron Boy’ Takes The Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize At Cannes

Cannes 2026 had its strongest animation showing in recent memory — Critics’ Week opened with In Waves, and the Marché du Film expanded its animation program to three days. When the prizes were called Saturday night, Louis Clichy’s Iron Boy, a hand-painted feature, won the Special Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard, and Lucas Acher’s hybrid student short Laser-Cat took La Cinef. Two wins out of a packed field, but the signal matters: Cannes programmers are actively giving animation slots that used to belong to live-action auteur work.

Source: Cartoon Brew · May 26, 2026

Tools & Pipeline

Black Eye Technologies Launches Black Eye 2.0 — A Dynamic Camera System For Unreal Engine

Black Eye 2.0 shipped May 28 — a major update to the dynamic camera system built exclusively for Unreal Engine. It targets a real production headache: cinematic and gameplay cameras both tend to break when scene layouts, animation, or timing change late in a project, forcing teams to rebuild camera logic from scratch. The company is founded by Adam Myhill and Gerald Orban, the team behind Cinemachine, and the new release adds modular tools for gameplay, cinematics, marketing content, virtual production, and in-engine storytelling. Worth a look for previs and virtual production teams already on Unreal.

Source: Animation World Network · May 28, 2026

Animation — Technique (Stop-Motion)

Netflix Drops Trailer For ‘I Am Frankelda’ — Mexico’s First Stop-Motion Feature

Netflix released a trailer and new images on May 28 for Arturo and Roy Ambriz’s I Am Frankelda (Soy Frankelda), Mexico’s first stop-motion feature, which streams June 12. The story follows a gifted 19th-century writer whose ignored dark tales come to life when she’s thrust into her own subconscious — a setup tailor-made for stop-motion’s tactile, slightly uncanny range. The film was Annie Award-nominated and represents a significant milestone for the Mexican animation industry’s growing presence in long-form stop-motion.

Source: Animation World Network · May 28, 2026

From the Community

A few Substack posts from the visual storytelling community worth a restack this week.

Animation Obsessive

The Look of ‘Ernest & Celestine’

A deep dive into how the watercolor look of Ernest & Celestine was built — the kind of visual breakdown that’s almost extinct now. If you do production design, board, or color, you’ll get something out of this.

By Animation Obsessive Staff · May 25, 2026

Animation Obsessive

Escaping Cartoons

On the rise of “animation” as a respectable term — and what gets lost when the medium tries too hard to leave “cartoons” behind. A useful conversation given how often the industry’s prestige push gets read as a rejection of where the craft came from.

By Animation Obsessive Staff · May 22, 2026

Animation Obsessive

Three Follow-Ups

This morning’s drop — more on Xerox, Sherlock Hound, and Chen-Yi Chang. Good companion to the Loryn Brantz / BuzzFeed AI story above, since the Xerox-as-precedent argument is being thrown around a lot right now.

By Animation Obsessive Staff · May 29, 2026

Leave a comment

And that’s a wrap for this week. We’ll be back next Friday with more industry news.

Beyond The Process is a newsletter for working creatives in visual storytelling — storyboarding, animation, comics, illustration, and film pre-production.

You’re receiving this because you subscribed on Substack. If this was forwarded to you, you can subscribe below:

Subscribe now

When a director keeps hiring the same storyboard artist over and over, it’s usually not because that artist draws the most gorgeous, hyper‑detailed frames on earth. It’s because that artist speaks the director’s language — shot by shot, frame by frame.

When I’m boarding, I treat shot sizes as my visual vocabulary. Picking an extreme wide shot versus an extreme close‑up isn’t just a “what looks cool?” decision; it’s a storytelling choice that ripples through every department. Costume, production design, camera, lighting, sound — they’re all reading your boards to figure out what the director actually wants.

In the video this article comes from, I walk through eight essential framing techniques every storyboard artist should have on speed dial. Here, I’m expanding that into something you can keep open next to you while you board your own sequences.

If you want to see the original breakdown while I talk through it, start here:
Watch the full video

The Core Idea: Shot Size Is Emotional, Not Just Technical

When I’m boarding a scene, I’m not just asking, “What do we see?” I’m really asking, “How do I want the audience to feel right now, in this exact beat?”

Each shot size:

• Communicates a different emotional distance.

• Tells the crew what actually matters in the frame.

• Guides the viewer’s eye and attention.

• Sets up, sustains, or releases tension.

Think of these eight shot sizes like eight different pencils in your kit. The more intentionally you use them, the more confidently you can translate a director’s ideas into a visual plan that everyone else can execute without guesswork.

Prefer a downloadable PDF? Get it here.

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1. Extreme Wide Shot (EWS): Scale and World‑Building

I kick off the video with the extreme wide shot around this point:
Watch this explanation

An extreme wide shot is about the world first, the character second (or not at all). Your subject might be a tiny speck in the frame, or completely invisible. What you’re really framing is the environment itself.

Think of those Lord of the Rings shots where the fellowship is a little line of figures crawling across enormous mountains — that’s an EWS doing exactly what it’s meant to do.

Use an EWS when you want to:

• Establish the scale of the world.

• Open a scene with a strong sense of place and tone.

• Show epic action — armies, crowds, giant battlefields.

• Make characters feel small in the grand scheme of things.

Emotionally, an EWS tends to create awe, or sometimes a feeling of insignificance. It’s perfect for adventure, fantasy, and any story where the environment is basically a character in its own right.

2. Establishing Shot: Function Over Size

I make a key distinction between extreme wides and establishing shots here:
Watch this distinction

An establishing shot isn’t defined by how wide it is. It’s defined by what it does. Its job is simple: tell the audience, “Here’s where we are now.”

That might be:

• A skyline with the Empire State Building.

• Big Ben to signal London.

• A futuristic city with flying cars.

• Hogwarts in winter — which gives you both location and season in one go.

Establishing shots can also tell us:

• Time of day (sunset, neon‑lit night, early‑morning street).

• Season (snow, autumn leaves, sweaty summer haze).

• Tone (bright, bustling street vs. creepy, deserted alley).

They can be locked off or moving. In the video, I reference a Lord of the Rings shot where the camera glides to reveal the location almost like an in‑camera wipe:
Watch the establishing shot examples

As a storyboard artist, I treat establishing shots like chapter headings. They prevent jarring, confusing location jumps and save you from having characters awkwardly announce where they are. You can just show it.

3. Wide Shot (Long Shot): Relationship to Environment

We nudge in a little closer around this point:
Watch the wide shot breakdown

A wide shot (or long shot) shows the character’s full body, but still leans heavily on the environment. It’s a real workhorse shot.

I use wide shots when I need to:

• Show characters moving through a space.

• Frame multiple characters in the same environment.

• Emphasize the relationship between character and location.

• Let the audience read blocking and geography clearly.

Classic use: characters entering an impressive new location. A wide shot lets us see both their reactions and what they’re reacting to, all in the same frame.

4. Full Shot: Performance and Body Language

The full shot is the next step toward the character:
Watch the full shot section

We still see the character from head to toe, but the emphasis shifts more toward their physical presence than the surroundings.

I reach for a full shot when:

• The body is doing most of the storytelling — pacing, swaggering, slumping.

• There’s dancing, fighting, or physical comedy.

• I want posture and movement to act as character clues.

The full shot is a nice middle ground: enough environment to understand context, but close enough that we start to connect with the character as an individual, not just a figure in a landscape.

5. Cowboy Shot: Action and Expression in One Frame

One of my favorite framings to teach is the cowboy shot, which I cover here:
Watch the cowboy shot explanation

Born in Westerns, this shot frames from mid‑thigh (sometimes knees) up. The original reason was purely practical: you could see both the gunslinger’s face and their hands hovering over the holster.

Today, I use cowboy shots any time I need:

• Facial expression and hand action in the same frame.

• To avoid constant cutting between full shots and close‑ups.

• Efficient storytelling — one shot doing double duty.

It’s a great compromise between a full shot and a medium shot, and it works in pretty much any genre, not just dusty towns and horses.

6. Medium Shot: The Dialogue Workhorse

I call the medium shot the bread and butter of filmmaking for a reason:
Watch the medium shot breakdown

Usually framed from the waist up, the medium shot is what we most often see in dialogue scenes.

Why directors (and storyboard artists) love it:

• It mirrors how we naturally see people when we talk to them.

• We can clearly read facial expressions.

• We still get body language — crossed arms, leaning in, stepping back.

• We keep enough of the environment to maintain context.

When I’m boarding a dialogue‑heavy scene, medium shots are the backbone. They’re intimate without feeling invasive, which makes them ideal for the bulk of dramatic exchanges.

7. Close‑Up: Emotion and Emphasis

Now we get personal. I dive into close‑ups here:
Watch the close-up section

A close‑up usually frames from the shoulders up, and it’s all about emotion and connection. We’re hardwired to read faces, so close‑ups plug straight into the audience’s empathy.

I use close‑ups for:

• Emotional peaks — confessions, realizations, fear, grief.

• Key reactions — the instant something truly “lands” for a character.

• Important details — hands exchanging an object, reaching for a weapon (in this context, that’s often called an insert shot).

In the video, I also talk about how you can:

• Use a wide aspect ratio to keep one character in sharp focus while another is blurred behind them.

• Frame more than one face in a close‑up to show multiple emotional responses at once without cutting.

Watch these close-up nuances

Close‑ups strip away distractions and tell the audience, “This right here is important. Pay attention.”

8. Extreme Close‑Up (ECU): Impact and Intensity

Finally, we hit the most intimate framing:
Watch the extreme close-up breakdown

An extreme close‑up isolates a tiny portion of the subject — eyes, a mouth, a needle, a key turning, a clue on a scrap of paper.

I treat ECUs like visual exclamation points.

They’re powerful when you want to:

• Build suspense (a needle entering skin, a trigger being squeezed).

• Highlight a crucial story detail the audience must remember.

• Turn something familiar into something almost abstract (skin as landscape, an eye as a whole world).

Because they’re so intense, I use them sparingly. If everything is an extreme close‑up, nothing feels special. Used with restraint, they go straight to the audience’s nervous system.

Combining Shot Sizes and Building Your Visual Toolkit

Near the end of the video, I talk about combining these core shot sizes into sub‑shots:
Watch this section on combinations

You’ll often hear a director ask for:

• A medium close‑up (between a medium and a close‑up).

• A wide medium or a tight medium, depending on the feel they’re chasing.

These hybrids are just fine‑tuned versions of the same eight foundational sizes. Once you understand the emotional and narrative purpose of each one, you can mix and match them with a lot more confidence.

