For most of his working life, Serhan Yorganci read other people’s stories. He was a production manager at Avsar Film, one of Turkey’s largest production companies, and his days were spent inside scripts that belonged to someone else: noticing why one worked, where another broke, how a character was put together. He had stories of his own. He kept telling himself he would make them someday.
Someday is a quiet trap. He knows that now.
“Looking back, I can see more clearly that I was always waiting,” he says. “For the right time, the right project, the right conditions. As if I would only start once everything was perfectly in place. But that moment never really comes.”
The film that finally pulled him out of the waiting room is called Square Heads, a fully CG animated feature he wrote, animated, lit, and edited almost entirely by himself, with no prior experience in 3D animation whatsoever. It is now streaming on Apple TV, with additional reach across Plex, The Roku Channel, YouTube Movies and TV, Xumo, and public libraries across the United States through Midwest Tape. It has screened at the Ischia Global Film and Music Festival and at Cartoons on the Bay. The whole thing was made by one person who, a few years ago, did not know how to make a single character move.
The version of this story that has already traveled around the animation press goes something like: man learns 3D from YouTube, makes a feature alone, ends up on Apple TV. It is true, and it is a good headline. But it skips the part that matters, which is everything that happened before he believed he was allowed to begin.
The loop
The scripts came first, and the rejections came after. Yorganci took his work to around ten different production companies, friends included, and the answers piled up the way these answers tend to: some never replied at all, others offered a polite “it’s good, but not right for us at the moment.” Reaching out to people he knew did not move the needle the way he had assumed it would.
The rejections were not cruel. That was almost the problem. They were soft enough to keep him circling.
“At some point I realized I was stuck in the same loop,” he says. “I write something, I send it out, and then I just wait. And that waiting part is completely out of my control.”
The first crack in the loop came from his wife. She pointed out that he was good with computers and knew some programming, and asked whether he had ever thought about going in that direction. It was not really about filmmaking. The idea stayed with him anyway. Then the pandemic arrived, the world stopped, and in the sudden stillness the thought had room to grow into something clearer: if he wanted this story to exist, it was not enough to be the person who writes and waits. He would have to step onto the production side himself.
There was no dramatic turning point, no slammed door, no vow. Just an accumulation, until the obvious finally felt like a decision. He would do it himself.
The misleading easy part
The first weeks of teaching yourself 3D animation are, by his account, a kind of beautiful con.
“Since I didn’t know anything yet, even the simplest thing I made felt like a big achievement,” he says. “A small movement, a very basic model. I would look at it and genuinely feel impressed. I even had moments where I showed it to people around me saying, I made this.”
He is clear-eyed about why that mattered. If the early excitement had not been there, he would have quit. The beginning felt far easier than the work actually is, and that illusion is what carried him past the point of no return. Because soon enough, every scene started demanding something new: lighting, camera, character animation, facial expressions, each one a fresh subject to learn from zero. Every time he thought he had figured something out, another gap appeared. After a while it turned into a single low hum of a question: what else don’t I know yet?
That hum is where the real learning lived.
Eight in the morning to five the next
For roughly three years the schedule ran from 8am to, on bad days, 5am the following morning. Every day. Weekends. Holidays. Through Ramadan. Because it began during the pandemic, the isolation felt almost like permission at first; everyone was home, life had paused, and pouring himself into a production felt like the most meaningful possible use of the empty time.
Then the world started moving again, and he did not.
“Life outside was moving again, and I began to feel like I was falling out of sync with it,” he says. “People were going back to normal, but I was still working at the same pace. That’s when it became more challenging psychologically.”
His wife was, by every account he offers, extraordinarily supportive. But a pace like that is never carried by one person alone. “It wasn’t just affecting my life, it was directly affecting hers too. At the end of the day, this is a shared life.” He remembers wondering whether even the dog had absorbed the atmosphere of the apartment. The cost, when he names it, is not heroic. It is small and human and exact: he drifted out of everyday life. You stop making plans. When you do go somewhere, your mind stays at the desk. There is only ever one thing to talk about. And eventually the days stop distinguishing themselves from one another.
“Days keep passing, but they all begin to feel the same,” he says. “I think that was the clearest loss.”
At one point the toll became physical. After long stretches at the screen he started seeing color wrong: reds drifting toward pink, blacks toward gray. He went to an eye doctor, who, possibly humoring him, told him to look at something far away, a tree, for a minute or two every half hour. He did it.
