ONCE MORE, WITH VIGOR

January 26, 2026

I’ve spent the last decade working on projects for other people. A lot of them never really saw the light of day. Pilots, video game work, short runs that stalled out, that sort of thing.

In 2017, I lived with my friend Aron Keyser for six months and we worked on a handful of shorts for his channel. In 2018, I helped animate an eleven minute pilot with my friend Max Field for Alejandro Gluski. I had three months to finish it, which was rough, but it taught me how to push through pressure and just keep moving.

After that, I bounced around between projects. I helped with cleanup animation on Aron’s pilot AoK, did cleanup work on Eddie Alcazar’s short Bullet Time, and took on other freelance gigs along the way. Some were cool, some were just work. I also kept making music the entire time. A few tracks ended up in friends’ animations, and in 2019 I worked on a soundtrack for a game called All Clowns Go To Hell. I finished about nine tracks before the game got cancelled, which sucked, but I was used to it by that point.

In 2021, I decided I needed stability. I took everything I had learned from freelancing and aimed for a steady job. For the past five years, I’ve worked as a videographer and multimedia designer for a cannabis company in Arizona. I handle their websites, some packaging, advertising materials, video ads, and all of their social media content and reels. Having a consistent paycheck changed everything. I stopped worrying about rent, medical bills, and scrambling for side work just to survive. It is not animation industry work, but it is reliable and it lets me breathe.

Creatively, though, it does nothing for me. The work exists to serve the company, which is fine, but it is not fulfilling. The upside is that my life is finally balanced! I have time, energy, and the mental space to make things for myself again.

Since 2012, I’ve been developing an idea for an animated series that hits everything I have ever wanted to explore creatively.

The Cannoli Chronicles follows Porky and Robbie, two would-be mafia goons running their operation out of a run down mail warehouse. They know almost nothing about how the mafia actually works and barely resemble one at all, outside of the clothes and the accents. Porky is a gruff, overweight guy with a thick Brooklyn accent. He is almost completely emotionless and rarely moves his face, but he is fully convinced he is a great leader. Robbie is Porky’s right hand man. He is always eager, always ready to go, and completely sold on whatever dumb plan Porky has cooked up.

In the world of The Cannoli Chronicles, everyone is stupid. The police can barely connect clues back to the “mafia,” and Porky n’ Robbie never really understand when they are committing crimes in the first place.

There is a bigger story I want to tell with these characters someday, but right now I am focused on shorts. The goal is to sell people on the characters, their dynamic, and the world they exist in.

The show started during a Skype call with my friend Rob Rodriguez. We were watching the anime ‘Baccano!’ together and doing dumb, whiny Brooklyn accents at each other. That riffing slowly turned into us playing mafia character types, and eventually those became Porky and Robbie.

So why did it take so long to actually make something with them?

I tried early on. I started working on an episode in Flash with Aron’s help, but it became clear pretty quickly that my skills were not where they needed to be. I did not want to burn a good idea on bad execution.

So I sat on it. Over the years, the idea evolved, the characters sharpened, and the designs landed where they needed to be. The show pulls heavily from late 90s and early 2000s cartoon aesthetics. Thick outlines, flat backgrounds with texture, limited shading, bold character colors against more muted environments. I spent years studying the work of Rob Renzetti, Paul Rudish, Genndy Tartakovsky, Craig McCracken, Stephen Silver, and others to understand what actually works for my abilities and for this show. At this point, I feel confident saying that I can finally pull this off.

I spent almost fifteen years animating in Adobe Animate, but before that, I started with Smith Micro’s Anime Studio 5. I made some truly awful rigged animations, barely functional, poorly designed, and somehow those videos still pulled in hundreds of thousands of views. It was boxed software I bought at Target, and it was all I had, so I forced myself to learn it.

Years later, I found out Anime Studio became Moho Animation Studio after being picked up by Lost Marble. I stumbled back onto it last year when I learned that Cas van de Pol’s team was using it for their YouTube shorts. I was blown away. The software I remembered had grown up in a big way. Rigs combined with frame by frame swaps, action bones, and techniques that made me think the cartoons were done in Flash. If it fooled me, I figured it was worth a real look.

So I dove back in and actually learned it. Making basic rigs came quickly, but learning how to make heads turn properly, look up and down, rotate side to side, and animate limbs cleanly took months. It was a lot of trial and error.

By October, I had Porky and Robbie’s rigs far enough along to start animating a real short. The biggest difference between good Moho animation and bad Moho animation is being willing to break the rig. Drawing over it, swapping parts out, and not treating the rig as sacred. The rigs are only as good as the animator using them.

That is the approach I am taking. I use rigs for base movement, then replace anything that needs custom drawings to match the animatic. If a drawing does not exist in the rig, I draw it. If a movement looks better hand animated, I do it that way. For example, there is a shot where Robbie turns around while kneeling at a table. The back of his head does not exist in the rig, so that is a new drawing. Once the head hits a side profile, I swap back to the rig seamlessly. Same thing with Porky adjusting his hat. The arms and hands are drawn outside the rig because it looks better that way.

I could make the entire short in Adobe Animate, and I was doing exactly that for a while. But Moho’s pipeline saves me a massive amount of time, and I am only one person. I do not have the budget to pay friends to help animate full episodes. If I want to make four to five minute cartoons on my own, this is the only way it is realistic. I will still animate certain shots by hand when it makes sense, and I may jump between programs when needed, but the fact that they blend together cleanly is huge.

So in 2026, my goal is to finish one full five minute Cannoli Chronicles short. The script is written, the voices are recorded, the animatic is done, and the animation is moving faster than it ever could have otherwise. I might handle the music myself, or I might bring someone else in. We will see. No promises on timelines, but the first minute is finished and cleaned up, so that is something.

This long, rambling post is also me saying that I am not planning on working on other shorts for the foreseeable future. I want to commit to this world and actually see it through. I have carried it around for years, and not doing anything with it has been driving me insane.

It might take a long time to make the full series I dream about, but I know I can make shorts. I already have. My day job covers the practical stuff. Now I want to spend my free time making things for myself.

I will still take music commissions for projects I care about, and I will still make music on the side. I have hundreds of unreleased tracks sitting on a drive somewhere, so maybe it is time to dig through those. Or maybe I just keep making new stuff. Not everything needs to be shared.

At the end of the day, I am taking back my creative time. I want to make things because I need them to exist. The career side of my life is stable now. This is about making myself happy, and honestly, I am happier than I have ever been. I think that is why I am finally able to do this.

For a long time, I did not think I was good enough, or that my ideas mattered. At some point I realized that I am the only person who can bring these ideas to life. And that is pretty cool.