For storyboard artists, that understanding is freeing. It’s like upgrading from a single 2B pencil to a full set. You’re no longer guessing which shot “might look cool”; you’re deliberately choosing the shot that best serves the story.

Practical Tips for Storyboard Artists

When I’m boarding, these are the principles I try to keep front and center:

• Start with function, not style.
  Ask what the audience needs to feel or understand in that moment, then pick the shot size that delivers that feeling or clarity.

• Use wide and establishing shots to orient.
  Don’t make your viewers play geography detective. Give them clear location and spatial context early on.

• Let performance dictate your distance.
  Big physical actions? Think full or wide. Subtle emotional shifts? Think close‑up or ECU.

• Reserve ECUs for maximum impact.
  Treat them like punctuation — powerful when used intentionally, noisy when you spam them.

• Think in sequences, not isolated frames.
  How does your extreme wide flow into your medium, then into your close‑up? The progression of shot sizes is part of the storytelling rhythm.

• Watch how you feel as you board.
  If a panel feels flat, ask yourself whether the shot size is too neutral for the moment you’re trying to convey.

Remember: strong visual storytelling isn’t just about what you show, but how you choose to show it. Nail these eight framing techniques, and you’ll become the kind of storyboard artist directors trust to carry their vision all the way from script to screen.

(BONUS) Cinematic Shot Framing CHEAT SHEET

Shot Framing Techniques

1. Extreme Wide Shot (EWS)

• Shows vast environment, subject may be tiny or not visible

• Establishes scale, location, and world size

• Creates sense of awe or insignificance

• Perfect for opening scenes and showing epic scale

2. Establishing Shot

• Sets location, time, and atmosphere

• Not size-dependent - about function rather than framing

• Efficiently communicates information visually

• Can be static or involve camera movement

3. Wide/Long Shot

• Shows full subjects in relation to surroundings

• Displays movement across space and multiple characters

• Provides context and spatial relationships

• Shows how characters fit into their environment

4. Full Shot

• Captures character’s full body (head to toe)

• Emphasizes physical presence, movement, and body language

• Balances environment context with character focus

• Ideal for showing physical actions and relationships

5. Cowboy Shot

• Frames character from mid-thigh or knees up

• Named after western films showing gunfighters

• Captures both face and hands in one frame

• Perfect middle ground showing emotion and action

• Economical storytelling - no need to cut between shots

6. Medium Shot

• Shows character from waist up

• Most common framing for dialogue scenes

• Balances facial expressions with body language

• Creates natural perspective similar to conversation

• Intimate without being intrusive

7. Close-Up (CU)

• Shows character from shoulders up

• Emphasizes emotion and creates connection

• Reveals micro-expressions and subtle emotions

• Used for emotional high points

• Can focus on important details (insert shots)

8. Extreme Close-Up (ECU)

• Shows portion of face or tiny details

• Creates intensity and commands attention

• Can make ordinary elements look extraordinary

• Use sparingly for maximum impact

• Acts as visual “exclamation point”

Practical Applications

Shot Selection Tips

• Each shot type serves specific storytelling purpose

• Combine shots to create subshots (e.g., medium close-up)

• Consider emotional impact when selecting shots

• Show information visually rather than telling through dialogue

• Use shot variety to maintain visual interest

Professional Applications

• Storyboard artists translate director’s vision through framing

• Shot selection guides every department on set

• Framing techniques create visual language for storytelling

• Effective shot choices enhance emotional impact

• Mastering these techniques makes artists valuable to productions

Storyboarding · Animation · Comics · Pre-Production · Tools & Pipeline

Happy Friday, and welcome back to The Final Cut — your weekly roundup of what’s moving in the world of visual storytelling.

Wild week. Marvel’s 30-year publishing chief just walked out the door on the same day the Eisner judges quietly yanked a nomination because someone snuck an AI-generated page into an anthology and didn’t tell anybody. Meanwhile a French animated love story between a surfer and a skateboarder became the first cartoon to ever open Critics’ Week at Cannes — and Netflix bought it on the spot. The week of the working artist striking back, in other words.

Grab a coffee. Let’s get into it.

Comics & Illustration

Dan Buckley Exits Marvel After 30 Years — Brad Winderbaum Takes Over Comics, TV, Animation & Franchise

Marvel announced on May 18 that longtime publisher Dan Buckley is leaving the company after a near-30-year run, with Marvel Studios executive Brad Winderbaum taking on an expanded role as Head of Marvel Television, Animation, Comics & Franchise. David Abdo joins from Disney as General Manager, Comics & Franchise, reporting to Winderbaum. Buckley will stay through mid-2027 to support the transition, but the signal is clear: the publishing arm now lives under the same roof as the studio and animation pipeline, with one creative head over all of it. For comics creators, this is the biggest leadership reshuffle at Marvel since the early 2000s.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Comics & Illustration

Eisner Awards Pull a 2026 Nomination After Anthology Hides a Page of AI Artwork

The Eisner judges rescinded the Best Anthology nomination for Stardust the Super Wizard after community sleuths revealed that one of its pages — by contributor Michael Todasco — was AI-generated, a detail never disclosed on the Zoop campaign or in the book itself. The editor has withdrawn the submission, the judges confirmed they “would not have voted for it” had they known, and Comic Book Yeti EIC Byron O’Neal has opened a petition to formally bar AI-assisted work from future Eisner consideration. The Awards committee says a new AI policy is now in development. A small story about one page, but a real line drawn in the comics industry’s sand.

Source: The Daily Cartoonist

Comics & Illustration

Sean Gordon Murphy Trades Gotham for the Open Road With Image’s The Last Driver

Sean Gordon Murphy — the Batman: White Knight writer-artist — is heading back to creator-owned territory with The Last Driver, an ongoing series at Image Comics launching August 19. Pitched as “Escape From New York meets Vanishing Point,” it’s a post-apocalyptic car chase about a driver named Clutch racing through a robotic GRID transport system to save his granddaughter. Murphy is writing and drawing, and the book ships in landscape format — an unusual choice that lets him stage the cinematic, side-scrolling chase sequences his pitch is built around. Variants come from Corin Howell, Matteo Scalera, and Ryan Ottley.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Tools & Pipeline

Comics Writer Torunn Grønbekk Quietly Launches NORN — a Browser-Based Scriptwriting Tool With No AI, No Cloud

Catwoman and Valkyrie writer Torunn Grønbekk pushed her in-house comic scriptwriting tool, NORN, into public alpha this week. It walks writers from outline to beats to pages with auto-formatting for issue scripts, graphic novels, and strips. The pitch the team makes up front: no cloud sync, no AI integrations — it runs entirely in your browser, built by what the site calls “skeptical nerds who value privacy.” After a week in which AI in comics dominated the headlines for all the wrong reasons, a working professional shipping a deliberately AI-free craft tool is a notable counter-move. Free alpha sign-up at nornstory.com.

Source: NORN Story / Comic Book Club

Animation — Industry

Phuong Mai Nguyen’s In Waves Becomes the First Animated Feature to Open Cannes Critics’ Week — Netflix Buys It Days Later

Phuong Mai Nguyen’s hand-drawn debut feature In Waves — adapted from AJ Dungo’s graphic novel about a skater and a surfer falling in love as illness sets in — opened Critics’ Week on May 14, the first time an animated film has held that slot in the sidebar’s 65-year history. Netflix moved on it almost immediately, acquiring worldwide rights outside France in one of the closing-week deals at the 2026 Marché du Film. For the working animation community, two things to clock: a 2D love story carrying a major Cannes sidebar, and a streamer paying real money for it without an existing IP attached.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter · Variety · TheWrap

Pre-Production

The Annecy Animation Showcase at Cannes Reveals Its Five Works-in-Progress — From Insect Stop-Motion to a Sci-Fi Cooking Saga

The Annecy Animation Showcase ran inside the new Cannes Animation umbrella from May 15–17, presenting five features still in production: Sofía Carrillo’s stop-motion Insectario, Oscar-nominated Alain Gagnol’s Dog My Cats!, Takayuki Hirao’s Wasted Chef, Masashi Kawamura’s Hidari, and Vergine Keaton’s Bataille. With Japan as the 2026 Country of Honor at the Marché, anime and stop-motion shared equal stage time — and producers walked away with co-production conversations on craft-driven features rather than studio tentpoles. A useful snapshot of what mid-stage international animation pre-production looks like in 2026.

Source: Variety

Comics & Illustration

DC Takes 15 of the Top 20 Graphic Novels in April — Marvel Posts a Goose Egg

ICv2’s Circana BookScan rundown for April 2026, published this week, shows DC controlling 15 of the top 20 graphic novel slots, Image taking the other five, and Marvel landing exactly zero. Absolute Batman Vol. 1 took the top spot, Absolute Batman Vol. 2 hit number two, and the Compact collection of The Dark Knight Returns rounded out the podium at three. Read against the Buckley/Winderbaum reshuffle this week, the trade chart is a useful data point: the bookstore market has fully recalibrated around DC’s Absolute and Compact imprints, and that’s the inheritance Marvel’s new leadership is walking into.

Source: ICv2 · Comic Book Club

From the Community

Three Substack posts worth a restack this week

The Serious Cartoon

Animation Obsessive · May 15, 2026

Animation Obsessive’s Thursday edition uses the new Animal Farm adaptation’s flop as a way to revisit how the genre has historically handled (and mishandled) political allegory in animation. Sharp craft history from a newsletter that consistently treats animation as a serious art form.

Cartooning in the Age of AI #41: AI-Assisted Spam Nearly Fooled Me

Alex Hallatt · May 14, 2026

Working cartoonist Alex Hallatt on a moment she almost fell for an AI-assisted scam aimed at illustrators — and what it taught her about the spam-meets-syndication market our work now lives in. A grounded, useful read for anyone selling drawings online.

The Storyboard That Had No Story

Thobey Campion · Lore Machine · May 13, 2026

A founder-side experiment with ChatGPT’s Image 2 model and ByteDance’s Seedance 2 video model — generating storyboards and then animating them in 15-second beats. Polarizing piece, worth reading for working storyboarders who want to know what the AI-first pipeline actually produces and where it fails.

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And that’s a wrap for this week. We’ll be back next Friday with more industry news.

Beyond The Process is a newsletter for working creatives in visual storytelling — storyboarding, animation, comics, illustration, and film pre-production.

You’re receiving this because you subscribed on Substack. If this was forwarded to you, you can subscribe below:

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Happy Friday, and welcome back to The Final Cut — your weekly roundup of what’s moving in the world of visual storytelling.

