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