if you're in seattle on the 5th

my film is playing at the 2D or Not 2D animation festival on Dec 5th, probably around 4:40. It'll be up with some other cool films by friends of mine, like Chris Perry's Incident at Tower 37 and Elliot Cowan's The Thing in the Distance. i won't be able to be there, but check it out if you're around, guaranteed to be a good time!

sorry, i don't have any drawings to post. hopefully i can remedy that soon with a bunch of new stuff.

I found this on a door at Cartoon Network

there must have been some mistake, but i won't say anything if you don't.

back to nyc

the seat next to me on the airplane was empty, so i was setting down books, comics, and drawings in it. the guy across the aisle had to stare at me with a sour face for a long time when i drew this. maybe he liked it and had one of those always-sour-faces. i think that's it because this shit is cute. it's like those 60's puppy-dog drawings


















makes me think of this. i didn't draw this piece of work, though i wish i had...

i'm good at travelling

i went to cordoba and madrid in spain last week to go to the Animacor festival. i stayed with some friends of a friend in madrid for a few days and then drank like a person who does not need sleep very much in cordoba. probably the most fun i've had in a really long time. people there are SO cool. what they don't know is i will come back and stay on their couches very soon again.

this is me in madrid, jetlagged and wandering around galleries after drinking too many cafe solos and eating way too much jamon. i also learned the power of the long siesta to replace the fact my body wouldn't let me sleep during the night.

trying to draw again

it's been 3 weeks since i finished my last big freelance projects. this is the first thing out of my electronic pencil.

Apparently it's been done before

Robert Silverberg has an acute taste for good monikers.

i'm kind of a big deal

so i'm going to ottawa in a couple days and i decided that i needed to represent a little professional-like, so i made a business card. i got the idea from a friend of mine who made these awesome sewing kits with her name rubber-stamped on them. she pointed me to a little store in the east village that only makes stamps, and i got an image made from a drawing i did at 5am one night. not cheap, but indispensable since now i can take any cool paper i find and make it into a business card. i kind of want to make like a ton of different designs and stamp them on everything. i'm like worth a million dollars now. check it out!

More screenings!

hey guys, sorry for the inactivity, i've been totally swamped on projects lately that i've completely neglected this blog. please check out:

http://www.dantesinferno.com/
http://yogabbagabba.com/

:for awesomeness.

anyways, the short film i made has been getting into some festivals and doing pretty well! i won the bloody cow award (awesome, right?) at muuuvi fest in romania, and best animation on bornholm island, denmark, at bornshorts. i'm way stoked and way mad i could not have afforded either of those far off locales.

there's more! if you're around, here's some festivals that are in the works!

KLIK!, sept 17th -20th in amsterdam. this is honetly the coolest lineup of films ever in the history of the world. i would not lie to you.

FANTASTIC FEST, sept 24-oct 1st at the alamo draft house in austin, tx. i'm pissed i can't go to this. if you're in texas, you're crazy if you don't spend at least a day at this.

ANIMADRID, in madrid, spain from sept 24th to oct 2nd. i won't be at this so please enjoy some empanadas and movies there for me.

WOODSTOCK FILM FESTIVAL, sept 30th-oct 4th in woodstock, ny. i'll be there looking at some natury stuff.

CONEY ISLAND FILM FESTIVAL, Oct 2nd-4th in my current town of living! come out and we can eat corn dogs together!

OTTAWA ANIMATION FESTIVAL, Oct 14th-18th in sunny canadia. show up there and we can grab some poutine together. that sounds dirty, but it's cheese curds and gravy over fries. canadians are weird.

HORROR AND SCI-FI FEST, oct 15th -18th, in tempe, az. if you go you can crash at my brother's place with his girlfriend and dogs. he's cool, he'll like you.

GRANADA INTERNATIONAL YOUNG FILMMAKERS FESTIVAL, oct 24th-31st in, you guessed it, granada, spain! i don't know too much about this one because the website doesn't have much english on it, but still way stoked!

anyway, that's all for now! hope you can go to one of these, they're all really way cool. here's a picture i did of a skateboard boy flying off a ramp:

some screenings!

If you're in Brooklyn or Manhattan this weekend, check out "Alpha-9!" screening at some really awesome animation festivals!

Fri, July 24th, 8pm — Pat Smith's CARTOONS FROM HELL in Manhattan at the 92YTribeca Screening Room! This is a culmination of lots of really professional animators, and is a guaranteed good time. Tickets are ten bones.
Tickets and info here.