This week the industry has its dress shoes on. Cannes opened with the Marché du Film quietly making 2026 the year animation stops being a sidebar — there’s now a full “Cannes Animation” umbrella threaded across the whole market. 🙌

Meanwhile in Burbank, DC Studios and Warner Bros. Animation showed their cards for Annecy: a three-feature Batman: Knightfall world premiere, plus first looks at Tom King’s Mister Miracle and Jake Wyatt’s My Adventures with Green Lantern. And on the less-glamorous end of the spectrum, Mad Cave laid off senior editors the same week Newsarama’s last writer walked out the door — the comics journalism job market really is that fragile right now.

Grab a coffee. Let’s get into it.

Animation — Industry

DC Studios and Warner Bros. Animation Unveil Their Annecy 2026 Slate — Headlined by a Three-Feature Batman: Knightfall

Peter Safran and Sam Register are taking a heavy slate to Annecy in June. The headliner is the world premiere of Batman: Knightfall Part 1: Knightfall, the first installment of a three-feature animated adaptation of the 1993–1994 Bane storyline. Around it: first looks at Tom King and Mitch Gerads’ adult Mister Miracle, Jake Wyatt’s My Adventures with Green Lantern, Josie Campbell’s Starfire!, plus Creature Commandos, Batman: Caped Crusader, Cartoon Network’s new SuperMutant Magic Academy, and Hanna-Barbera Studios Europe’s Living the Dream and Keeping Up With The Joneses. For working storyboard artists and animation directors, this is the clearest signal yet that DC animation has stopped being a single-track output and is being structured as a tiered slate — adult-prestige, YA, and four-quadrant in parallel.

Sources: Variety · The Hollywood Reporter · Animation World Network · The Beat

Industry — Film & TV

Cannes Quietly Stops Treating Animation as a Sidebar — Launches a Full “Cannes Animation” Umbrella Across the 2026 Market

The 2026 Marché du Film (May 12–20) is the first edition under the new Cannes Animation banner — a structural change that pulls animation out of its single “Animation Day” silo and embeds it across the entire market: works-in-progress screenings, finished-film showcases, panels, workshops, networking events, and targeted co-production meetings. The centerpiece event is the Annecy Animation Showcase (May 17), with five post-production features including Sofía Carrillo’s stop-motion Insectario, Oscar-nominated Alain Gagnol’s Dog My Cats!, Takayuki Hirao’s Wasted Chef, dwarf studios’ samurai stop-motion Hidari, and Vergine Keaton’s Bataille. Japan is the Country of Honor. For pre-production teams hunting financing or co-production partners, this is the closest the European market has come to giving animation the same vertical that live-action features have had at Cannes for decades.

Sources: Marché du Film · Variety · Cineuropa

Comics & Illustration · Industry

Mad Cave Cuts Senior Editors the Same Week Newsarama’s Last Writer Walks Out

Two cuts in the same news cycle, both worth tracking. Mad Cave Studios laid off Senior Editor of Creator-Owned Projects James Emmett, Senior Editor Chas! Pangburn, and Senior Marketing Manager Maya Vee, with President Mark Irwin framing the cuts as “necessary to ensure the long-term health of the company.” Days later, Newsarama — one of the few unionized comics journalism outlets — effectively went silent after its last staff writer George Marston was laid off in the latest wave at Future plc. The combined picture is bleak: an indie publisher trimming editorial bench depth at the same moment one of the field’s longest-running journalism platforms loses the staff that covered it. For working comics writers and illustrators, this affects two practical things at once — fewer editors actively shepherding creator-owned projects, and fewer outlets covering the work once it ships.

Sources: Bleeding Cool (Mad Cave) · The Beat · Popverse (Newsarama)

Animation — Industry

Alberto Vázquez’s Goya-Winning Decorado Opens in U.S. Theaters Today

GKIDS is releasing Decorado — Alberto Vázquez’s 2026 Goya Award winner for Best Animated Feature — in U.S. theaters today, in both subtitled and English-dubbed versions. The Spanish-Portuguese co-production expands Vázquez’s earlier animated short of the same name into a feature-length black comedy about Mouse Arnold, a resident of the city of Anywhere, spiraling into the suspicion that everything around him is fake scenery. For animators working in 2D and stop-motion-influenced design, Vázquez’s anthropomorphic visual language and stripped-back palette is a useful counterweight to the dominant US TV-animation aesthetic — and a reminder that the festival circuit is still delivering features that don’t look like everything else on the shelf.

Sources: Comicon · Official Site · Wikipedia · Animation Scoop Interview

Animation — Industry

Devil May Cry Season 2 Drops All Eight Episodes on Netflix — Studio Mir Back at the Wheel

Adi Shankar’s Devil May Cry animated series returned to Netflix on May 12 with all eight Season 2 episodes released at once. South Korea’s Studio Mir — the team behind The Legend of Korra and The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf — is again handling animation, with Johnny Yong Bosch back as Dante, Robbie Daymond as Vergil, and Scout Taylor-Compton as Lady. Season 1 set a high bar for stylized action choreography in a Western adaptation of a Japanese property; for storyboard artists and action animators, Season 2 is worth studying as a case in how Studio Mir is sustaining that level of fight design across a longer episodic order. A third season has already been ordered.

Sources: Animation World Network · Animation Magazine · Wikipedia

Animation — Festival

Stuttgart ITFS 2026 Crowns ‘With Tapes and Toasts in the Car’ as Grand Prix Winner — and Auto-Qualifies It for the Oscars

The 33rd Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film wrapped May 10 with Kiana Naghshineh’s With Tapes and Toasts in the Car — a Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg graduation film — taking both the €10,000 Grand Prix and the €6,000 Audience Award, an unusual double that automatically qualifies the film for the Academy Awards. Other notable picks: Tanja Nuijten’s Sensual earned a Special Mention at the Lotte Reiniger Promotion Award, Switzerland’s Banana Soup won the Trickstar Nature Award, and Anna Böhm’s Emmi & Einschwein took Best German Screenplay for an Animated Feature. The festival drew 2,000 submissions and handed out 11 awards. For independent animators on the festival path, ITFS remains one of the cleaner shortcuts to Oscar eligibility for shorts.

Sources: Zippy Frames · Animation World Network · AMCRS

From the Community

Worth a restack — recent posts from other working creatives in visual storytelling.

An Artist for the Underdog · Animation Obsessive
A deep dive into Raoul Servais — the Belgian master who founded the European continent’s first animation school in Ghent in 1963, and whose ethical, underdog-side filmmaking still casts a long shadow over short-form animation. Useful context for anyone teaching or learning the craft. Published May 8, 2026

Storytelling in Illustrations · David Rickert
A short, sharp post passing along advice from cartoonist Roy Doty: characters need a setting to actually tell a story. Rickert breaks down how even a single drawing earns its narrative weight from environmental detail, not just figure work — the kind of reminder storyboard artists and illustrators don’t get often enough.

The Outsider Newsletter — May 13, 2026 · Drew Landry
Landry’s mid-week filmmaking dispatch is one of the better independent reads for indie directors and pre-production crews — covering grants, festival calls, and craft notes for filmmakers working outside the studio system. Published May 13, 2026

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And that’s a wrap for this week. We’ll be back next Friday with more industry news.

Beyond The Process is a newsletter for working creatives in visual storytelling — storyboarding, animation, comics, illustration, and film pre-production.

You’re receiving this because you subscribed on Substack. If this was forwarded to you, you can subscribe below:

Subscribe now

© 2026 Beyond The Process

By the time you read this CIRCLE OF SNAKES: RETURN of the CURSED should be out in the wild for you to enjoy. But how did I get here? What were the steps taken in my first attempt at a FRENCH BD format?

Because of the panic I was feeling about not advancing my concepting skills while embroiled in this comic project, I incorporated more 3D modelling into pre-production than I had originally planned. Here’s how that went…

Prefer a downloadable PDF? Get it here.

Buy PDF Here

When I initially submitted my roughs, Ramon Perez, the artist (AD?) who is looking over all the work had given me some notes. He suggested emphasizing the action a bit more on the page as some of the panels seemed to be too much of the same size and needed help giving more focus to the overall page. It’s an easy problem to wander into as one is trying to convey the action throughout with a large number of panels. French BDs don’t rely so heavily on that ONE PANEL emphasis that draws your eye toward the page like American comics. However, it’s important to not make the shots pedantic. My hope is I can take the best of both American and French comics and come up with something that still feels exciting.

Once I had the layouts approved, I realized a large portion of the action took place in a Viking public house. Because of the complexity of the scene, I really needed to understand Zal Kragson’s relationship to his environment as he was running away from the Tengu, a Japanese spirit messenger.

More importantly the 15 ft. tall Oni that was going to confront him needed to be able to fit within the space as well. Oh yeah, and there are stairs to a second-floor loft of rooms.

I didn’t have a lot of time to really do this design justice. If I had to do it over, I’d make the second-floor loft around the back and both sides of the public house. But for the shots required the angles chosen would have all the relevant and interesting things accounted for.

Because I wanted some level of accuracy in terms human scale, I pulled down some 3D human models from CG TRADER for free. This helped at least keep me honest so that when it came to rendering from various camera angles, I at least had a guide.

Checking and comparing angles from the thumbnails throughout the modeling process helped as well to feed the right scale for action as well as having good sight lines throughout.

The overhead candelabras were the detailing feature that made the space less generic. A lot of the other detailing (like weapons, decorations, etc.) I’d handle in the pencil stage. Below is a panel that I drew but because of the complexity of the shot I needed to get the right background angle setup. I did a screen grab because I didn’t have time to light the entire space.

Measuring the final panel size, I then took that screen grab, scaled it accordingly, and spotted blacks on what needed simplification. While this model did take me a LONG time to create, it was far easier to do this than to monkey my way through accurately drawing this. Some things aren’t worth the headache.

Some of the other preproduction included having to address the character design of TENGU, the messenger.

I really liked E and have no idea why I developed A. But I went ahead and threw some color on it for some unknown reason. I might have thought E was too Aztec in nature...I can’t really remember.

By the time I finished I couldn’t help but think he looked like YE OLDE CHICKEN from some Ren Faire. Not Japanese in mythic origin in the least! I abandoned this but it’s not to say that the work was wasted. When confronted on the page of what I wanted it to look like, I eventually found what the character needed to be.

