Baby Griffin

Dr. Strange

Here's my version of Dr. Strange. I sketched this out for the Comic Geek Speak art challenge on the CGS forums.

Frank's Monster

DRAGON!

YAR!

The Joe

Here is the complete The Joe story line. If you haven't heard about this before The Joe is a mini comic I did with my friend Joe Koski loosely based on a trip he took to Texas. I had been looking to do a mini comic when Joe told be about the writing he was doing. After seeing Joe's writing I thought that the story would make a perfect mini comic. While this comic is far from perfect it gave me the opportunity to experiment with the process of making a mini comic. Each "chapter" of The Joe I used a slightly different approach do drawing and inking. In the end I think I finally found a method of creation that got me results I was satisfied with and a method I think could evolve into something really slick. Maybe sometime later I'll post about the method I used.

Assassin!

A Scarecrow and a Wrestler

I forgot to post my scarecrow from last week (that's what I get for finishing a sketch before the friday deadline) so you all get a double dose of drawing fun!

Class 3

I can upload to my website again! That means I can share some of my work with you guys.

My mentor for class 3 was Scott Lemmer who worked on Jimmy Nuetron and Ant Bully at DNA and just recently started working at Pixar. Scott was a really cool guy with an amazing passion for animation. He had a great eye for seeing the big idea of a shot and helping me improve my work. Looking back at my work from class 3 I can really see a noticable improvement from my first assignment to my last assignment. Scott helped me a bunch with my transitions from pose to pose. If you take a look at my first assignment my transitions are stiff and a little robotic like. But in my second assignment my transitions are broken up a bit better and they are much smoother. This is still something I need to work on but I am making progress.

Click on the image to see my class 3 work(1MB)

I just got a new computer that is going to be a huge time saver. I can now watch my animations play in real time in Maya! I also have been spending some time studying the masters. I have been going through the Illusion of Life and The Animators Survival Kit and copying some of the examples. I'll copy it in Plastic Animation Paper and then sometimes I'll do some more inbetweens. You can't learn anthing about timing from this but I'm learning a lot how those great animators think. This isn't something that is required by AM but it has been really fun and educational. Here's some samples of what I've done.

(52KB)

This Pluto recation is from the Illusion of Life pg50-51 and was animated Norm Ferguson. None of the subtlety is there and the timing is mine but I still learned from it.


This one is also from IOF on page 61 and was animated by Ham Luske.

Cheerleader

Garbage Man!

It's a bird! It's a plane! No it's Garbage Man!

AM sketch memory

Don't tell anyone this but sometimes I really wish I could do this.

Customer Service

80s metal rocker

Class 2 Reel

http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/C_2/Class_2_ex.mov

Hello animation fans! Here's my work from class 2. On to class 3!

Weekly Sketch?

Here are the weekly sketches that I did for the Animation Mentor forums. Most of these guys were done really quickly and some of them are pretty goofy proportionally. Something I need to work on. This first sketch is something I did for the Comic Geek Speak forum.

Iron Fist

"Undercover Agent"

"Cute Monster"

"Knight"

"Lazy Dragon"

"Mutated Bug"

"Useful Robot"

Class 2 Thoughts

Class 2 is over! I'm super excited and a little bit sad too. It was an awesome class. My mentor Paul Allen was amazing. (He just left DNA and had a hand in Jimmy Nuetron and the up and coming Ant Bully. Check out his blog at http://paulallenanimation.blogspot.com.) Super cool guy, he really knew his stuff and he wasn't affraid to be honest with us. Our Q&A sessions were tons of fun. My classmates were great too, I had Corey Stisser (http://http://stisseranimation.blogspot.com/) and Alejandro Mendoza from my class 1 class and I met some talented new animators like Robert Barros and Derek Gladen.

I also got involved in the student run Dailies and Frame Grabbers Club. These are weekly video chat sessions where we talk about our own work (Dailies) and frame through professional work (Frame Grabbers Club). I learned a lot durring all these sessions but the high point would have to be the last Frame Grabbers where Clay Kaytis (of Disney and the animation podcast) talked about a sequence of shots he did on Chicken Little.

This class was on the mechanics of movement and there was so much to learn. Wayne Gilbert (formerly of ILM and EA) one of my former teachers at De Anza taught a class on force that was so full of complex info and yet was so simply put it was amazing. Pete Docter (director of Monsters Inc) blew me away as a guest speaker and some folks from Blue Sky who worked on Ice Age 2 hosted a Q&A that was inspiring.

