Kaleb Leino - individual Rookies submission (2023)
My first time submitting an individual entry to the Rookies! I am a story artist and character designer, with interest in narrative artwork of various mediums.
Hello there!
My name is Kaleb Leino, I am a recent graduate from DigiPen Institute of Technology. My area of interest is primarily in story art and character design/development - I have always had major interest in narrative and creating characters, and my interests have intersected into my drive to be a story artist.
Please enjoy this assortment of projects I have created!
Mother
"Mother" is a student team project I lead as a junior/senior at DigiPen. The teams entry can be found here: https://www.therookies.co/entries/23045 but these are the portions of the project I specifically worked on.
My roles on this team were as Art Director, Concept Lead, Story Lead, and 2D Animator. This project was one that I initially pitched at the start of our projects term, with the goal in mind to make something different from what I had normally seen come out of my college in recent years - I was interested in making a horror film. I was extremely fortunate to form a team of artists who were also interested in such a project, and over the next three semesters, we brought this dream to life.
Original Pitch
The film projects course I was enrolled in began with every student pitching their own idea to the class to begin forming teams around concepts. Thus, the beginning of this project was incredibly different than it ended as. While I always knew I wanted to make a horror story, my beginning concepts revolved around a boy walking home alone and having a mysterious doppelganger follow him, which he never sees throughout the entirety of the film. This concept was born from the concept of being afraid of your own shadow, and was inspired by a concept I find terrifying - never seeing a threat, even if it is directly behind you.
Ultimately, the original concept was scrapped once the team assembled. This was for many reasons, most notably that the needs of the artists on the team were not suited for the original pitch. In order to provide everyone on the team with roles they enjoyed and could benefit from, the entire project was rethought.
Character Concepts
My roles as art director and concept lead were two of my earliest, as I had already begun to establish a look and feel for the film when the team began to form. I started with the main character, named Ben later on into development but simply referred to as "B" for most of the project.
B went through a lot of iteration, and ideas for him were thrown out by various members of the team, as he was the first character that was a "for sure" in the film. His final design was also simplified to allow for easier animation, as the film was going to have 2D character animation.
My contribution to the design of the monster was much smaller, as I had teammates who were more interested in creature design than I was. Despite this, I created a few concepts for the monster and helped guide the style to ensure that the monster and human characters would all be able to fit into the same universe.
The parents were characters that lived on the back burner, not fully established until later on in the project, when the final story determined their roles and relevancy. I had a lot of fun designing them, keeping their shape language consistent with B's and ensuring that the mother character had enough parallels to the design of the monster that it could be recognizable that they are one and the same.
One of my responsibilities as art director was to ensure that the entire team knew how to work together to create a cohesive visual look. I dedicated a lot of time to creating guides, drawovers, and demos to my teammates in order to communicate the exact process that would help make everyone's life easier.
As story lead, I worked with a few other teammates and our professors to create the films animatic and plan story beats. Creating a horror film was a fun challenge that I learned a lot from - from how to make a story read in the first place, to how to invoke the feelings of suspense that I was aiming for - I took away a ton from this project, and it strengthened my understanding of storytelling as a whole.
The animatic linked below is the semi-final version: the 3D backgrounds in the second half were created by my teammates, but otherwise all work seen visually is my own.
The story for this project saw many changes throughout the production process, even having the entire ending scene be reworked while other portions were in production. Not every iteration was the neatest, but every single one improved on the overall story and flow of the project, and gave me chances to learn and revisit concepts.
The following images are examples of these iterations, as well as an example of a camera map created for the CG team to be able to place cameras in the 3D environment and match it with the animatic provided.
"Mother" was the longest, most ambitious project I have worked on, and I couldn't have done it without my team. It was an excellent learning opportunity for me, both as an individual artist learning how to contribute my ideas to the world, and as a teammate learning to communicate with the people around me.
Personal Project - Cartel Animatic
This animatic was created for an academic course during my final semester at DigiPen. Based on characters I have been developing for many years, it was an experiment in dialogue, setting a tone, and working with the camera in a 3D space to better frame shots.
Content Warning: the following animatic contains coarse language
Car Model Credit: Eukortis on TurboSquid
"Non-Super" was another project created for an academic course, which focused around sequential art and comics. I have always had interest in comics, but this was the first time I had taken a class dedicated to the proper creation of them.
"Non-Super" is a story that focuses on Eli Elastus, a teenager with superhuman abilities... only problem is, they're not very "super," nor even that useful. My intentions for this short story were to explore the concept of having abilities and talents (or lack thereof) but still finding your place in the world that makes you happy.
The following images are concept work and reference maps created for this project:
Personal Project - "Little Guys" Comic
Another comic assignment from my aforementioned sequential art course, but as a smaller-scale project. For this project, I was tasked with creating a world and character to then make a comic about. My partner and I were both in this class, and decided to discuss ideas together, creating two independent characters and storylines that could exist in the same universe. The cat character shown in the comic below is the character he created, which I incorporated into my story as a good friend of the character I created, Leif.
The Final Comic:
These pieces were created for an independent study during my final semester at DigiPen. I attended live drawing sessions once a week and worked up some of the gestures into more complete rough sketches. This course taught me a lot about pushing shapes and forms, and how to tell stories in quick, simple drawings.
Additional Character Designs & Illustrations
When I draw personal art, I gravitate strongly to my characters. To finish off this entry, I am including a small gallery of examples of personal art I've created for my own characters and storylines - ones I hope to someday turn into content that can be shared with others.
The characters in this gallery are all my own original designs and concepts!
Thank you so much for viewing my work!!
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