If you can tell, this can be a battle with oneself throughout. Whether I was too lazy to turn on my computer to retrieve this concept sheet, or I found an easier silhouette that I came up with to make it look interesting, I still have to find happiness with the end result. Which I think I did. I think this character can only really be seen in like 3 panels anyway. Putting in the effort even for minor characters can make the story feel richer for it. Like that old actor quote:

“There are no small parts, just small actors.”

It’s something to always keep in mind.

Zal Kragson goes through a change that will mark him as cursed. I wanted to make the brand on his face easy to illustrate and yet interesting. This was no easy task and I’m not sure I landed on anything I like. This indecision is not helpful but in the end I’ll probably go with my first image which happened to be D. It’s bold relatively easy to remember and doesn’t slip too far into some of the more Maori designs I was seeing when I started adding curved elements.

As for the rest of preproduction, a lot happens on-the-fly when something is needed, drawn on scrap pieces of paper--working things out as I go, before committing to the final art. It’s not as neat and orderly as I’d like it, but it gets me through the rough patches and doesn’t make anything too precious.

Sometimes you can fall in love with a drawing, a brushstroke or what-not, but it doesn’t serve you as well as you’d like if you look at it for what it is. I ran into that a few times throughout this project. I’ve even done a few things that I’m still questioning but I’m not sure if they’re good or bad; they’re just different. I hope that’s good, but I’m sure once I see it in print, I’ll kick myself for not just doing what’s been done before. That’s the thing about rules of layout and design; they work for a reason. Mess with them at your own peril.

=s=

Happy Friday, and welcome back to The Final Cut — your weekly roundup of what’s moving in the world of visual storytelling.

A heavy week. The industry lost two giants in seven days — Gerry Conway, the writer who killed Gwen Stacy and built the Punisher out of moral ambiguity, and Ted Turner, the man who put a 24-hour cartoon channel on cable when no one thought there was an audience for it. Meanwhile, a small team of comics makers quietly launched Panels.store, a DRM-free alternative to the platform-lock-in we’ve all been complaining about for years. The contrast tells you something about where this medium is right now.

Grab a coffee. Let’s get into it.

The Week in Visual Storytelling

Storyboarding · Animation · Comics · Pre-Production · Tools & Pipeline

May 8, 2026

Tools & Pipeline · Comics & Illustration

Panels.store Launches a DRM-Free Comics Marketplace — Built by the Team Behind the Panels Reader

The team behind Panels, the iOS and Mac comic reader used by hundreds of thousands of readers, just opened Panels.store — a digital marketplace where readers can discover, buy, and download DRM-free comics that play instantly in the Panels app. The pitch is simple and unusual for this category: no platform lock-in, no per-publisher silos, files you actually own. For working comics makers, the more interesting layer is the distribution model — direct sales to readers without surrendering rights to a Comixology-style middleman. Worth tracking how this affects the indie publishing economics.

Sources: Panels.store · Product Hunt · Founder Interview (YouTube)

Comics & Illustration

Gerry Conway, Comics Writer Who Co-Created The Punisher and Killed Gwen Stacy, Dies at 73

Gerry Conway died April 26 at 73, of pancreatic cancer. He took over Amazing Spider-Man from Stan Lee at age 19 and wrote the run that contained the 1973 “Death of Gwen Stacy” — still arguably the single most consequential editorial decision in superhero comics, the moment the medium proved a main character’s love interest could actually die and stay dead. He co-created The Punisher with John Romita Sr., created Ms. Marvel (Carol Danvers), Firestorm, and Vixen, and helped shape Jason Todd’s Robin at DC. He was named to the 2026 Eisner Hall of Fame months before his death. For working comics writers and illustrators, Conway’s Spider-Man run is a foundational study in how a single story decision can permanently bend a character’s gravity for fifty years.

Sources: 5News · Variety · Marvel Tribute · Deadline

Industry — Animation & TV

Ted Turner, Founder of Cartoon Network, Dies at 87

Ted Turner died Wednesday, May 6, at his Avalon Plantation home in Lamont, Florida, at 87, after a long battle with Lewy body dementia. He’s remembered most often as the CNN founder, but for animators his more durable legacy is Cartoon Network — launched October 1, 1992, built on the Hanna-Barbera library Turner Broadcasting acquired in 1991. Without that bet, an entire generation of working animators wouldn’t have had a 24-hour pipeline to grow up on, and shows like Dexter’s Laboratory, The Powerpuff Girls, and Adventure Time wouldn’t have had a network willing to greenlight them. Turner also launched TBS, TNT, and Turner Classic Movies along the way.

Sources: CNN · ComicBook.com · Anime News Network

Animation — Industry

‘I, Chihuahua’ Locks Voice Cast — Iglesias, Luna, Beatriz, Perlman — and Heads to the Cannes Market

Jorge R. Gutierrez’s long-shelved Lucha Libre animated feature I, Chihuahua just confirmed its voice cast: Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias, Diego Luna, Stephanie Beatriz, and Ron Perlman. Rocket Science is launching world sales at the Cannes market next week, with Indian animation studio Assemblage handling production for UK partner Snafu Pictures. Gutierrez (Maya and the Three, The Book of Life) parted ways with original backer Netflix two years ago over creative differences — this is the project’s full revival as a creator-controlled independent. Worth watching as a case study in what happens after a streamer-funded animated feature goes back into the wild.

Sources: Deadline · Deadline (Background)

Industry — Film & TV

Cannes Opens Next Week With Generative AI Banned From the Palme d’Or

The 79th Festival de Cannes opens May 12, and for the first time, generative AI is formally ineligible for the Palme d’Or. Any film where generative AI serves as the “principal authoring tool” — script, visual generation, or principal performance synthesis — is excluded from Official Selection. Festival President Iris Knobloch summed up the position: “A film is not an assembly of data; it is a personal vision.” Technical AI tools (sound restoration, image cleanup, standard VFX) remain permitted; the ban targets AI as a creative originator, not as a production instrument. A separate World AI Film Festival ran in Cannes in late April for hybrid and AI-led work that doesn’t qualify. The line drawn here is going to shape how festivals worldwide distinguish AI-as-tool from AI-as-author over the next twelve months.

Sources: FSU News · AI Films · Wikipedia (Festival Overview)

Animation — Industry

‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Crosses 1 Billion Viewing Hours, Sets Up Another Theatrical Run

Netflix’s animated phenomenon KPop Demon Hunters just crossed 1 billion viewing hours globally and remains Netflix’s most-watched film of all time, with view counts now well past 500 million. The recent limited-release sing-along version sold out 1,300+ theatrical screenings across the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK before returning to streaming. Netflix is reportedly prepping another theatrical run as the title approaches its one-year anniversary. For animation studios still being told family animation only works as a four-quadrant theatrical investment, this is the counterargument — a streaming-first animated original that the audience pulled into theaters by sheer demand.

Sources: Netflix Tudum · The Hollywood Reporter

Tools & Pipeline · Pre-Production

Lightcraft’s ‘Spark Story’ Pitches Itself as the Google Docs of 3D Previs

Lightcraft Technology — co-founded by Emmy winner Eliot Mack and Avid founder Bill Warner — has been rolling out Spark Story, a browser-and-mobile previs tool that lets directors, DPs, and storyboard artists collaborate on 3D scenes in real time using scripts, Gaussian splats, imported USD assets, and physically correct camera/lens models. Cameras placed in the scene auto-generate shot list entries linked back to the script. The framing pitched at NAB and picked up by Creative Bloq this past month is aggressive: a “Google Docs of 3D” for the previs stage, designed to put real-time previs in front of teams that historically couldn’t justify the licensing or learning curve of Unreal-based pipelines. For working storyboard artists, the question worth asking is whether browser-native previs starts pulling some of what’s currently boarded in 2D into 3D earlier in the process.

Sources: Animation World Network · Creative Bloq · Newsshooter

From the Community

A few recent reads from other Substack writers in the visual storytelling space — worth a restack if any of these land for you.

An Artist for the Underdog — Animation Obsessive, by Animation Obsessive Staff (May 8, 2026)
A profile of Belgian animation master Raoul Servais — founder of Europe’s first animation school, the artist who pushed back when Pixar’s early Luxo Jr. tech demo arrived as a pure technique exercise and insisted “even the shortest of films should tell a story.” A useful piece for anyone thinking about why story-first thinking still beats craft-first thinking, even now.

Newsletter 5, 2026 — Why Cartooning Needs to Innovate — Cartoon Movement (May 4, 2026)
A field report from the International Journalism Festival on why editorial cartooning may be the least innovating profession in publishing — and why that’s actively hurting the form. Direct, pointed, and worth reading if you make work that lives next to the news.

[BIZ] Animation First 2026 Festival: How Animators & Composers Surprised Me About Making Comics — Charles Merritt Houghton (May 2026)
A working comics maker walks through what he learned at the Animation First 2026 festival in New York — including Chris Wedge’s argument that sound in animation isn’t subordinate to image but a parallel storytelling channel. Practical cross-pollination notes between animation and comics craft.

Leave a comment

And that’s a wrap for this week. We’ll be back next Friday with more industry news.

Beyond The Process is a newsletter for working creatives in visual storytelling — storyboarding, animation, comics, illustration, and film pre-production.

You’re receiving this because you subscribed on Substack. If this was forwarded to you, you can subscribe below:

Subscribe now

© 2026 Beyond The Process

Happy Friday, and welcome back to The Final Cut — your weekly roundup of what’s moving in the world of visual storytelling.

This week was loud. Annecy dropped its 2026 lineup with Brad Bird’s Ray Gunn headlining, along with Pixar’s Gatto, and a long-overdue 50th-anniversary tribute to Aardman — basically a stop-motion family reunion. On the anime front, Toei is restructuring One Piece’s production for the Elbaph Arc, while Hazbin Hotel earned its fifth and final season at Prime Video. Netflix came through with a slate refresh featuring LEGO One Piece and Bass X Machina, and THE LINE’s Warframe short had us reminiscing about 2000s AMV energy.

Grab a coffee. Let’s get into it.

The Week in Visual Storytelling

Storyboarding · Animation · Comics · Pre-Production · Tools & Pipeline

April 17, 2026

Animation — Industry

Annecy Unveils Its 2026 Lineup — Brad Bird, Pixar, and a 50-Year Salute to Aardman

The Annecy International Animation Film Festival rolled out its 2026 program this week, anchored by a Special Events slate that includes Brad Bird walking audiences through Ray Gunn, Enrico Casarosa previewing Pixar’s Gatto, Ricky Gervais hosting a masterclass on Netflix’s Alley Cats, and a Rick & Morty spinoff reveal. The headline tribute goes to Aardman, marking 50 years of Wallace, Gromit, Shaun, and stop-motion stubbornness. Travis Knight will also bring footage from his upcoming feature Wildwood. The festival runs June 21–27 in Annecy, France.