The face
If there is a single moment where Square Heads stopped being an experiment and became a film he believed he could finish, it was facial animation. Not because he cracked something technical. Because he discovered he did not have to.
“Emotion is not really a technical problem,” he says. “It’s something we all already know and feel. That’s when I realized I don’t have to learn everything from the outside. To understand what a character is feeling, I can draw from myself. I already have a reference for that.”
A small expression could change the meaning of an entire scene. The first time he felt a character’s emotion actually land, imperfect but working, the question of whether he could do this quietly answered itself.
The technical battles, for the record, were brutal in a less romantic way. The hardest enemy was bugs, the kind with no logic to them, errors that depended on his system or his exact scene, problems someone else might never hit. Rendering at least played fair: heavier scene, more struggle, predictable. Bugs were the thing he could not control, and at some point he learned the most useful lesson a solo filmmaker can learn, which is when to stop. “If I keep pushing everything, the film will never be finished.” Some nice-to-haves got let go. That was the balance: fighting what you can’t control while knowing where to quit on what you can.
Where the story actually came from
The premise sounds like a fable, and it half is. Three kids blow through a small fortune online after a few careless taps; a mysterious old watch springs to life and pulls them into a world that runs on money they suddenly have to earn. But the seed was a single ordinary afternoon with his young nephew.
The boy wanted to buy something, not a toy he could hold, but in-game outfits, small digital items inside a phone. Then he picked up a tablet linked to Yorganci’s card and started insisting. It landed hard precisely because it was so mundane.
“We grew up thinking of money as something you can touch and count,” he says. “In his world, it’s much more abstract, almost like a number on a screen. When I was a kid, I wouldn’t even think about taking money from my family’s wallet.”
If money itself had changed that much, he reasoned, maybe the meaning attached to it had changed too. That was where the story had to begin. What he wants a child to walk away feeling is deliberately not a lecture: just a small, earned sense that things have value, and that getting something takes effort. And what he wants from the parent sitting beside them is even simpler, that they notice how their kid actually understands money, and maybe start a conversation that usually never gets had.
The name, for what it’s worth, carries none of the meaning people assume. No metaphor about rigid, closed-minded “square heads.” It came from clicking around in ZBrush until the heads turned angular and he liked how they looked. “For me, the starting point was purely visual.”
Amateur
Some of his friends in Turkey called the film amateur.
He lets the word sit, because he has clearly turned it over many times. Part of it, he figures, is proximity: they know him, they know he made it alone, and that closeness makes the work easy to judge from a casual distance. Maybe they assume that under the same conditions they could do the same. There is also a plainer bias at work, the reflexive “how good can something made by one person really be.”
What kept him moving was refusing the question that disguises itself as standards.
“If I keep asking myself is this good enough, I won’t get anywhere. That question doesn’t move you forward, it holds you back.”
His goal had never been to make something perfect. It was to finish something. So he stopped waiting for flawless and started sending the film out, because the longer you wait, the easier it becomes to pull back, and he wanted to act on what he had made rather than on fear.
Then a festival with no connection to him at all said yes.
“In that context, it’s not about who you are, it’s about the work itself.”
The first acceptance felt like confirmation that the thing he could see actually existed for other people too. The friends’ verdict and the festival’s verdict were measuring different things. Only one of them had skin in the work.
The black box
Getting from a finished film to a film anyone could watch turned out to be nearly as uncertain as making it. There was no roadmap for reaching streaming platforms: no clear contact, no obvious next step. So he did it by trial and error, sometimes finding the right person, often just guessing email addresses and trying every format he could think of.
He sent a lot of emails. Most went unanswered. Many of the replies were no. The whole thing, he says, “felt like a bit of a black box.” He kept rewriting the same message in slightly different shapes, a shorter version, a new opening line, a tone adjusted by a few degrees, and was struck that those small changes genuinely affected whether anyone wrote back. He learned to space the emails out across days so they would not get flagged as spam. Mostly he learned patience, the kind that has no single correct path: try, fail, try again from another angle, until a door opens.
He also noticed who opened doors. The responses that moved things forward came, overwhelmingly, from the United States, where even a no usually arrived as an actual reply, sometimes with a pointer toward someone else who might care. He reads it less as character than as density: more people, more companies, more inboxes accustomed to receiving exactly this kind of cold message.