I could keep on writing about all the cool things that happened but it's lunch time so I'll stop here. Class 2 was great and I'm looking forward to Class 3.

AM Class 2 Week 11

Yeah so once again I have ignored my blog for too long. It's now week 12 so I've got some extra time because we don't have an animation assignment due this week. So unless I waste gobs of time on the internet I should get caught up this week. Here is my final assignment for Class 2 title "Stewie The Merciless"

http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/C_2/Merciless_Stewie080_ex.mov

AM Class 2 Week 7

http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/C_2/Mario_poll_jump068_ex.mov

AM Week 4 YEAH!

Hello friends, family, and sworn enemies! My fourth week of the second quarter was crazy full of work but it was fun too. I did a sketch of "Flaming Death" for the weekly sketch club/group/thing. It came out way more morbid than I thought it would I think I might need some serious counseling in the future but till then . . .



Also here is a link to the kick assignment that I finally finished.

www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/C_2/Stuie_ninja_kick_final_65_ex.mov

AM Class 2 Week 3

Another Week at AM is done. This week our assignment was to continue working on our assignment from last week. I'll post that when I'm done with it next week. Till then enjoy this sketch I did for the week sketch forum. This weeks topic was Wizard Wonder.

AM Class 2 Week 1 & 2

Late as usual posting this stuff. Sorry about that but it isn't a huge priority, getting the assignments done and learning to be an animator is the goal. Hope you enjoy this stuff.

Here is a pencil test I did to plan out my first assignment for Class 2. We are supposed to animate a kick, a 180 turn, or a side step. As usual I tried to bite off almost more than I can chew.
http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/C_2/ninja kick flipkick pencil ex.mov

Here is week 2 of assignment 1. My Ninja flip kick assignment, as I'm calling it, in the blocking stage.
http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/C_2/Stuie_ninja_kick_blocking_22_ex.mov

I would be posting images for you people to look at but sometimes (like right now) blogger doesn't like me.

AM Class 1 wrap up

Class 1 is in the bag! It was an awesome three months. I my mentor was amazing, my fellow classmates were super helpful, assignments were challenging, and the lessions were eye opening. I have been animating (or trying to animate) since 2002 when I was first introduced to softimage. I heard about the 12 principles and all that stuff pretty early on. But my understanding these past three months has grown a HUGE amount. My demo reel from before I started this class is useless now (and that is a really really good thing in my opinion). Bobby was right when he said

Right now it feels like you are still moving things around and not giving life to the characters. You definitely need training. You understand the software and that is evident, but you need to go much deeper into yourself to be an animator.

Well I better shut up before I sound like too big of a dork. Here is my Class 1 reel for all of you to enjoy. I have a long way to go yet but I know I'm on the right track.

http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/class1_video_JBK3.mov

AM Week 11

Well class 1 is coming to an end. Here is my last assignment, my zombie walk in 3/4 perspective!

http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/Ballie_Zombie3D_final_ex.mov

I still need to go back and revise this one.

AM week 8, 9, and 10

Its been a couple weeks since I've updated so here is three weeks in one. It three times the goodness.

Week 8: Intro to walk cycles. We had to do a plan basic vanilla walk. But only the blocking
http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/basic_walk_ex.mov

Week 9: Intro to walk cycles version 2.01. This week we had to polish the blocking we did the previous week and finish the vanilla walk cycle.
http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/basic_walk_finalex.mov

Week 10: Walk cycles with character. This week we had to do a walk cycle that communicated character in 100 frames. I got the stomache flu early in the week and was only able to put about 4 hours of work into it. It was a bad case of the stomache flu. But I seem to do my best work when I'm sick. Or at least I am very effciant when I'm sick.
http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/ballie_zombie_cycle01ex.mov

AM week 7

Here's my week 7 stuff. I had tons of fun with this one. In the end Raquel thought I got a little too creative and wanted me to tone down the tail action. I posted the original version where the Tailor (the little bouncing ball with a tail) does have control over his tail. Enjoy!

http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/tail_bounce_polishing_ex.mov

Cartoon Goodness

I just ordered the Beaver and Steve book. The dollar to pound exchange rate stinks by the way. I can't wait for it to arrive! On another cartoon note aside for a few spelling goofs I finished my Louie comic. You can check it out here . . .

http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/comics/louie.html

My next project is already in the works. More on that soon.