Sun, July 26th, 4:30pm and 9:15pm — Animation Block Party in Brooklyn at BAMcinématek! This is a 3-day BK animation festival, with cool stuff all days, so come out for all the events! This screening is $11 online and I heard that it could very easily sell out.
Tickets and info here.

Also if you're in the Woodstock area the first weekend in October, you should swing by! My film just got accepted there!

And, if you're in the Transylvania area over the weekend of the 31st of July (Lazarea Judetul Hargita, Romania), stop into the Muuuvi Festival for a weekend of music and my film thrown in somewhere in there.

Anyways, that's it for now! Here's a drawing I did with some bright colors that I'm beginning to find very hard to look at.

so here's some really old stuff

I was looking at a friend's website today and saw a lot of the drawings we developed for a pitch he was working on last year posted up all over the place. It's been about a year since we completed them, and assuming now it'll never be picked up, I'd like to share the things I drew for it.

The show was called "Carnies" and, you guessed it, involved a bunch of carnival freaks and the havoc they wreak in and out of their traveling circus. I could only locate the clean ones from his site, and the rough ones were just things I found from an old hard drive, and were more the working sketches, that may have not even made it until the end. In a couple, you can see the progression of the characters.

Anyways, this is my house-cleaning. Hope you like!

¡La cosa terrible de Alpha-9!

so maybe i'm being a bit vein, but i've been floored recently that i've seen so many people linking to my film and blog over the last month. while drawn.ca and motionographer.com were both so amazing as to put it up on their sites, some of my favorite links are the weirdest ones:

my film was pirated on a chinese site, complete with watermarking and advertisements! also, here it is en espanol! and the coolest one ever, i was just going through WJC's blog and found he'd drawn my spaceman. waaaaay awesome. if it was my birthday i'd consider it the best birthday present ever.



anyways, thanks so much for everyone watching! if you find any more weird links, let me know!

some sketches

hey sorry for the break. i can't believe it's been a whole month since the last post! anyways, i'm playing around with ideas for a comic right now and some of these are some beginning thoughts. more hopefully to follow!

my thesis is finally online!

Sorry it's been a month since my last post. It's been pretty crazy what with graduating, family visiting, and moving that I haven't had any time to do any actual drawing. I need to get back in the swing of things now.

But until then, my thesis film, The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9! is now on Cartoon Brew for hopefully everyone to see! Hope you enjoy.

In the spirit of the thesis that's totally over, here are the beginning designs and super rough ideas of backgrounds before I started laying out and animating. They don't even look like the same characters to me now after they've changed through animating. Thanks to everyone who's seen it so far!

brand new demo reel

this is my time while at SVA. enjoy!

Jake Armstrong Demo Reel May 2009 from jake armstrong on Vimeo.

breakdown

Clip 1 (:04) —“The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9!” Thesis Film; Flash, After Effects; 2009
Clip 2 (:08) —Second year film-SVA; Hand drawn, Photoshop, After Effects; 2007
Clip 3 (:11) —“The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9!” Thesis Film; Flash, After Effects; 2009
Clip 4 (:20) —School project-SVA; Hand drawn, Photoshop, After Effects; 2008
Clip 5 (:27) —“The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9!” Thesis Film; Flash, After Effects; 2009
Clip 6 (:34) —School project-SVA; Hand drawn, Photoshop, After Effects; 2007
Clip 7 (:38) —“The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9!” Thesis Film; Flash, After Effects; 2009
Clip 8 (:42) —School project-SVA; Hand drawn, After Effects; 2008
Clip 9 (:49) —“The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9!” Thesis Film; Flash, After Effects; 2009
Clip 10 (:54) —School project-SVA; Hand drawn, After Effects; 2007
Clip 11 (:57) —“The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9!” Thesis Film; Flash, After Effects; 2009
Clip 12 (:59) —Second year film-SVA; Hand drawn, Photoshop, After Effects; 2007
Clip 13 (1:02) —School project-SVA; Hand drawn, After Effects; 2008
Clip 14 (1:08) —School project-SVA; Hand drawn, After Effects; 2008
Clip 15 (1:17) —Second year film-SVA; Hand drawn, Photoshop, After Effects; 2007
Clip 16 (1:20) —School project-SVA; Flash; 2008
Clip 17 (1:23) —Personal test; Flash; 2008
Clip 18 (1:25) —“The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9!” Thesis Film; Flash, After Effects; 2009
Clip 19 (1:27) —School project-SVA; Hand drawn, After Effects; 2008
Clip 20 (1:28) —Second year film-SVA; Hand drawn, Photoshop, After Effects; 2007
Clip 21 (1:30) —“The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9!” Thesis Film; Flash, After Effects; 2009
Clip 22 (1:35) — School project-SVA; Hand drawn, After Effects; 2007
Clip 23 (1:39) —“The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9!” Thesis Film; Flash, After Effects; 2009
Clip 24 (1:40) —“Superjail!” Internship (cleanup and inbetween); Flash; Augenblick Studios 20008
Clip 25 (1:58) —“The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9!” Thesis Film; Flash, After Effects; 2009
Clip 26 (2:00) —Second year film-SVA; Hand drawn, Photoshop, After Effects; 2007
Clip 27 (2:06) —School project-SVA; Hand drawn, After Effects; 2008
Clip 28 (2:11) —“The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9!” Thesis Film; Flash, After Effects; 2009
Clip 29 (2:16) — Second year film-SVA; Hand drawn, Photoshop, After Effects; 2007

