This is a community event where teams of artists work together to produce 20-seconds of animation, each following a theme. The purpose of this jam is to give students and early-career artists an opportunity to collaborate on portfolio pieces together.
Teams of three are encouraged, but projects could be completed by groups of any size. There are no restrictions on techniques or software, so long as assets are not generated by AI. (We’re not here to help HAL 9000’s portfolio.)
When’s the portfolio jam?
The jam’s theme will be announced at 8:00 PM Eastern on Saturday, November 1st on Cartoon Recruit’s discord server. The theme will be silly and appropriate for post-Halloween. Artists will have up to 7 days to complete their jam films. In order to participate, projects must be uploaded to YouTube by November 24 before midnight (in your timezone) with links sent by email to mike@cartoonrecruit.com along with your team’s name.
To allow for participation from the widest pool of artists, project days may be non-consecutive. This helps working artists participate after work or on weekends. We are not strictly enforcing these time limits; it’s mostly there to keep the scope of the project manageable. We encourage everyone to work at a reasonable pace and get plenty of sleep.
The films will each be screened during a livestream on Cartoon Recruit’s Discord server at 8:00 PM Eastern on Sunday, November 30th. There will be a panel of judges as well as a community vote.
How to portfolio jam?
If you don’t already have a team assembled, you can look for one on the Cartoon Recruit Discord server through the #portfolio-jam-lfg board or anywhere else you can wrangle friends and colleagues together. Once you have a team of three ready, fill out this form.
Will there be prizes?
Cartoon Recruit doesn’t endorse spec work or contests. We’re only playing for bragging rights and a film that you can feel proud to have in your portfolio.
Hey, uh, what’s Cartoon Recruit?
CartoonRecruit.com is an ad-free job board for finding studios actively hiring in animation, game development and VFX. Whether you’re an early career artist or a seasoned professional, our goal is to provide the resources that you need to connect with your next animation job. And we’re interested in hosting more online events in the future.
Attention recruits! And welcome to the Cartoon Recruit Recap, where we reflect on the past week across the animation industry. And highlight job posts that you might have overlooked. This week’s recap covers an animatic pilot, a mini-series announcement from one of the biggest names in indie animation, and a slew of new productions announced at NYCC. Second and third season pickups are great to see, as ongoing shows tebd to give talent more stability and bargaining power.
Up and at ‘em, recruits! And welcome to the Cartoon Recruit Recap. This is the blog, renamed more times than HBO Max, where I reflect on the past week in the animation industry and also collect job opportunities that might otherwise go overlooked.
This week, I’m back from the Ottawa International Animation Festival and was excited to meet a few of Cartoon Recruit’s community members in-person for the first time. The next major animation festival is LightBox Expo, which just made it a little easier to connect with their guests and panelists. There’s also a new animated pilot that I’m excited about as well as leaked test footage from a shelved Genndy Tartakovsky project. It’s been quite a week!
Attention recruits! And welcome to a slightly late edition of the recap blog where I reflect on what catches my interest in the animation industry and highlight notable jobs which might otherwise go overlooked.
Next week I will be at the Ottawa International Animation Festival and The Animation Conference, so feel free to @-me if you will be attending the picnic or have a film in competition. This past week we were surprised by a new music video, celebrated all of the nominees for the Primetime Emmy Awards, and saw a departure from a major studio. Plenty to catch up on!
Attention recruits! Welcome to CartoonRecruit.com’s blog, where I reflect on the past week in the animation industry and highlight job posts that might otherwise get overlooked.
This past week’s theme seems to have been inevitability. Warner Bros. became the third major studio to file lawsuits against Midjourney, following lawsuits from Disney and Universal. PBS let go of 15% of its staff after the Trump administration cut $1.1 billion of funding from public broadcasting. And Nelvana, Canada’s oldest animation studio, will no longer produce animation as of this week.
On the bright side, we added 85 new jobs to our directory last week, including a paid storyboarding internship at Sony Pictures Animation.
Ahoy recruits! And welcome to Cartoon Recruit’s blog. This is the Fortress of Solitude where I pause to reflect on the animation industry. And highlight job posts that might otherwise go overlooked.
This week’s post is a little late, with me up proofreading in the wee hours of Labour Day as we tick into September 1st. I’m looking forward to attending the Ottawa International Animation Festival later this month and recently had a chance to check in with the crew behind Baltimore’s Sweaty Eyeballs festival on Toon Boom Animation’s YouTube channel.
What else have I been looking at this week? I’m geeking out about a Crunchyroll superhero series, meanwhile Netflix released their first guidelines for generative AI use on productions, and there’s a new video of another scary android that might be waking up.
Attention recruits! And welcome to the Cartoon Recruit blog where I collect job opportunity that might go overlooked while reflecting on the past week in animation. Overall this past week’s news makes me feel a bit more optimistic about studio demand for new projects.
We’ve seen yet another record set by KPop Demon Hunters, a medium-sized interview about Liza Hanawalt’s contributions to the new series Long Story Short, and a (not-so) bold new strategy at Disney: Pursuing young men as a demographic.
Drop and give me twenty, recruits! Or don’t. This is CartoonRecruit.com’s blog where I reflect on the past week in animation and highlight job opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed.
August has been a quiet month and I’ve been thinking about hits and misses across the animation industry, as well as a certain streaming service which seems to have taken a back seat on animation over the past few years.
As you were, recruits! Here on CartoonRecruit.com’s blog, I reflect on the past week in the animation industry and highlight job listings that might go overlooked. This week, I’ve been thinking about CG animation. If you’re my vintage or older, the first CG feature film you watched was probably Toy Story.
Working with 1995’s state-of-the-art technology, toys were an ideal cast; if the characters are supposed to have glassy eyes and plastic skin then you neatly avoid the depths of the uncanny valley. While the progress towards realism is an impressive series of technical accomplishments, I’ve personally enjoyed seeing films over the past decade embrace stylized characters, effects and movement like KPop Demon Hunters, Turning Red, the Spider-Verse series and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.
Thank you, recruits! Truly! CartoonRecruit.com has officially hit its one year milestone, and I would like to thank all of the artists who have interacted with this project so far; including those of you who sent in job posts and feedback early on. There is much more that I would like to do to support artists looking for work in the animation industry and I hope that you will join me on that journey.
As part of the 1-year celebration, we have brought back the monthly portfolio threads on LinkedIn. We would like to make it as easy as possible for recruiters to find available talent, as well as create opportunities for artists to network and provide positive feedback on one another’s work. I look forward to seeing you in the comments!