Goodbye 2025...and HELLO!

What's Ahead for 2026?

What a year for growth. We broke 10,000 subscribers on YouTube and our Substack keeps adding more daily. For this we want to thank you for joining our community.

Like any project there are a lot of missteps and successes along the way when it comes to building things from the ground-up. We’ve had more than our share and yet, there is still more to understand as we grow by leaps and bounds. Your feedback has always been invaluable to our mission: Bring people consistent, high-quality information so that they can pursue their own well-balanced and informed career.

It’s what we strove to attain for ourselves. By sharing the stories of other professionals, you can get a more well-rounded perspective to know that there isn’t only one way to succeed in art.

Our newest addition of the STORYBOARD ROUNDTABLE has helped in that effort and will continue to grow in the next year. We’ve already made plans for an all-female storyboard episode that we are extremely excited to share. Also, if you have suggestions for TOPICS TO COVER for this or any future episodes, PLEASE, RESPOND DOWN BELOW! 👇

Our interview series LONG STORY SHORT has been another amazing journey for us. We’ve learned so much by doing these and have heard such great feedback from all of you. Though, in the coming year, we are looking to scale back on this feature as it’s proving to be more and more difficult to reliably schedule interviews. Creatives are busy, we get that, and no amount of hounding is worth fueling bad relationships. From the beginning we’ve wanted it to always be fun and informative for both parties. So, moving forward, we may have a few stragglers that pop in for a quick tête-à-tête.

Speaking of fun…

…early next year we’ll both be in Italy together, gorging our eyeballs on the sights and sounds of the Chianti region. Who knows…we might even film an episode of BEYOND THE PROCESS for our YouTube channel!

With that in mind we also wanted to share what next year will look like. Our goal from the beginning was to create digital products that will help you to accomplish your work in a more timely, efficient manner. Even with our stalwart time management the level of focus required to do everything is becoming a sobering reality. Work comes in, and we have to figure out what to give up, and it’s usually the development of our products. That being said, we’re going to streamline some of the creation of articles, videos and the like to allow us the time to make cool stuff!

Lance has several things in development for storyboarders that we can’t wait for you to see, both digital and something real world you’ll be able to hold in your hands.

Shane has a fully written manuscript for storytellers that needs to be illustrated and designed for publication.

The opportunity cost will be two-fold if we can turn these projects into real things for our growing community.

Lastly, we are well aware of subscription fatigue. Long term commitment can be scary. So many of us have dozens of subscriptions that we can’t keep track of them. As much as we’d love all of you to become a paid subscriber to access all of our content, we realize that’s just not feasible for many who are on a tight budget.

That’s why, starting immediately, we’re now making ALL of our paid content available for a very small, one-time purchase. Ranging from $1.50 - $3.00, you can now download and read only the articles that you find most attractive to you, and with no ongoing subscription. All of the paid articles have recently been updated to include a “Buy Now” button just above the paywall line. To access them, you can do so by clicking HERE.

Unfortunately, none of our long form paywalled videos are available for purchase, so you’ll still need to be a paid subscriber to enjoy them.

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT:
The week after CHRISTMAS on December 29th at 9am PST we’ll be doing a LIVE SUBSTACK engagement where we invite YOU our Subscribers to join us. As much as we’ve enjoyed interacting with you all through Substack and other platforms, like our YouTube channel, we REALLY are looking forward to actually meeting and speaking with you in person. We believe the Substack Live platform will also allow us to bring in one guest at a time to join us on stage should any of you be willing (and brave ;-)
It should be fun.

What you will get from us is at least one BTP video a month, articles still focusing on creativity, storytelling, and career development. We believe it’s enough for you to stick around for the pay off by year’s end. And who knows what surprises will come up along the way.

Oh yeah, we can’t wait to tell you about our involvement with the Lucas Museum of Narrative Storytelling in the upcoming year…so stay tuned!

As always, thanks for joining us and we both wish you a Happy and prosperous New Year.

Warmest Regards,
Lance & Shane