Sources: The Hollywood Reporter · Variety

Animation — Industry

Toei Restructures ‘One Piece’ Production for the Elbaph Arc

Toei Animation announced a significant production overhaul for One Piece coinciding with the start of the Elbaph Arc. Beginning this April, the long-running anime caps annual output at 26 episodes, split into two 13-episode cours with a planned three-month production hiatus between them. It’s a notable move away from the relentless weekly grind toward a season-based model — a structural shift other long-running anime productions are likely watching closely.

Source: Animation World Network

Animation — Industry

‘Hazbin Hotel’ Renewed for Fifth and Final Season at Prime Video

Prime Video confirmed at the show’s LVL UP Expo panel on April 25 that Hazbin Hotel will end with a fifth season. Creator Vivienne Medrano — who built the property from a 2019 YouTube pilot into a global animated series at SpindleHorse Toons — said the renewal lets the team finish on its own terms rather than getting cut short. For independent and creator-owned animators watching from the outside, the arc still matters: a self-funded indie pilot became a multi-season Prime Video original and gets to walk away from the table on its own schedule. Season 5 will roll out in 240+ countries; release date is TBA.

Sources: Variety · The Hollywood Reporter

Animation — Technique

THE LINE’s Warframe Short Channels 2000s AMV Energy — and It Worked

Creative Bloq dug into Jade Shadows: Constellations, the new Warframe animated short from arthouse studio THE LINE (the team behind Gorillaz’s The Mountain, the Hades 2 launch trailer, and Overwatch cinematics). The piece is built around a metalcore track from the band ERRA and leans hard into glitchy, saturated, deliberately nostalgic 2000s anime-music-video aesthetics — bedroom-editing energy weaponized at studio scale. A useful case study for any animator pitching a stylistically risky project: the “wrong-feeling” reference can be the whole point.

Source: Creative Bloq

Animation — Industry

Netflix Refreshes Its Animation Slate — LEGO One Piece, ‘Bass X Machina,’ and ‘Swapped’

Netflix posted a sweeping animation slate update on April 29, headlined by LEGO One Piece — a two-part 3D animated special premiering globally September 29 — and Bass X Machina, a new adult animated sci-fi Western debuting October 6. Also confirmed: Swapped, an animated feature directed by Nathan Greno (Tangled) with a voice cast led by Michael B. Jordan, Juno Temple, Tracy Morgan, and Cedric the Entertainer. Netflix continues to spread bets across kids, adult, and major-IP animation.

Source: About Netflix

Comics & Illustration

‘Anti-AI Crafting’ Tops Creative Bloq’s 2026 Illustration Trend Report

Creative Bloq’s late-April trend roundup names “Anti-AI Crafting” as the dominant force shaping illustration in 2026 — a deliberate move toward hand-drawn texture, wonky charm, and visible imperfection as a counterweight to AI’s hyper-polished output. The piece flags hybrid 2D/3D workflows (think Nimona, The Wild Robot) and “micro-animations” creeping into static illustration as adjacent currents. For working illustrators and storyboard artists, the practical upside is real: clients increasingly want work that visibly came from a human hand.

Source: Creative Bloq

From the Community

A few recent reads from other Substack writers in the visual storytelling space — worth a restack if any of these land for you.

Inside Satoshi Kon’s Last, Unfinished Movie — Animation Obsessive, by Animation Obsessive Staff (April 27, 2026)
A deep look at Dreaming Machine, the “road movie for robots” Kon was making when he died. Storyboards exist, 26 minutes of footage are colored and edited but unvoiced — and the piece walks through what the film was supposed to be. Required reading for anyone obsessed with the planning side of animation.

Alien Day 2026 Is Here! (& Stuff) — Ben Templesmith’s Substack (April 26, 2026)
Comics artist Ben Templesmith breaks down the gold-foil prints and painted originals he released for Alien Day, plus a candid look at his current commission queue. A useful peek at how a working illustrator turns a fandom event into actual income.

April 2026 in Comic Book Covers — The Indies — Substack, by CH Wilkins (April 2026)
A curated visual roundup of the strongest indie comic covers shipping in April. Good fuel if you’re an illustrator looking at what’s actually getting commissioned right now outside the Big Two.

And that’s a wrap for this week. We’ll be back next Friday with more industry news.

Beyond The Process is a newsletter for working creatives in visual storytelling — storyboarding, animation, comics, illustration, and film pre-production.

You’re receiving this because you subscribed on Substack. If this was forwarded to you, you can subscribe below:

Subscribe now

© 2026 Beyond The Process

I’ve been a metalhead since I was thirteen, but even at that time I was very specific in my tastes. I didn’t care much for the popular stuff, the accessible stuff that seemed to be on the tips of every burnouts tongue. I was hooked on CHEZ 106.1 out of Ottawa who had a 3 hour metal show every Friday night from 9-12pm called POWER CHORDS. They played a lot of stuff from Europe as well as a bunch of indie metal. At thirteen, when we’re all seeking our identity in the world, it felt right as rain.

Just as a brief example of what I was listening to back then:

• PILEDRIVER

• GRAVEDIGGER

• LOUDNESS

• MALICE

• EXCITER

• MANOWAR

• ACCEPT

• LEIGE LORD

• ZNOWHITE

• OVERKILL...etc.

The thing of it was, I’d record stuff on my boom box as the songs were introduced. In most cases I was trying to hit RECORD while trying to remember who the band was. In some cases, I got it completely wrong. For years, I had no interest in METALLICA until I realized that some of my favorite stuff was off their first two albums. Even to this day, I have a thin skin for anything past Kill ‘em All and Ride the Lightning.

When it came to more popular bands like DOKKEN or MOTLEY CRUE I was a casual listener. Though RATT seemed to get through to me for some reason. Anyway, there were A LOT of bands to seek out and that was part of the fun. Sending away for catalogs in the back of KERRANG! magazine to find even more obscure music and t-shirts was as good as it got when it came to finding a means of expression.

One band in particular I never could wrap my head around was IRON MAIDEN. I loved the album covers, thought EDDIE their mascot was great, and even liked “Run to the Hills”, but Bruce Dickinson’s vocals always felt like he was singing through a sock. Like it was this quiet powerful voice...if that was even possible.

A few years ago, I was contacted by Z2 Comics editor Rantz Hoseley to see if I wanted to work with Bruce Dickinson on an Iron Maiden series. The pay was really good for indie comics...hell even for mainstream comics! Compared to my Marvel rate in 2009 it wasn’t too far off.

BACKSTORY: Rantz contacting me years ago to work on COMIC BOOK TATTOO, a Tori Amos anthology project. He had been friends with her and pitched a book that would use songs from her catalogue that people would write and illustrate. What was even cooler is I asked if my wife could write the story…and he said sure! As the years went on Rantz ended up becoming the editor at a music-based publisher called Z2 Comics.

He’d remembered working with me and offered up an interesting BEETHOVEN: The Final Symphony anthology. A few years later…GWAR came out with a book that I contributed to. It seemed like they were happy with my work to keep contacting me.

Anyways…of course I jumped at the chance, because I knew a series with as big a name as BRUCE DICKINSON would get more eyeballs on my work. I even had a very good friend I was hoping would do covers as he was an IRON MAIDEN FREAK! Absolutely loves them!

The gig itself was perfect. I’d illustrate 20+ pages every 60 days for 3 years, until the launch of their latest album. But as we all know nothing is definite until the check clears--especially in comics.

A week before our initial meeting, Bruce decided to “go in a different” direction. The project may have been cancelled for all I knew. [NOTE: Actually, it wasn’t but instead went to one of my favorite long-haired heavy metal-loving British comic artists, STAZ JOHNSON…so really, we all won!]
However…Rantz, threw me a bone to illustrate an 11-page story for another band: TYPE O NEGATIVE.

I’d heard of TYPE O NEGATIVE but never really listened to their music. They were more of a goth/metal thing...not that I was against it. After CANDLEMASS I didn’t really seek out anything Doom Or Goth. I was more of a Power/Melodic metal kind of guy.

So, here’s the crazy thing, I had about 2 weeks to do 11 pages and really no idea how I was going to do it. I wanted it to have a looser rock’n’roll feel to it but wasn’t sure how I was going to get there. The above thumbnails took me 2 days to cook up in Photoshop. I didn’t even do my usual little thumbnails on the actual script. I created a hybrid, something that was polished enough in between thumbnail and rough...and then I blew them up to full size pages to ink!

I’d never really done this with any great success before. My thoughts were if I could get the underlying structures to look solid enough, I could build on it with ink...or pencil in stuff I didn’t feel was quite right.

I ended up inking it primarily with a quill which more or less kept it linear until I went back in to fill in blacks. I knew I wanted to rely on spotting blacks as much as I could because I’m not terribly crazy about the colorists they can afford for these projects. Taking a page from comic artist Alan Davis’ notebook, the more I spot black the less chance people have of messing up the art. Still...they do pick some rather horrible colors.

This was also a first for me to directly incorporate Zip-A-Tone effects in Photoshop. I’ve always liked the halftone gradations, and they really helped me out to create depth and shape things.

The story itself was incredibly simple and straight-forward. I was happy that it didn’t have a lot of buildings or structures to contend with. This is a factor in how fast one can accomplish the work.

The story was based on the cover of a song by Seals and Crofts. TYPE O NEGATIVE’s version was obviously darker and more haunting. I don’t have too many opportunities to illustrate horror material. In fact, I was looking through a bunch of flash fiction I wrote a few years back and realized it’s not a genre that I’ve embraced to any large degree. I’ve tried a few times and the most I come up with is something “disturbing” but not quite horror.

I guess that’s why it was interesting to work on a horror film over the summer. I wouldn’t have picked it for myself, nor would I have written it. Though I grew up with a lot of the Italian horror films and pretty much anything I could find, it was the “disturbing” stuff like HENRY: PORTRAIT OF SERIAL KILLER that haunted me most.

So, here’s the rub.

A lot of people I’ve shown these pages to seemed to really like them. Like them in a way that they like my sketchbooks, and my storyboards. They’re loose, as I had hoped, but my satisfaction in their execution left me feeling flat. I did my best to craft something that was attractive to my eye, but it never rises to what level of finish I prefer.

