We help working animators use AI to protect their time and energy for the craft, not replace it. A real feature animator, translating the noise into what actually helps your week.
The lane
One side says adapt or die. The other says it is all theft, do not touch it. Both are loud, both are exhausting, and neither one helps you when you sit down to work tomorrow morning.
Santor Media Ventures does the practical version instead. Which tools are actually worth your time, how to get your hours back from the busywork, and how to protect the part of the work that is irreplaceably yours. Craft is the constant. Everything else is just tools.
Services
Two free things that help every week, and one paid review where you get my eye on your actual frames.
Send a link to whatever reel you want looked at. You get back a recorded video with my honest take. What is landing, what is missing, where you are reading against the bar, and the one thing I would sharpen first.
Book a review →He is willing to tell the harsher truths without losing any of that kindness and patience. People who are your friends and co-workers will probably never tell you "no, none of these shots will work." Positive comments feel good to hear, but they tell me nothing about how I might improve.
Salina, TV animator
Helping animators navigate AI and the future of animation. Calm, practical, anti-hype and anti-doom. The signal, without the noise, every week.
Subscribe free →Answer a short run of questions about a shot before you animate it, and walk away with a clear read on what the performance is actually for. The thinking that saves you the second pass.
Try it free →Lessons drawn from 27 years in feature animation. The fundamentals of acting and performance that no tool can hand you, taught by someone who still does the work.
In developmentHow a Reel Review works
It is deliberately asynchronous. You send the reel on your time, I review it on mine, and you get something you can rewatch instead of a call you half remember.
Fill out a short form with a link to your reel and what you are aiming at.
A short permission form so I can review your work. Required before anything starts.
One flat fee, charged when you book. No tiers, no add-ons, no upsell maze.
A private video link plus your one-page summary, inside five business days.
Who is behind it
David Torres has animated feature films for 27 years and still animates every day. He is not an AI evangelist who picked up animation. He is an animator figuring out these tools honestly, in real time, and sharing what actually works with the people doing the work.
How this gets made
That's the test I hold my own work to, so here's how the work here actually gets made.
Every essay here starts with me, written from things I actually did or got wrong. An issue of The Animation Frontier can't go out while my section is still an empty placeholder.
Around that, AI does real work. It researches, it checks the links, it drafts the sections that are summaries rather than opinions, it catches me repeating myself, and it takes on a lot of the admin. I read all of it and I cut a lot of it.
The pictures follow the same rule. The diagrams and tip graphics are built from real text rather than painted by an image model, so the words in them are the words I wrote. I put a “Created with AI” stamp on them either way, so you never have to guess which is which.
I'm not going to publish AI-made animation under my name. I run tests in private so I can talk about this from experience instead of guessing, and that work stays there.
If something I make ever stops passing that test, tell me.
Questions, press, partnerships, or just want to compare notes on AI and the craft?
hello@santormediaventures.com