THE FALSE GOD OF HEADCOUNT It’s funny how lately I keep getting asked how big my team is, almost like it’s a badge of honor. If you’re not hiring people, are you even serious? I used to run a digital studio. We got acquired in 2022 and at our peak we were around 40 people, tackling 8-figure projects for some of the largest brands and institutions in the world. Not a gigantic company by any means, but big enough that I know what scaling a team actually means. And even with incredibly talented people and a proper management layer, SO much of my time went into delegating, managing, hiring, keeping people happy, making sure they didn’t burn out, replacing them when they eventually left, staffing up when a big project came in, figuring out what everyone would work on when it ended… It never stops. Staying hands-on was always incredibly important to me. I felt that the second I stopped actually making things, I would slowly become irrelevant at the thing I was supposed to lead. So I stayed hands-on. Mostly at night and on weekends. 😅 There’s this weird idea, especially in corporate America, that progress means managing more people. Bigger title, bigger salary, bigger team. Except nobody really tells you that 1/ not everyone is cut out to be a manager and 2/ the more you manage, the more you inevitably have to let go of actually doing. Fast forward to this week. I wrapped a 16-minute, feature-quality episode of Junkyard King, with the help of one person getting through some of the shots. I worked on a tool to automate part of my storyboarding process. And I built a working beta of a Junkyard King arcade game that would probably have cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of development through a more traditional path. Is all of it perfect? Of course not. But it exists. And that’s what I find so liberating about agents right now. It’s not even just about doing more with fewer people. It’s about being able to find out whether an idea is worth burning more money and resources on before burning the money and resources on it. I can build the thing. Play with it. Break it. Decide it sucks. Throw it away. Or realize there’s something there and THEN bring in the right people to take it further. I’ve been on both sides of this and I absolutely still believe in people. I want talented people around me. Some things I simply cannot do, and some things become infinitely better when the right person touches them. But I want the right people, for the right tasks, at the right moment. What I reject is this lingering idea that having a payroll somehow proves you’re doing serious work. That hiring is progress. That 20 people building something is inherently more impressive than 2 people building the same thing. Maybe my lingering ADHD is finally having its moment 😂 but being able to stay hands-on, jump between disciplines and actually MAKE things again has been incredibly liberating. I don’t want to look like I’m building. I want to build. And I think our obsession with headcount shows how far we still are from understanding what the technology developing in front of us is actually going to change.

MY LITTLE TRICK FOR BETTER POSTERS & THUMBNAILS 👀 Image models still suck at keeping characters perfectly consistent when you’re working from an animated project...so I stopped using them. Instead, I use Seedance 2.5 as a poster generator. I feed it my characters + environment and ask it to generate a sequence of radically different cinematic compositions. Then I scrub through the video, find the perfect frame and extract it for my final poster or thumbnail. Video generation → composition generator → screenshot → poster. Turns out one of my favorite image generators is actually a video model. 😅

Junkyard King, the arcade game. 🕹️ In the spirit of the 80s/90s, I started experimenting with building a web-based Junkyard King game with GPT-6. There’s a TON of room for improvement. Movement is stiff, lighting needs work, assets need work… but as a prototype, it works. Mostly, I wanted to see how far I could push Junkyard King beyond the series and into something you can actually play. I’ll get back to this little rabbit hole later. 👀

WHITE RABBIT - FRAGMENT #3# In a world where the Queen doesn’t just control her people. She steals what makes them who they are. Their memories. Their skills. Their lives. Alice carries what was taken from them inside her. Hunted by a totalitarian regime, she must survive long enough to return what was stolen and bring the Queen down. Armed with other people’s memories, her smarts, courage, and a headstrong temper that gets her into almost as much trouble as it gets her out of, Alice might be Wonderland’s last chance. An @thisisoddkid dystopian reimagining of Alice in Wonderland about identity, memory, and what remains of us when everything is taken away.

Currently stuck between “I should probably avoid blatant copyright infringement” and “f*** it, I need to make a short fan film about a Jedi with PTSD trying to live with a lifetime of trauma and killing.” I’ve always felt like there’s a psychological darkness in the Star Wars universe that’s been left largely unexplored.

Meet PINK STATIC, the best band that never existed. I believe in repetition when building an IP. Not reposting the same thing, but giving people more ways to recognize the world, the characters and the tone. I produce the music for Junkyard King, so I started wondering: what if the music actually belonged to the characters? So Artie + Kai now have a band. PINK STATIC. Their first track, “One Step at a Time,” appears in Episode 2, and I’m using these little fillers to explore where the IP can go beyond episodes: music, visual identity, clothing, maybe even brand collaborations down the road. Made this clip with Seedance 2.5. One useful trick: feed the model a black video carrying the original track as timing/audio authority, then generate the visuals in smaller chunks. Much less audio drift, much tighter lip sync. Also pushing a rough screenprint / halftone / misregistration graphic language that may find its way back into the show. ODD KID RECORDS presents PINK STATIC One Step at a Time

Lately, I’ve been playing a little with this little boy right here… It’s funny, I never really saw myself making any kind of kid-friendly content, and yet here I am, IP after IP 😅 I guess emotion has always been a big focus in my work, and getting a laugh definitely sits pretty high on that list too. Turns out those two things translate pretty well to making strange little worlds for younger audiences. I also remember reading someone talking about NVIDIA’s DLSS years ago and making the point that, at some point, getting more realistic is just another way of looking more like everyone else. ¯\(ツ)/¯ That one stuck with me somehow. With all these new tools pushing toward more fidelity, more resolution, more realism, I find myself increasingly interested in going the other way. Finding characters, textures, imperfections and visual languages that actually feel like something. Anyway. Meet another odd little kid. More soon from Dead Normal and @thisisoddkid.

You got me there. 😄 Considering the pretty extreme interest this received, I decided to break open my poor little Codex piggy bank and go back in. @sama whenever you want for some free credits. Cleaning things up, adding more systems, moving over to @fal’s H3 Max Turbo, and generally pushing the engine quite a bit further. I’m also now exploring some more D&D-like mechanics after someone very rightfully brought that up. Not just voting on A or B, but potentially introducing stats, probability, character traits, inventory, consequences, maybe even rolls that can alter what the audience wants to happen. Which is where this starts getting really interesting to me. Less “choose your own adventure.” More “shared live world with rules.”