Built After Hours: The Story Behind Glitch Entertainment

There's a version of this story where it starts in a boardroom. Seed funding. A pitch deck. A team of sixty people with matching hoodies and a catered launch event.

This isn't that story.

Glitch Entertainment was built after work hours. Evenings. Weekends. From a lake house in Indiana, by a construction worker who refused to stop building when the job site closed.

My name is Richard Case. I'm the founder and director of Glitch Entertainment LLC, an independent AI-assisted animation studio based in Muncie, Indiana. By day I build homes. By night — and every available hour in between — I build worlds.

Why Muncie. Why Now.

Muncie doesn't need an introduction to the people who grew up here. It has a particular kind of spirit — practical, grounded, proud. It's a city that builds things. That felt right.

The American Midwest doesn't have a reputation as the center of the animation industry. That's exactly why it needs one. Glitch exists to prove that world-class storytelling doesn't require a Los Angeles zip code. It requires intention, discipline, and an almost unreasonable refusal to quit.

Our motto is Never Stop Building. That's not a tagline. It's a daily instruction.

What We're Building

Glitch Entertainment isn't a single project. It's a studio built for scale, organized into divisions that each serve a different part of the creative mission:

• Glitch Imaginarium — Our animation and film division. Where the flagship work lives.

• Glitch Mythos — Mature, epic adaptations of public-domain literature. Big themes. Uncompromising tone.

• Glitch Press — Publishing arm for the worlds we create.

• Glitch Interactive — Games and interactive experiences.

• Glitch Workshop — Merchandise and physical creative products.

• Glitch Sound Labs — Original scoring, audio production, and sound design.

We currently have more than twenty intellectual properties in active development across those divisions. Some are in early concept. Some are in production right now. All of them are moving.

The Flagship: The Last Acorn

Our first feature film, The Last Acorn, is a Pixar-style animated adventure about courage, belonging, and the courage it takes to try again after the world has told you to stop.

Nim is a young squirrel who was bullied out of climbing trees. Burl is a bear who has spent years running from a failure that was never really his. Flash is a turtle who was celebrated for his speed — then cast out for it, and deliberately made himself slow. Together, they carry the last living acorn toward a dying Great Tree. Standing in their way: a world that has decided it's too late to matter.

We're deep in production on Act 3. The rough cut is assembled. The film is close.

The Last Acorn is the kind of story I needed to tell first — because it's about finishing something when every reasonable voice in your head says it's easier to stop.

The Second Front: Beowulf: The Coming of Grendel

While The Last Acorn moves toward completion, our Glitch Mythos division has already released its first work into the world.

Beowulf: The Coming of Grendel is a completed, festival-submitted AI-animated short — approximately ten minutes — the first installment of a planned trilogy retelling the oldest surviving story in the English language. Bold. Dark. Uncompromising.

The film is currently in submission at multiple international festivals, including the Runway AI Festival, AIMA AI Movie Awards, Queensland AI Festival, Pineapple Animation Festival, and several others.

Glitch Mythos exists because some stories are too large and too old to keep shrinking for a comfortable audience. Beowulf is the beginning.

On AI and Authorship

People ask about the tools. That's fair.

Glitch Entertainment uses AI tools as part of our production pipeline — Kling, Veo, Sora, Nano Banana, ElevenLabs, Suno. We're transparent about that, and we're proud of how we use them. We're also clear-eyed about what that means and what it doesn't mean.

The tools render. The humans decide.

Every story beat, every character arc, every line of dialogue, every editorial choice — those come from a person. From me. The AI doesn't know that Nim is afraid of climbing trees because that fear is her identity, and her climbing one at the end of the film is the whole point. The AI doesn't know that. I do.

What we've built is a production method that lets a solo filmmaker operate at a scale that previously required an entire studio. That's not a compromise. That's an innovation. And we document everything — the methods, the mistakes, the breakthroughs — because we believe this approach is worth understanding and sharing.

What's Coming

The Last Acorn completes first. That's the rule. The skeleton before the polish — always.

After that: Beowulf: Mother's Revenge. Little Chicago, a documentary about Muncie's forgotten prohibition-era criminal history. A growing library of IPs we haven't announced yet.

Glitch Entertainment is in it for the long run. We're building a studio, not a single project. Every film feeds the next one. Every audience we earn in Muncie is an audience we carry into the world.

We're not waiting for permission. We're not waiting for a bigger budget or a better moment or a boardroom to tell us the timing is right.

We're building. After hours. Every day.

Come watch.

Glitch Entertainment LLC | Muncie, Indiana | theglitchverse.com Never Stop Building.