The Storyteller Squad Animated

The Storyteller Squad is a queer actual-play podcast, and the goal was simple: get it in front of a much bigger audience. This show is smart, carefully written, and character-driven, and it deserved animation that matched. So we built the whole short around one moment — the korrasami kiss we deserved! A tender queer kiss done right, the kind fans have been waiting years for.

Visually, we were chasing a high-class, Western-anime look — think Legend of Vox Machina-level polish — on a tight deadline and an even tighter budget. To get there, we blended rigged animation with traditional frame-by-frame work, so it reads as premium and near-fully-traditional without the traditional-animation price tag.

We started with a lean, rig-based approach as the baseline. Once it was clear the tone needed more than a rig alone could give, we leaned hard into compositing — layering traditional touches over the rig to get that premium, near-fully-traditional feel.

We were just as scrappy everywhere else: lots of close-ups, backgrounds reused wherever the story let us. For the crowd shot, we used silhouettes and line boiling to sell a packed party in motion — without animating a single extra character.

Character work was led by Ami Vidal, with a heavy focus on premium, expressive polish — built to hold up in close-up, since close-ups were doing a lot of the heavy lifting here.

Backgrounds, led by Steph Li, got the same treatment: painterly, built efficiently. The patio set gets reused across all three of its shots — same trees, restaged and relit each time — so the budget went toward polish instead of redundant asset work.

The short premiered at Gen Con. This is now the first of an ongoing retainer: three videos total, with the budget scaling up or down depending on how each one performs.