Sure, there’s a few moments here and there, but overall, I’m left puzzled. How is it some artist like JOSE LUIS GARCIZ-LOPEZ can have both “liveliness” and “solid draftsmanship” to their work? Guys like BILL SIENKIEWICZ can whip ink at the page and yet pull off stunning light and shadows.

Some of my earliest influences were CARLOS ESQUERRA and JUAN GIMENEZ whose works were always loose. But for some reason I could never find what satisfied me. I’ve often felt through the years I was stuck “interpreting” what comics or characters should look like and not ever finding my natural flow. Maybe it was because I felt I could never find work at the “BIG TWO” if I was drawing something of a “marketable” style.

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Nowadays the field is wide open. There’s really no need to be stuck in thinking that there’s a HOUSE STYLE or way of working. I need to get out of my own way. If nothing else this project has taught me a lot about what the audience wants. If they like this stuff and I don’t and proceed the way I have been, they won’t vote with their dollars.

On the flipside, if I give them what they like, I won’t be as happy creating the stuff. I won’t like the work that I produce. I’ll enjoy the process...but the finish will mean very little.

BUT...there is a way that does take time. Spending time with myself, in this style, regardless of what I draw, eventually I could find my groove. If I give it a chance, it may EVOLVE into something meaningful for me. And maybe that could be time well spent.

Especially if it means I can produce work faster. All in, these 11 pages took 8 days to produce--from start to finish. So, it can’t be all that bad, can it?

And to think if Rantz hadn’t been friends with Tori Amos all of this would never have happened. Who says LUCK isn’t a large part of this business?

=s=

P.S. If you haven’t seen our SUBSTACK LIVE w/ RANTZ check it out HERE!

Happy Friday — welcome back to The Final Cut.

Big week. This installment of The Final Cut is a bit weighted towards Animation, but that’s just how the week’s news panned out.

California just opened its film tax credit program to animation for the first time in the program’s history, and studios apparently had a lot of pent-up opinions about that — applications jumped 400% in the first window. Also, 9,000 creators showed up in Burbank this week for AfroAnimation Summit 6.0, which is either deeply inspiring or deeply exhausting depending on where you fall on the introvert spectrum.

In other, less positive news, Disney just axed nearly the entire Marvel visual development team — the artists who built the look of the MCU — and replaced them with a freelance contracting model. And separately, Warner Bros has made the decision to finally release the long awaited movie Coyote vs. ACME which was originally shelved in 2023 as a tax write off.

Grab a coffee. Let’s get into it.

The Week in Visual Storytelling

Storyboarding · Animation · Comics · Pre-Production · Tools & Pipeline

April 24, 2026

Animation — Industry

California Finally Opens the Tax Credit Door for Animation

For the first time in the history of California’s Film & Television Tax Credit Program, animated features are eligible — and three major productions are already in. Governor Newsom announced on April 23 that 38 film projects will receive a collective $193 million in credits, including inaugural animation recipients The Simpsons Movie 2 (20th Century Studios, $21.9M), a Phineas and Ferb feature (Disney), and an untitled DreamWorks Animation feature ($24.7M), each qualifying for a 35% refundable credit.

This matters beyond the specific titles. California animation studios have spent years watching productions leave the state for Georgia, Canada, and the UK in search of incentives. The expanded program — which now also covers animated TV series, competition shows, and short-form content — is a direct response to years of industry lobbying and a 2025 economic study documenting the scope of that exodus. Applications for the new program jumped more than 400% in its first window.

For working animators and visual storytellers based in California, this shift could mean more local hiring, more projects staying in the state, and more stability in a production landscape that’s been contracting since 2020.

Read more →

Industry — Film & TV

Disney Guts Marvel’s Visual Development Team in Sweeping 1,000-Person Layoff Wave

Disney announced approximately 1,000 layoffs across its divisions under new CEO Josh D’Amaro — and Marvel Studios took some of the sharpest cuts. Nearly the entire visual development team, the group responsible for designing the overall look and feel of the MCU, has been let go. The model shifts from full-time staff artists to per-project freelance contractors; some of those departing have been there for a decade or more. The studio maintains this wasn’t AI-driven, though individual artists have noted that AI visual generation is already being used internally on some projects. For working concept artists and visual development professionals, this is a significant structural shift in how the industry’s biggest player intends to operate going forward.

Source: Comics Beat

Animation — Industry

Cannes Directors’ Fortnight 2026 Selects Animated Films — Including Honami Yano’s Eri

The 2026 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight lineup includes several animated works, most notably Eri by Japanese animator Honami Yano. The hand-drawn short follows a Holstein cow who falls in love with another female in a world that only values cows who bear calves — a quiet, pastoral, and quietly devastating piece. Yano works entirely outside the commercial anime industry, and her selection signals a continuing appetite for independent animation at the highest levels of the film festival circuit. A broader set of animated shorts and one animated feature also appear in the full Fortnight program. Cannes runs May 13–23.

Source: Cartoon Contender

Animation — Industry

Coyote vs. Acme Gets Its First Trailer — the Shelved Looney Tunes Movie Is Actually Coming Out

In 2023, Warner Bros. shelved the completed Coyote vs. Acme as a tax write-off without ever releasing it. In 2025, Ketchup Entertainment acquired it. And this week, the first trailer dropped — the film opens theatrically August 28. The live-action/animation hybrid stars Will Forte as a personal injury lawyer helping Wile E. Coyote sue Acme Corp, with Looney Tunes cameos from Bugs, Daffy, and Tweety. Directed by Dave Green, it’s a rare Hollywood story about a completed film that was discarded, rescued, and actually getting its shot. Whether it holds up is another question, but just reaching theaters at this point is genuinely remarkable.

Source: Variety

Animation — Community

AfroAnimation Summit 6.0 Puts 9,000 Creators on the Same Floor

This week in Burbank, AfroAnimation Summit 6.0 is underway (April 23–26), drawing more than 9,000 artists, animators, technologists, and storytellers to what has become the largest four-day gathering in the US dedicated to non-traditional creators in animation, gaming, VFX, and emerging media. Studios present include Disney, Netflix, Marvel, DreamWorks, BBC, Nickelodeon, and Warner Bros. — not just as sponsors but actively recruiting.

Summit co-founder Keith White is presenting his lecture series “Margin to Mainstream: The Evolution of Black Animation,” a multimedia deep-dive covering Black animators from 1956 to the present. The series — which White has been touring at colleges including USCBAC, Academy, and SVA — examines pioneers whose contributions shaped the medium but rarely receive industry credit. The April 25 Creative Job Fair is a new addition this year, alongside an Artist Alley and a Graphic Design Interactive Lab.

If you’re in LA this week and haven’t found a way in, there’s still time. For everyone else, White’s documentary project documenting this history is also in development — one to watch.

Read more →

Animation — Storytelling

Aubrey Plaza’s Kevin Is the Adult Animated Comedy Worth Watching Right Now

Six years after Aubrey Plaza and her then-boyfriend Joe Wengert first started developing it, Kevin arrived on Prime Video on April 20 — and it’s the strangest, most interesting animated debut of the spring. The premise: when couple Dana (Plaza) and Dan (Mike Mitchell) break up, their rescue cat Kevin (Jason Schwartzman) decides to walk out on them. The show follows Kevin adjusting to life as a solo cat in a fictionalized New York City, voiced by Schwartzman in full neurotic mode.

What makes it worth attention as a storyteller is how the premise flips the default protagonist POV. The show’s emotional logic — the anxiety, grievance, and confused loyalty of the cat — is consistently held to Kevin’s perspective rather than the human drama playing out around him. The result is something genuinely odd: a show whose emotional stakes are small but felt, with an animation style that emphasizes posture and pacing over spectacle.

The supporting cast (Whoopi Goldberg, John Waters, Amy Sedaris, Aparna Nancherla) gives it texture without overwhelming the central thread. Eight episodes, all available now. The first two are worth at least half an hour of your time.

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Animation — Feature Film

Nathan Greno’s Swapped Drops a Trailer That Earns Its May 1 Spot

Skydance Animation’s third feature, Swapped, releases on Netflix on May 1 — and the official trailer that landed this month gives a cleaner picture of what director Nathan Greno (Tangled) has been building. A small woodland creature (Michael B. Jordan) and a majestic bird (Juno Temple) involuntarily trade bodies and have to cooperate to survive: a premise that’s been done, but the execution looks genuinely fresh. The character design work and the use of scale — the size difference between the two creatures, and what that means when reversed — is doing interesting visual storytelling work.

Greno has been talking in interviews about the team’s approach to naturalistic animal reference: studying real behavior and movement before making choices about what to abstract or amplify. There’s an Animation Magazine feature this week with exclusive art and behind-the-scenes detail from the team on that process — worth reading if you work in character animation or pre-production.

Produced by John Lasseter, Jennifer Magee Cook, David Ellison, and Dana Goldberg. Score by Siddhartha Khosla. Runtime 1h 42m, rated PG. One to watch on May 1.

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Comics & Illustration

Illustrate Ishiguro: The Folio Society’s 2026 Award Is Open

Entries are now open for the Folio Book Illustration Award 2026, and this year’s brief is genuinely compelling: create an original illustration based on the opening chapter of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. The Folio Society describes the opening as “quiet, unsettling and deeply human” — which is an accurate characterization, and also a useful constraint. The scene is set in the seemingly pastoral world of Hailsham, where memory, friendship, and something unnamed just beneath the surface intertwine.

The award is free to enter, open internationally to anyone aged 18 or over who hasn’t previously been commissioned by The Folio Society. The winner receives a £2,000 cash prize, a £500 Folio voucher, and — most significantly — their artwork featured in a future Folio edition. Five runners-up each receive a £500 voucher. The 2026 judging panel includes Folio editorial staff and 2025 winner Dawn Xintong Yang.

Deadline is May 26, 2026. If you illustrate, this is exactly the kind of brief that produces a portfolio piece worth keeping regardless of the result. Full submission details at foliosociety.com.

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From the Community

Recent posts from visual storytelling Substackers worth reading — and worth restacking.

The Forgotten Art of Visual Storytelling

A one-person newsletter from a production designer working across film, animation, and cross-media projects. If you work in pre-production, this is the kind of close, practical thinking about boards and visual narrative that’s hard to find in broader industry coverage.

Substack — Pesto Comics

Predicting Indie Comic Trends for 2026

A thoughtful breakdown of where the independent comics market is heading — audience shifts, distribution changes, and what creators need to think about to find readers in a noisier landscape.

