Welcome! You made it to one of the coolest places on the web.
This is the website of a starting animation studio that tries to stay true to some pretty unconventional ideals in 2026.
To explain where this comes from, I need to tell a short story.
One day I came back from a long trip to Japan and just wanted to relax and watch my favorite TV show on my Apple TV. But I couldn’t, not because of Wi-Fi problems, but because Apple disabled access to TV shows I had already bought.
Why?
Because I usually charge my account using gift cards. I bought some of them in Japan, in a different currency, which caused my account to switch to the Japanese region. That meant I could no longer watch the shows I purchased overseas.
You’d think I could just switch it back, right?
Nope. To do that, I would have to spend all remaining money on the account, down to exactly 0 yen. I had 652 yen left. Basically impossible to spend perfectly. Support told me I should just connect a credit card to fix it.
And yes. I really didn’t want to do that. That’s literally why I use gift cards.
That was the moment where my thought process started.
Even if it sounds dramatic, I realized something simple: we used to own things.
I could buy a CD and listen to it forever. I could resell it. I could rip it to my iPod. Same with DVDs. And to some extent, software.
That’s mostly gone now.
Everything is a subscription. Everything depends on accounts, licenses, constant internet checks, and the goodwill of giant corporations. We don’t really own our tools or media anymore. Instead we just have temporary permission to use them until someone flips a switch or changes the terms.
As someone who wants to create digital worlds, as a 3D artist, animator, and game developer, that feels deeply wrong. Creative tools should feel stable, dependable, and genuinely owned, not leased hostages to monopolies and recurring payments.
I want to make people feel strong emotions. I want to tell stories and build worlds people care about. That part matters more than constantly chasing the newest tools or feeding subscription machines.
The Project: "Doggo"
Anyway. Enough philosophy. Let’s talk about the project.
This project is mainly built around a short film idea I have (codename “Doggo”). It will mostly be animated in 3D.
Here’s where things get practical: I’m still a student. I learned Autodesk Maya and really like working with it, but I only have a student license, which means I can’t use it commercially.
Some people will say: “Just use Blender.”
And yes...I know Blender is powerful, open-source, completely free, and improving incredibly fast. But switching tools would mean a long learning phase before I can actually realize my idea. I also genuinely like Maya’s workflow and UI. That’s subjective, but it matters to me.
The Retro Dream vs. Reality
The other problem is hardware. I don’t currently have the kind of modern high-end machine needed to comfortably render a full 3D short film.
So I spent a long time dreaming about an alternative path: going retro. Using older, perpetual-license software like Maya 7 (from the Alias days. buy once, own forever, no logins, no cloud DRM) together with powerful 2005-era hardware, dual Xeons, Quadro cards, tons of RAM, that can still be found surprisingly cheaply today.
It would be so nice if we could utilize that approach. It feels right philosophically: escaping subscriptions, avoiding monopolistic control, using tools and machines you truly own, and still creating beautiful work. After all, films like Monsters, Inc. and early Pixar movies were made with tools and hardware from roughly that era, and they still hold up incredibly well.
But after a lot of testing, research, and real-world consideration, we decided not to go that route for this project. The practical hurdles (compatibility headaches, plugin availability, long-term reliability, and production speed) turned out to be too big for where we are right now.
Still. The ideal stays. We strongly disagree with the all-subscription, all-cloud, all-monopoly direction the industry has taken. And one day we’d love to build (or help build) a real alternative that gives creators stable, owned tools again.
For “Doggo” we’ll find a workable path in the present, but the bigger vision hasn’t changed.