SVA DUSTY film festival

just to let anyone know that may be in new york this week, the SVA animation thesis screenings are this thursday the 7th, with my thesis playing roughly nine-ish. it's at the sva theatre, playing from 7pm-11pm. that's 4 hours of cartoons for free. pretty amazing if you ask me. hope to see you there.

the sva theatre
333 w 23rd st,
ny ny 10011

The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9!

almost done! it's weird when 8 months of straight work and worry all slowly wind to a stop. it's kind of a pre-post-partum thing, where you stop thinking "all i need is rest" and start thinking, "okay, what next?"

until i can figure that out, i made some postcards for my thesis (of which the screening is may 7th i think). i'm really a child when things come in the mail for me, especially something printed. i'm so eagerly waiting that i just keep hitting refresh on the ups page, even though i know when it'll arrive.

if you want one, find me in the Digi lab, comment, or email, and i'll be sure to get one to you, no matter how far. i got 500 so i want to get them out, i can't stand to see unused printed things!

Thesizing the demons

this is right before the monster gets hit in the face with a laser. kind of like a dog chasing an oncoming car.

luckily, i can't really draw

here are some screenshots for my thesis. i'm putting these particular images up because these were some of the most unmistakably bad inbetweens in the current section of my thesis in production. regardless of how unreadable they are as for what's actually going on, they all made me very happy that they made it into my film. bad drawings really are so much more ambiguous and fun than good drawings ever could be.

(as a sidenote, the fourth drawing isn't even mine, it's by the wonderfully talented kat, who's doing her own brand of great bad drawings in my thesis. with her helping, it's going to be sooooo good. i'm way excited.)

mini failures and mini successes

So here's a couple pictures relating to the prior post about making a sign for a comics section that was supposed to wrap around a wall. In the end, I did get to make the sign, which I thought turned out pretty well, aside from the easter-egg colors that ended up coming out when I tried to paint with wet acrylics on foam core. I felt that it didn't work, so posted with it is what I would have done had I planned better. Next time!

On the upside, I got to ink it with a sumi brush. That stuff is so much fun to play with!

screenshot

Here's what I'm choosing as the screen shot for the Dusty's book, thought this might be a good time to finally start putting some thesis stuff up. I think this is final color, but I'll probably use some textures. This still feels too bare for me.

I've done about 6 months on my thesis so far, and have a frightening two months left. It's time for some prayers...

Hope you like!

Phoenix airport

If you can't tell, I'm really trying to post a lot more lately to keep myself working on different things. That's why I'm trying to work with color and textures in more recent pictures, which I'll try to post more of soon. I'm somewhat new to textures these days, so if this is too much, let me know! This one was when I was waiting for a plane in the Phoenix airport for 3 hours, because of inclement weather in Denver. Seems like every time I travel I get stuck somewhere, but I'm getting used to pulling out my sketchbook at these times, and kind of starting to enjoy this forced people-drawing time.

finally back to work

after three weeks of not being able to work on thesis (plus a really good excuse to be lazy and catch up on my smash brothers), i finally went back to work this week and now get to devote all of my time to thesis. don't get me wrong, i love working on this stuff, but this was me on monday: totally exhausted because i woke before 11am.

air travel

this made 6 hours stuck in the airport worth it.



and to stay with the air theme, this was on a plane to london. woohoo!