Substack — How To Draw (RJR)

An Exercise in Visual Storytelling: Adapting Your Favorite Films to Comics

A practical exercise using film adaptation as a way to study visual language — how shot selection, panel rhythm, and composition choices translate (or don’t) from one medium to another. A useful framework for anyone who works across both.

“The Process Is the Art”

Animation Obsessive · April 19, 2026

This issue centers on animator Coleen Baik, who is animating on paper and reflects: “In the era of ‘let the machine do everything,’ I’m increasingly drawn to do more of the labor myself.” Also covers Glitch’s Amazing Digital Circus ticket presales and Honami Yano’s Cannes selection. One of the best animation newsletters running.

Newsletter 4, 2026

Cartoon Movement · April 2026

Cartoon Movement covers editorial cartooning and political illustration with genuine craft conversations — this issue includes work from Pedro X. Molina and discussion around their long-form DELIAH project. Essential reading if your work touches illustration, narrative art, or sequential storytelling.

“Animation First 2026 Festival: How Animators & Composers Surprised Me About Making Comics”

C. Merritt Houghton · April 2026

A firsthand account of the Animation First festival at Alliance Française in New York, with honest observations about the unexpected crossover between animation craft and comics making. Short, specific, and worth a read for anyone working across both disciplines.

And that’s a wrap for this week. We’ll be back next Friday with more industry news.

Beyond The Process is a newsletter for working creatives in visual storytelling — storyboarding, animation, comics, illustration, and film pre-production.

You’re receiving this because you subscribed on Substack. If this was forwarded to you, you can subscribe below:

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© 2026 Beyond The Process

I’ve had this story brewing for years. I probably wrote it around 2010 or so and it’s gone through a few iterations. But the core of the story hasn’t changed. Now I have an opportunity to get it published in an anthology from RAID! STUDIOS. I’m super-excited to share my process of how it’s coming together.

Prefer a downloadable PDF? Get it here.

Buy PDF Here

Originally the main character was named Hadar Kleg. Why? I have no idea. I was looking for a unique name at the time and landed on it as a placeholder. Conan is a perfect name because it starts off with a hard consonant. On a cover it’s easy to read. I wanted the same feeling even though Zal Kragson’s name would not be on the cover. Usually it’s fairly easy for me to come up with names I really like. But this one I’m still getting used to.

Admittedly it took awhile to land on Zal. I needed something both Middle Eastern sounding and Nordic. Because he’s a complex man with an even more complex past. I wanted a hapless character how bungles his way through life and has dumb-luck on his side. Zal is relatively easy to type...which is also a very important consideration. I just read a book by Toni Morrison Song of Solomon and she had names in there like Corinthians and Milkman Dead. I mean...jeez...save yourself some typing if you can.

These pages ended up being 16.5” x 20”. That’s a lot more real estate than I was used to, but the beauty of that was also evident in how much more freedom of arm movement for drawing big landscapes. Part of me was thinking about the final oversized format of French BDs which this RAID anthology was setting up to be.

But it also got me thinking about monthly comics. Back in the Golden and Silver Age of comics, pages were “twice up” instead of today’s standard “1.5 up”. When art is shrunk down it tightens up and looks better. Shaky lines become much less noticeable. That’s why it’s amazing to see those ARTIST EDITIONS of WALLY WOOD and see how loose everything was on his Weird Science books. Meanwhile, us artists are trying to match the tightness we see on the printed page which while it may be a fool’s errand, when that gets shrunk down, the life gets squeezed out of it.

Which is another great reason to collect original art if you can afford to.

Because so many artists are working exclusively digitally, there’s an infinite amount of zooming in that adds more detail to a page when working at 600dpi. Our eyes and hands can only handle so much detail in practical terms. But with the aid of brush stabilization people are getting amazing results. How does a traditional artist compete? My theory is to DRAW BIGGER.

I contacted Mitch Gerards (Sheriff of Babylon/Mister Miracle) and asked him what his schedule was in terms of delivering a book. I believe he does everything from pencils to colors. 8 weeks is what he told me. That’s nearly two months.

A lot of digital artists are toning their pages too, which adds time but doesn’t net them any more money. Many of these people live outside of the U.S. where our dollar goes further for them. If they’re getting 6-8 weeks to work on a book, that’s still a lot of work.

If a traditional artist was given the same amount of time and was working bigger, then maybe it would work to their advantage. It does take longer to pencil a page. But I also noticed it takes a long time to ink digitally. So maybe it all comes out in the wash so-to-speak. Though I have heard too that larger art pages may be harder to sell...but seriously...who wouldn’t want a bigger Batman page when everyone is working digitally these days? Look at the future...there’s going to be less comic art available and that means the older art is going up in price. Supply...and demand.

There’s no way to really test my theory other than to say, these pages took a long time to draw and even longer to ink. For ten pages...I think it took me almost two months of seven days a week. I wished I’d kept closer watch of my time.

The paper is a rough Strathmore 500 series 3-ply bristol. The sizing makes dry brush very easy. But that also means coverage takes awhile when it comes to filling in your black areas. It’s a great look and the meaty paper feels like you can really punish it and still come up with a clean line if needed.

If I remember correctly, each page took about a day and half to pencil. And a day and half to ink, depending on the detail. Because I was using 3D models and my main character and villain had a lot more detail I was constantly in need of checking reference for spatial relationships and size variations.

Coloring...well...I actually hired a flatter from the Philippines to help save me some time when I realized it was taking me a day to flat a page. Insane! For $10-15 you can get a flatter and save you some time. I gave him color guides to work with and he was fast. I’ll definitely be using him again.

Another lessoned learned was when I designed the ONI’s head mask, I designed it from one angle. It wreaked havoc on me when I had to draw it from the back or other weird angles. LESSON: Draw every design from at a minimum of three different angles until you can get a better understanding of how it works. And then draw it again and again to commit to memory.

Because of the time crunch I wasn’t able to do this.

It really did not help that I had scheduled a two week trip to visit my parents. I mean it helped me for my mental well-being as I had been working seven days a week since February. It was good to come back revitalized and not feel like I was doing drudge work. Still, I needed every moment I could get to hit the deadline but I couldn’t believe how slow these pages made me feel. I started having serious doubts about...well everything.

See, this was supposed to be a test run for my AUTUMN PEOPLE project in a lot of ways. It’s a 156 page graphic novel...and if it was taking me this long, I was looking at a VEEEEERY LONG schedule. I’m gonna be 53 this year...and if it takes seven years...egads! And there’s no guarantee that it’ll get published or that people will be interested in reading comics the same way. Anyway...I was really facing a great conundrum here.

Usually when I lay out a page it looks like this:

My initial goal is to lightly go in and get the FEELING down for each panel, making sure I have a nice balance of close-ups, medium shots, and long shots. With this many panels on the page it’s hard to create an overall page design with a focal point. But at the very least I do try to lead the eye from one panel to the next by design. In comics that’s what’s considered good storytelling. If you can also maintain good camera rules then you’re golden.

I’m not sure as many newer pencilers have this in the bag. There’s more of a cinematic push in a lot of books. A lot of hero-poses and the like. While tastes change, it’s still important to keep the art and craft alive. If you can push those boundaries, even better.

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Because I have more than six panels to a page I felt some restrictions. I used the bleed areas of the page to open up some panels and bring them to the edge of the printed page while being keenly aware to keep the relevant action and potential word balloons within the trim lines. In the below example the dotted area is the trim. Panels that are smaller than that are the safe area. So if you see the word SMASH you know it’s just within the safe zone.

Panel sizing and deleting some of the borders was a way to create an openness and style that I’d been experimenting back when I started working on BRAUN. I like it and hope that I can continue to push things even further. It always depends on the story.

Well that’s it for now, thanks for reading, and thanks for being my patron. I really appreciate sharing with you all. I have some really interesting projects coming up that I can’t wait to show. It should be fun.

=s=

Happy Friday, and welcome back to The Final Cut — your weekly roundup of what’s actually moving in the world of visual storytelling.

This week: Adobe dropped a massive NAB update — a brand-new color grading interface built into Premiere, a smarter way to work with Frame.io, and an AI-powered matte tool in After Effects that’s genuinely interesting for compositors. And in the comics world, Oni Press and Matt Kindt just unveiled a “100% Human-Made” certification logo — open-source, Creative Commons licensed, and landing at an interesting moment in the AI conversation.

Grab your favorite beverage and let’s get into it.

The Week in Visual Storytelling

Storyboarding · Animation · Comics · Pre-Production · Tools & Pipeline

April 17, 2026

Tools & Pipeline

Adobe Brings Color Grading Into Premiere, Launches Frame.io Drive, and Updates After Effects at NAB 2026

Adobe’s NAB 2026 announcements landed on April 15 with significant workflow implications. The headliner is Color Mode in Premiere Pro — a new color grading interface built directly into the editing timeline, developed over three years with input from hundreds of working editors and now in public beta. The idea: editors can now do primary color work without round-tripping to Lumetri or DaVinci.

Also shipping: Frame.io Drive, a desktop app that lets you mount Frame.io project files locally in Finder or Explorer and work with them as though they’re on your own drive. On the After Effects side, version 26.2 introduces an AI-powered Object Matte — click an object in a single frame, and AE tracks and isolates it automatically, no painting required. Kling 3.0 AI video generation also joins the Firefly Video Editor.

Source: No Film School | Adobe Blog

Animation — Technique

Studio 4°C’s ChaO Opens in U.S. Theaters — A 7-Year Passion Project That Won Annecy’s Jury Award

ChaO, the wildly inventive romantic comedy from Studio 4°C and director Yasuhiro Aoki, hit North American theaters via GKIDS on April 10 after spending seven years in production. Set in a futuristic world where humans and mermaids coexist, the film follows a mild-mannered office worker suddenly proposed to by a mermaid princess — and builds something unexpectedly moving out of the absurdity. It took the Jury Award at the 2025 Annecy International Film Festival, where it was one of the most talked-about features of the competition.

For animation professionals, the film is worth watching for craft alone. Studio 4°C has always operated at the edge of what hand-drawn and mixed-technique animation can do — and a seven-year production window shows. If you’ve been following the Annecy 2026 selections announced this week, ChaO‘s journey from last year’s Jury Award to wide release is a useful reminder of what the festival pipeline can actually do for a film.

Source: GKIDS | Aftermath

Comics & Illustration

Oni Press and Matt Kindt Launch a “100% Human-Made” Certification Logo

Oni Press and cartoonist Matt Kindt unveiled a “100% Human-Made” seal this week, designed to certify that a comic or creative work was made without generative AI tools. The logo debuted on April 9 and will first appear on Kindt’s upcoming series MIND MGMT: New & Improved (June 24). Kindt released it under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license, meaning any creator or publisher can use or adapt it — with attribution.

