🔑 Animation ANTHOLOGY Era ✏
Giant monsters, laser swords, and weird alien shorts are on the way.
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👋🏻 YO, YO, YO!
Are we turning a corner when it comes to Animation jobs finally? It feels like more and more shows are lining up to start production, with greenlights and job hirings showing up on the socials. Features, series, and indie productions are all starting to spark to life.
How are the motion designers feeling out there right now? 📈 or 📉?
📃 What’s inside this edition of KEYS & CURVES?
Animation: Netflix saves a hand-animated film.
Motion Design: mixed media + styleframe superstars.
Tools + Training: Cascadeur drops a new release.
Spotlight: Yond Studios
ANIMATION STATION
More 2D feature animation on the way.
Genndy Tartakovsky’s completed feature FIXED is being saved from a sad fate by Netflix and will debut August 13th – be ready for some raunchy 2D animated dog jokes to start streaming soon.
Glitch Productions debuted the pilot of their hope-to-be-greenlit-soon new series GASLIGHT DISTRICT, and it hit five million views in less than a day on Youtube.
Also? It looks like April is going to be Animated Anthology Announcement month, as we’re getting a new PREDATOR, two new STAR WARS, and LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS anthology seasons very soon.
More animation finds:
FLOW made more than the live-action SNOW WHITE remake in China
The LINE collabs with RIOT GAMES again
Fun little tank animation from Pablo Cuello
MOTION MADNESS
Explaining Motion
What’s the one big challenge in the 2025 for Keys & Curves readers?
Mindblowin environment exploration made in Blender by @CG_kaizoe
Mindblowin but entirely different mixed media style animation by sirdushon
Last week’s Spotlight Artist Justin Harder dropped some classy styleframes.
And Yeti Pictures shared some retina popping frames + them in motion!
TOOL TIME
Out with the old, in with the… IN-BETWEENING?
We’re only going to talk about one tool this week, as it’s sort of blown our animating mind. We’ve been using CASCADEUR a while back and we’ve been wildly impressed with the amount of novel new features each update comes out with, but the newest release that includes INBETWEENING needs to be seen to be believed.
Create one pose, offset it in space, and have Cascadeur auto-inbetween to get the base movement of a walk or run in seconds. From that, you can use the Auto-Unbaking featureset that was built for mocap to create keyframes that can be adjusted and tweaked like usual – AND – turn on AutoPhysics to dial in an adjustable level of realism on top of it all, while still maintaining your ability to keyframe and control the whole animation.
It feels to us that Cascadeur has been running in stealth mode for too long and would make for the perfect bridge for motion designers that have been over-relying on Mixamo for too long.
Have you tried the newest drop of Cascadeur yet?
SPOTLIGHT
YOND Studio
One of the newer shops to hit the scene, the dynamic dup of Kyle Krueger and Alessis Heap steer a ship that feels sometimes more like an animation studio than one specializing in motion design – they’re loud and proud branding always catches our eye, and they’re hot off the presses new site really shows off what a character-centric studio can offer to brands looking to start a campaign off in a different way.
Sometimes you can just tell from a studio’s logo and brand what it’s going to be like to work with them, and there aren’t many better at it than YOND.
Know someone that should spend some time in our Spotlight? Let us know who!
That’s a wrap for this week. We’re getting back to a regular posting schedule, releasing Monday mornings to get you going for the week.
Until then, keep on slinging the keys and riding those curves! 🤩