Jake Fried

Jake Fried is an American animator who began as a painter. Watching an image change as he reworked a canvas drew him to animation. He draws on a single sheet of paper with ink and white-out, sometimes adding gouache, collage or coffee, and scans or photographs the drawing after every change, so each film is one picture altered more than a thousand times. Most of his films last about a minute, run as loops and carry sound he makes himself.

Colossal, Gizmodo and It's Nice That covered his early films, among them The Deep End, in 2013. That year his work screened at Tate Modern, where Saatchi & Saatchi presented its pick of new directors, and it has since played at festivals from Annecy to Ottawa. His films have been shown on Adult Swim and Netflix. He drew the opening of Dan Deacon's When I Was Done Dying video for Adult Swim, has made commissioned work for Coldplay, and has taught at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

In 2021 and 2022 he minted films as 1/1 NFTs on SuperRare, among them Night Vision and Paper Trail, a 2017 collage film built from about 1,500 layers. In 2022 Christie's sold Baby Eyes in a benefit sale for MAPS. His own contract also holds films such as The Deep End, and in NORTH STAR, built on a Transient Labs contract, each holder chooses whether their token shows the original animation, a single frame or a remix.