From finished film to Apple TV took about a year. A year of refreshing for replies, of motivation rising and collapsing on the strength of a single email, of the specific helplessness of a stage where nothing is in your hands. “While making the film, everything is in your hands. At this stage, it isn’t. You just have to wait.” Which is why the day it landed on Apple TV mattered the way it did: the uncertainty finally became something he could point to.
Learn learning
Ask Yorganci for the one thing he would pass to anyone attempting this, and he does not say software, or hardware, or hustle. He says: learn how to learn.
“When you run into a problem, even if you don’t know the solution, you can at least guess where it might be solved.”
The trick is staying curious about what different tools can do, holding a rough map of what exists, so that when you get stuck you can ask whether the answer lives in this program or somewhere else entirely. Not mastering everything. Finding the right tool at the right time, learning exactly as much as the moment requires, and continuing.
His other stated superpower is problem-solving, and his favorite example is small and telling. Near the end, at the color stage, he found five or six shots with little glitches in hair or mouth movement, minor, but the kind that gnaw once seen. He could have reopened the technical pipeline and risked unraveling everything. Instead he changed the edit: swapped in alternative shots, cut to a reaction of the other character listening. He solved an animation problem with storytelling. Most viewers would never have caught the flaws. He likes pushing that line anyway, right up to the end.
What he would tell the man reading other people’s scripts
The advice he offers other filmmakers, the ones with a script, no budget, and no connections, sitting at the edge of giving up, is the same advice he would hand his younger self at the Avsar Film desk. Don’t wait that much. The work you’re doing now is not wasted; every script you read and every mistake you notice is preparing you. But don’t stay there. You don’t have to be perfect. The first thing you make may not be great. Being finished will always matter more.
He is already deep into a second film, and the difference is immediate. On the first, the question was constantly how do I do this. Now it’s how can I tell this better. He’s building a system from the start this time, planning scenes and workflow and structure instead of learning them mid-fall. “With the first film I was learning the process. With this one, I’m trying to manage it.”
What is strange, he admits, is how little the Apple TV milestone feels like an arrival. When he finished Square Heads he expected relief and got emptiness instead, days that suddenly had no shape after years of being built entirely around the work. He had to go on vacation and not open his computer just to climb out of the void. And reaching all those platforms did not close anything either. It made him want to do more.
Rapid fire
Favorite animated film? My Neighbor Totoro. Simple on the surface, with a deep and natural emotion underneath that reaches you without forcing anything, which he considers the hardest thing of all to pull off. Not a target to copy, since copying just becomes imitation. A reference point. A reminder of what’s possible, and that he has to get there his own way.
Favorite film overall? The Harry Potter series, and not for the world so much as the architecture of the storytelling. The narrative logic is airtight, an entirely original culture with its own language and sense of otherness, held consistent from start to finish. Smooth to watch, with a very solid structure underneath. That balance is what gets him.
What’s on while you work? Classical music for tasks that need real thought, since it focuses without distracting. For repetitive work, pop, usually just the current Billboard Hot 100 running in the background.
Your hobbies, and how they feed the work? Photography taught him framing, what to show and what to leave out, which goes straight into film. Reading shifts how he thinks about telling a story. Drumming, a studio he’s rented weekly for fifteen years, builds rhythm and timing. Padel three times a week and the occasional tennis clear his head after long hours at the screen. What they share: they keep him from staying inside the same thing all the time.
What time did you wake up this morning? Around 8:30. Then he takes the dog out, which is where the day really starts.
First thing you do when you sit down to work? Open YouTube, not to watch but to put on music or a playlist. A small ritual; pressing play is how he tells himself, I’m starting now. Lately he also checks in on the industry, browsing sites like, he notes, Motionographer.
Something that would surprise people who watch Square Heads? How personal it actually is. The wealthy, stingy father was inspired by his own, exaggerated and blended for the story, but drawn from a very familiar place. It looks fictional from the outside. It sits much closer to home than it seems.
“There’s a big difference between where I started, alone in my apartment in Istanbul, and where I am now. But to me, this still feels more like a beginning.”
Square Heads is streaming now on Apple TV, with additional availability on Plex, The Roku Channel, YouTube Movies and TV, Xumo, and in public libraries across the United States via Midwest Tape.