by Rollin Bishop

I cannot believe I'm saying this, but: happy anniversary. It has officially been over a year since myself, Kambole, and Toussaint spun up re:frame and started our little animation newsletter. We didn't come into this with any expectations, really, and the fact of the matter is that re:frame was immediately much more successful than we expected.

We were, and remain, humbled by anyone and everyone that's willingly subjected themselves to our opinions, reviews, interviews, and general curation. We set out to cover everything we weren't able to otherwise, because the reality is that there's plenty of interesting and cool animation happening all over that simply doesn't get the same spotlight that everything else does.

So, with one year behind us, we collectively decided that it might be a good moment to publicly check in and look back at everything we've accomplished while looking forward toward what we still want to achieve. It's been a banner year; can we make it a banner decade?

• Improved social presence

  • As it stands right now, our entire social strategy is just… post a link to the newsletter sends on Bluesky through our personal accounts. It's fairly simple and straightforward, but that's basically all we do. Anything else is entirely organic from folks actually reading the newsletter itself. Over the next year, it'd be ideal to figure out how to do something that isn't, you know, only that. Maybe social cards of some kind with dedicated accounts on whatever social media platforms we decide to bother with.

    We quite like what our peers over at Animation Obsessive do, not that we want to copy and paste that. It might well serve as an inspiration of sorts, alongside old school attitude era Waypoint. Either way, expect to hear from us in new and exciting ways going forward.

• More thematic content

  • While there have been plenty of newsletters that we're proud of — the Matt Braly interview remains a high point for both readership and new subscribers — the month that we took turns spotlighting exciting Gobelins projects is something we all still talk about regularly. But we can do better and go bigger. Or, at least, we can hope and aspire to.

    Thematic content doesn't need to be specific months or weeks, it could be as simple as badged-up sends in a similar vein or concept, but it'd also be grand to do more like the Gobelins highlights. Por que no los dos?

• Guest contributors

  • We've had a couple of different guest contributors over the last year, not that we were actually looking for them. We'd love to find even more guest contributors to continue to expand our pool of folks to continue to present viewpoints outside of our own.

    This is a bit of a tough one, however, because this is more of a money-losing endeavor than a money-making one. This newsletter was never envisioned as something for profit, in part because that complicates other efforts and also because running a business seems like a nightmare. Because of that, we literally make no money through any means off this coverage; we don't have a freelance budget, and all three of us are loath to ask other folks to put in the work for a byline only. We're still noodling on this one, but the short version is: it's cool when other people publish on re:frame, and we like it, and our readers like it. If you're interested in contributing, let us know.

• An actual website

  • A big reason we don't already have a proper website — the URL is a simple redirect to the Buttondown-hosted newsletter archive — is because that's only available to folks paying for the next level of hosting on Buttondown. At our current subscriber count (around 600) we are not forced to that higher tier, but it's something we've considered for a long time.

    Perfect world? We surpass that next cap, which I believe is 1,000 subscribers, and we build an actual homepage archive for the newsletter so that it's a bit easier to actually direct people where we want them to go. The possibilities for what we could do with an actual homepage aren't limitless, but they are pretty significantly different from what we're able to accomplish right now.

Last but not least: thank you, from all of us here. The past year has been an overwhelming learning experience, and one that all three of us are immensely proud of, but it wouldn't have happened at all without people like you — yes, you — reading and sharing our work.

To paraphrase the very first send that introduced the world to our animation newsletter, we're still not just looking to continue the animation conversation or be a part of it; we hope to reframe it.

We're no longer just getting started, however, but we're only continuing to pick up momentum.