About

We make films. This is where we talk about everything that happens before they become films.

Contanimation is an independent film studio working at the intersection of cinema, animation and emerging technology.

This Substack is our studio notebook: a place to open up the process, share what we’re learning, and have the conversations that don’t fit into a final frame.

We’ll talk about directing, storytelling, visual development, production, references, mistakes, experiments, workflows and all the strange decisions involved in making something from nothing.

Sometimes through our own work. Sometimes alongside filmmakers, animators, artists and other creatives whose brains we’d happily spend a few hours inside.

AI will obviously be part of the conversation. But this isn’t a newsletter about AI tools.

Tools change.

We’re more interested in what doesn’t: taste, ideas, judgment, authorship, collaboration and the ability to know when something is actually worth making.

We’re figuring out what filmmaking looks like when the rules, the technology and the scale of what small teams can achieve are all changing at once.

And we thought it would be more interesting to figure it out in public.

Why subscribe

If you like our films, this is how you get closer to them.

If you make films, animation, art or strange things with computers, you’ll probably feel at home here too.

Free subscribers get access to our studio notes, ideas, references, discoveries, selected breakdowns and the occasional thing we simply can’t stop thinking about.

Paid subscribers get further inside the process: deeper breakdowns, exclusive videos, experiments, production material, conversations and collaborations with other creatives, and a much closer look at how the work actually gets made.

No shortcuts. No “10 prompts to become a filmmaker”.

Just films, process, people and everything we learn while making them.

Website contanimation.com