The Cartoon Recruit Blog

What’s a portfolio jam?

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.