About
Nuno Taborda is a Lisbon-based 2D animation director, born April 2002, in his fourth year of a Digital Animation degree at Universidade Lusófona. He writes, directs, animates, and co-sound-designs his own work. He also documents the making of it.
His debut short Nuno — four minutes, no dialogue, about the long-dead uncle he never met whose name he carries — premiered in IndieLisboa 2025's Brand New competition, the Portuguese flagship festival's new-voices strand. World premiere at Cinema São Jorge on 2 May, second screening with Q&A at Cinema Ideal on 5 May. It has since picked up festival laurels in the USA and Greece.
His second short, Alvéolos, is currently being made in public. He is running a 100-day daily diary on YouTube Shorts and Instagram, posting one short per day showing storyboards, 3D references, rigging, animation, and team workflow. Recent episodes pass Day 30 and into the high thirties.
Total online footprint: ~290 YouTube subscribers, 890 Instagram followers, three Twitter followers, zero tweets. Textbook hidden.
Highlights
- Debut
- Nuno (2025) · IndieLisboa Brand New
- In production
- Alvéolos · 100-day public diary
- YouTube
- ~290 subs · 88 videos · 59,923 views
- Education
- BA Animação Digital, Universidade Lusófona
- Roles
- Writer · director · animator · sound designer
Deeper Dive
The pedagogy is the point. Before Nuno premiered, Taborda ran a 25+ episode YouTube series, 'Vamos fazer um filme de Animação!,' walking through every stage of its production: character design, storyboard, animatic, 3D environment builds for casa, café, estaleiro, and rua, SFX/VFX, colour and line passes, teaser, poster. He was publicly teaching the pipeline before the film even existed publicly.
Alongside the diaries he runs foundational tutorials in Portuguese — 'Aprende Animação 2D Do Zero — Bouncing Ball' is a twelve-minute primer — and a collaboration with Portuguese-history YouTuber Ana Rita Explicações on the animation of her Regicide video. Each Alvéolos Short pulls 300-1,500 views, disproportionately high for his subscriber count and a quiet signal of algorithmic pickup among animation students.
Variety listed him in '11 Portuguese Animation Talents to Track' in 2024 — establishing the tier above him, which he is not yet in. He takes freelance commissions through @nnart2d. The work is auteur, the workflow is open-source.