AM week 6

Okey Dokey here's my work from week 6. This week the lecture covered overlapping action. Another really basic animation topic that I thought I understood. And I did, intelectually. But once I got onto the computer I ran into more problems than I thought I would. I eventually learned a cool way to animate overlapping action that is simple and powerful at the same time. So that said I learned a lot this week.

http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/revise_export.mov

AM Week 4

Doesn't 4 come before 5? NO! Blogger killed my last post for some reason so you are getting post 4 late, out of order and without explination. Enjoy. . .

http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/am/heavy_v_light104c.mov

AM week 5

Week five was a tough one for several reasons. For our animation assingment we had the choice of three obsticle courses of assending difficulty. I wanted to challenge myself so I chose the third obstical course, a pinball machine. I made the whole process a lot more difficult by not planning enough, so I had a hard time getting the timing right. Then I got the flu and spent the last two days working on the assignment with a fever. It wasn't too much fun and now I'm exahusted. Here's the link

http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/pinball_finalb.mov

AM Week 3

I know, I know week four is almost over. I'm a fat lazy man! Well not really, I've been busy animating my week 4 assignments and coloring my Louie comic (which is almost done). Here is my work from week three at AM.


Notice my little timing boo boo that I didn't catch until after I scanned this image in. The frame numbers go 14,30,32,41, . . . They should have been 14,30,42,51, . . . oh well.


My amazing mentor Raquel Coelho liked my stu pose. The assignement was to pose stu in an exciting pose. Raquel's only critique was that the left foot looked like it was rotated back too far.

Here is a link to my bouncing ball assignment. We were supposed to animate a simple bouncing ball with the weight of a soccer ball from the side view.

http://www.jakekalsbeek.com/AM/bounce_shortroll_07revision2.mov

Raquel had a family emergency and had to go back to Brazil so this week we get to have Justin Barrett as a Q&A mentor. Check out his blog entry entittled Relationships, emotions, and animation over at http://www.justinanimator.com/blog/ it is really good stuff.

AM week 2

Week two has just come to an end. All my assignments are completed and I'm feeling pretty good about it. Our assignment was to go to a public place and do some live figure drawing, then pose our digital character Stu in one of the poses we sketched. It worked out pretty well. I completed my goal to do 100 sketches, but I didn't complete my goal of 10 Stu poses. I only did four. I'm not too worried about it though. I spent more time trying to polish the poses that I got and really learned a lot. I was struggling with some silhouette issues but a comment from Alejandro, a second termer, helped me out a lot. Here is what he said.

Jake
I had the same comment las semester and my mentor told me that you are working for animation, so you have to create that negative space by cheating the camera.

He basically (Matthew Russell) told me to rotate the torso, or the camera so the hands go away of the body the most possible. In "closed" poses the camera should be seeing a kind of "side" view, where the arms and hands are out of the body.

Try to put the pose in black and white, so the only visible thing is the silouette. Then ask somebody to look at it and tell them to describe the feeling of the character. If your pose reads, the person will understand it.

I browse my last semester assignments and found something similar to your pose. Check this image and how i rotate the torso and camera to avoid the arms inside the torso the most possible.

http://x12.putfile.com/1/1918045611.jpg

So play with the pose and trick the camera to achive the kind of poses you want.


Alejandro.

Here are some of sketchbook pages and my poses.




This is the pose that has the silhouette problem. I haven't fixed him yet.



I had actually planned to post a lot more but blogger isn't playing nice. Maybe I'll try again latter. My "best" sketch pages are up there. So enjoy.

Animation Mentor Week 1

All I can say is wow. Animation Mentor (AM) is all that I hoped it would be and much more. It has only been the first week and we haven't had a real assignment yet but man oh man it is awesome. The video classes are so packed with info, the are the guest lectures which are awesome, the forum is full of passionate students and animation ninjas, and I have a dedicated mentor to look over my stuff each week.

I've already have an "AH HA!" moment. Even though I haven't set one key or sketch one thumbnail I feel like I've improved through osmosis. My mentor this quarter is Raquel Coelho formerly from Blue Sky, PDI and more and is currently working at Tippet Studios. My class is full of 13 animators that are all excited about animation. It is a great place to learn.

From now on this blog will mainly be a record of my AM experience. Some of my other art will filter through, but I don't want to get distracted with too much jornaling.