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 leaned on a rig-based pipeline and pushed it as far as it could go, layering in extra polish wherever the story needed it most, so every dollar landed exactly where it counted.

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 in extra passes and detail wherever it would read on screen, so every dollar landed exactly where the story needed it.

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.