The initiative lands at a charged moment in comics: a BBC News piece from March noted at least eight separate efforts to establish credible “AI-free” certifications, and the conversation has only intensified. The Creative Commons licensing makes this particular effort notably open — the logo belongs to no one publisher and is available to the whole industry.

Source: Comics Beat | Comic Book Club Live

Animation — Industry

Netflix Animation Opens Its New 110,600 Sq. Ft. Vancouver Studio

Netflix Animation Studios officially opened its purpose-built Vancouver facility on April 8, marking a significant expansion of North American animation infrastructure. The 110,600-square-foot studio sits in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood at the new M4 building and currently employs more than 450 people. It’s designed as a full-cycle animated feature hub — development through post — and will eventually integrate Netflix’s in-house VFX division Eyeline on the same floor plan.

The studio’s first major project is Steps, a reimagining of the story of Cinderella’s sisters. The Vancouver opening follows Netflix’s expanding footprint in Canadian animation and reflects a broader industry shift toward building owned, permanent production infrastructure rather than relying entirely on outsourced studio relationships. Construction alone contributed over $50M to British Columbia’s GDP.

Source: Animation World Network | Animation Magazine

Animation — Industry

Annecy 2026 Reveals First Screening Events for Its 50th Anniversary Edition

The Annecy International Animated Film Festival (June 21–27) is ramping up its 50th anniversary programming announcements. The festival has confirmed 141 short films from 43 countries in competition, 66 TV and Commissioned Films from 32 countries, and is now rolling out its first confirmed special screening events. Immersive works selections are expected mid-April; the feature film lineup will be announced at the end of April.

For animators, the Annecy selections remain one of the clearest windows into what the global animation community is actually making — particularly at the short film and experimental level. The 50th edition is also the first year the festival operates out of the new Cité internationale du cinéma d’animation venue.

Source: Animation Magazine | AWN

Tools & Pipeline

DaVinci Resolve 21 Arrives at NAB with AI Search, AI Color, and a New Photo Page

Blackmagic Design announced DaVinci Resolve 21 at NAB 2026, bringing eight new AI-powered tools to the professional editing and color grading platform. The highlights include IntelliSearch (which lets you search footage by face, object, or scene description), CineFocus (AI-driven depth of field control for post), an AI Speech Generator, and an AI Face Age Transformer. A new Photo page also debuts, extending Resolve’s reach into still photography work.

Resolve 21 is available as a free public beta, which continues to be a significant advantage for independent filmmakers and small studios evaluating pipeline options. The AI tools arrive on the same week as Adobe’s NAB announcements, making this one of the more tool-dense news weeks for post-production creatives in recent memory.

Source: No Film School

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From the Community

Recent posts from visual storytelling Substackers worth reading — and worth restacking.

Devin’s Chicago Comics Book Club Digest — Devin Whitlock

Comics NEWS Digest — April 10, 2026

Devin’s weekly round-up is one of the more reliable comics news aggregators on Substack. This week’s edition covers the 2026 Herblock Prize going to Jack Ohman, Emily Flake winning the Thurber Prize for American Humor in Cartoon Art, the Oni Press “100% Human-Made” logo, and GlobalComix’s $13M raise and INKR acquisition — plus a handful of creator announcements worth knowing about.

Published April 10, 2026

Animation Obsessive

Stepping Inside UPA

The Animation Obsessive team digs into the revival of Inside UPA, the book covering the legendary mid-century animation studio that defined a generation of character design and graphic economy. If you care about where modern visual shorthand in animation actually came from, this is the kind of deep history that makes the newsletter genuinely essential reading.

Published April 13, 2026

Devin’s Chicago Comics Book Club Digest — Devin Whitlock

Witch Hat Atelier, Volume 1 — March/April 2026 Book Club Edition

Devin’s book club digs into the first volume of Kamome Shirahama’s gorgeous manga Witch Hat Atelier — a series celebrated for its intricate linework and exceptionally thoughtful visual storytelling. Good reading for anyone who wants to think seriously about how illustration and sequential art can carry narrative weight through craft alone, independent of dialogue.

And that’s a wrap for this week. We’ll be back next Friday with more industry news.

Beyond The Process is a newsletter for working creatives in visual storytelling — storyboarding, animation, comics, illustration, and film pre-production.

You’re receiving this because you subscribed on Substack. If this was forwarded to you, you can subscribe below:

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© 2026 Beyond The Process

Happy Friday, and welcome back to The Final Cut— your weekly roundup of what’s moving in the world of visual storytelling.

Big week. Brad Bird just dropped the first-look images for Ray Gunn (see above image)— his sci-fi noir animated feature that’s been 30 years in the making — and the cast alone is worth pausing over. Also this weekend: a festival in Nashville that somehow assembled Andreas Deja, Aaron Blaise, and John Pomeroy under one roof.

One last note before you grab a coffee and get into it. Shane and I are well aware how polarizing even the mention of AI can be, especially in a newsletter designed for artists. That said, we feel completely ignoring it may not be the best approach, as some may want to keep tabs on the advances and how it may affect their careers.

A couple of articles in the Tools & Pipeline section mention AI this week. We would be interested in knowing exactly how our readers feel about this moving forward, so please sound off in the comments section (but please keep it civil).

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The Week in Visual Storytelling

Storyboarding · Animation · Comics · Pre-Production · Tools & Pipeline

April 10, 2026

Animation — Events

Animation Y’all Expo Returns to Nashville This Weekend with Disney Legend Lineup

The second annual Animation Y’all Expo runs April 10–12 at Lipscomb University in Nashville, bringing together an impressive roster of working and legendary animators — including Andreas Deja, Aaron Blaise, John Pomeroy, and Stephen Silver. Masterclasses cover animal drawing, world building for story, and a behind-the-scenes look at Deja’s film Mushka. The expo features nearly 90 exhibitors and sponsors including DreamWorks Animation, Walt Disney Animation Studios, and Skydance Animation. April 11 has been officially declared “Animation Day” in Tennessee, timed to coincide with the event.

Source: Animation World Network

Animation — Industry

TAAFI 2026 Wraps This Weekend at TIFF Lightbox with 100+ Films and Industry Conference

The Toronto Animation Arts Festival International runs through April 12 at the TIFF Lightbox, presenting over 100 animated films from around the world alongside the Toronto Animation Industry Conference (TAIC). The lineup includes speakers Bobby Chiu, Suzanne Wilson, Mark Edwards, and Nic Cabana of Claynosaurz. Programming includes Perfect Pitch, Speed Pitching, portfolio reviews, and panels on navigating the current industry. For those in the Toronto area, the conference programming runs through Sunday.

Source: Animation World Network

Animation — Feature Film

Netflix Drops First-Look Images for Brad Bird’s ‘Ray Gunn’ — and the Cast Is Exceptional

Netflix and Skydance Animation have revealed the first official images and voice cast for Ray Gunn, the long-in-development sci-fi noir animated feature from two-time Oscar winner Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille, The Iron Giant). Sam Rockwell voices private eye Raymond Gunn, Scarlett Johansson voices Venus Nova, and Tom Waits voices Eyera — set against the backdrop of Metropia, a sprawling city imagined from the vantage point of 1939. Bird has said the project has been in his mind for over 30 years, and the first-look visuals already carry that sense of long-gestating vision. Produced by Skydance and John Lasseter.

Source: Animation World Network

Comics & Illustration

Graphic Novel Sales Jump 28.5% in Q1 2026 as Market Rebounds

According to Circana BookScan data reported by Comics Beat, graphic novel sales climbed 28.5% in the quarter ending March 28, 2026 — a significant rebound following last year’s disruptions from the Diamond Comic Distributors collapse. The surge appears driven largely by DC’s Absolute Batman collections and continued dominance from manga titles including Jujutsu Kaisen. The growth comes even as total print book unit sales fell 3.1% for the same period, making the graphic novel category a genuine bright spot in publishing right now.

Source: Comics Beat

Tools & Pipeline

iQIYI Launches Nadou Pro — An AI Agent That Handles Storyboarding Through Post

Chinese streaming giant iQIYI launched Nadou Pro on April 3rd, positioning it as China’s first AI agent built specifically for end-to-end professional film and TV production. The platform combines proprietary multimodal models with third-party tools to support script development, storyboarding, art direction, and visual effects inside a single workflow — no platform switching required. It’s already being used on 16 productions across genres, and was credited by director Fangzhao Zhuang for achieving the visual look of Celestial Quest. The platform was co-launched with Academy Award-winning cinematographer Peter Pau, whose AI Theater initiative gave directors early access.

Source: PR Newswire / Morningstar

Tools & Pipeline

Autodesk Rolls Out New AI Features for Maya and Flow Studio — Free Webinars Next Week

Autodesk has released new AI-powered features across its animation tools, with two standouts worth knowing about. MotionMaker in Maya now includes a horse motion archetype that uses AI to generate realistic base motion in seconds — a practical time-saver for animators working with quadrupeds. Wonder 3D, available in Autodesk Flow Studio, lets artists generate 3D characters or objects from text prompts or reference images, designed for previs and concept development. Autodesk is hosting free live webinars on what’s new in Maya on April 15 and 16 at 10:00 AM PT.

Source: Autodesk News

From the Community

Fellow Substackers worth your time this week. If their work resonates, give them a restack.

BIZ — Charles Houghton

Animation First 2026 Festival: How Animators & Composers Surprised Me About Making Comics

Houghton reports from the Animation First 2026 festival and digs into an unexpected connection — how animators and composers approach narrative rhythm in ways that challenge the way he thinks about comics. Cross-disciplinary thinking at its best.

How to Draw ____ — RJR

An Exercise in Visual Storytelling: Adapting Your Favorite Films to Comics

RJR walks through the process of taking a beloved film and translating it to the comics page — exploring how panel composition, pacing, and visual language shift when you move from motion to static frames. A genuinely useful exercise for anyone who works across both mediums.

Cartoon Movement

Newsletter 2, 2026 — Cartoons, Democracy, and the DELIAH Project

Cartoon Movement shares updates on DELIAH, a European research initiative exploring the relationship between humor, cartoons, and democratic literacy. It’s an interesting lens on what editorial and political cartooning can actually do in the world.

And that’s a wrap for this week. We’ll be back next Friday with more industry news.

Beyond The Process is a Substack for working creatives in visual storytelling — storyboarding, animation, comics, illustration, and film pre-production.

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