Friends are like umbrellas 3

Thinking and pondering....

I have spent a little while now trying to come up with some smart way of telling the collage part of the story, but it's really the hardest part for me. I think it is because the original story has them being friends from the very beginning, and is just one paragraph long and doesn't go into any detail.....

I have tried doing smooth transitions using the umbrella as different tools, like parachute and boat, but that had me ending up with a gigantic sea monster which would have made it a completely different story. Also it have given me great problems on how to include the patch that is supposed to go on the umbrella before the crash. Ai suggested that I have the patch belong to the girl and it would be an equal exchange, kids trade things all the time, it's how they make friends. So my head have started playing with the thought that the patch might originally be hers, he takes it and the umbrella rips in the process, she gets upset and he realizes he's been stupid and gives it back by patching up the umbrella.

I have now started to think in much simpler terms on how to do the transitions. Maybe a white backgrounds with a few panels on them which the characters interact with, going from one to the other, doing different things in them, almost like the typical "background changing as characters walk along" but in a more interesting way. Not just acting within the colored space, but also with the white space.

Talking and working

Had a little chat with Darren today.
I had done some storyboards for a part between the crash and the hospital visit where you can see the girl getting rushed into hospital and the typical heart blip going in the background. He pointed out that it would make it too long so I decided to cut it. Also, now that I look back on it, I don't really need it since I was blacking her out at the end of the crash. It is actually a nicer transaction just to have the camera black out and then blurredly pull back into focus in the hospital room.

I am having Yan have a go at my characters since my teacher told me to push the illustration style for them. I can't seem to do anything but the storyboard versions of the characters, I guess that's because I have already changed them multiple times before I properly started this project, and now my brain is just going "nope" since I have already had 3-4 hairstyles and colors on the girl and 2-3 on the boy, and about 3 different umbrellas. (-__-')

Anyhow I have started to write down the script, but I think I am doing it a bit wrong so I'll have to go over it again some other time when I'm done writing down the story as it is now.

Lone Wolf 1

I have been working a little bit together with my classmate Yasmin on her project "Lone Wolf".

These sketches and storyboards were done before her project went through and was told to change it by making it shorter, hence cutting out the scene I had originally started to storyboard. It is the original opening scene where Arty chases a butterfly and his older brother Mile gets told off by their father for not looking after him.

I had a quick knack at trying to do a little with her characters designs as she was told to change them. It is fairly close to what she already had since she had already modelled a wolf which she was planning to use and didn't seem very much up for spending another three weeks re-modelleing her entire character.

Friends are like umbrellas 2

My story passed the first stage and it seems like I have stuck with my working title.

I have been trying to work out the storyboards, I have done the beginning and from after the scene that shows their friendship being built, but I still need to deal with that one scene and work it out. I find that one to be a bit hard as it needs to flow from one thing into another while using the umbrella as a key feature - which makes it some sort of "1001 uses for an umbrella." I want to use symbolism as well, but it all depends on how abstract I can go with it before people don't understand it's their friendship in the shape of an umbrella.

First scene is pretty straight forward. She is bullied and he defends her using the umbrella as a bat/shield and sword.

 Traffic accident. Ended up a bit shorter with fewer pictures than what it plays in my head. I might have the rain come down from her perspective - seen from the ground up, but then it would make less sense to show the people standing around unless I turned the camera which I don't really want to do as she is turning her head the other way to find her broken umbrella. Also I thought it might be a nice little nudge to repeat the way it pans down from a rainy sky onto a circled crowd, like when something bad happened to her the first time, and now something bad has happened again.

Another little piece of a problem I am running into is how to deal with the hospital scene. I know I need to have her ask the people visiting her about the boy by using the umbrella, but I am a bit unsure on how to deal with it. I'm not entirely happy with the way I have solved it in the following page.

I'm not sure if I should have a black fadeout or a white after the umbrella drops since it's fading in black from the hospital scene it's probably better to use white.

Now off I go to find out how to deal with the hospital and the friendship scene.

Friends are like umbrellas 1

Nevermind my brilliant current working title for this. I don't really have a title at the moment and "friends are like umbrellas" sounds like one of the titles you'd get from the anime Gintama so I will most likely find something else on the way.


I'm making my own story for the third year film, it is about a friendship represented by an umbrella.
The first page is the main part of the story, or rather the first sketches I did for the story so it gave an general overview of the story.

The second page is the first storyboards where the guy picks up the girl on his scooter, the bottom part is bits and pieces of an idea for the ending after I had a talk though the story with one of my lecturers - after having some quite obvious stuff pointed out. Like the story missing a character arc the first time around.

After the talk I came up with something slightly longer than what I had first intended, but looking back I think it looks a bit more solid than just "scooter + traffic accident + dead"

The breakdown of the story is:
Guy gives girl umbrella  
-still have to figure why and how he does it-
 I have however decided that she wears black to represent her being depressed one way or another
Collage of how the umbrella is the thing keeping them as friends  
See the umbrella getting battered and worn over time, but it's still in one piece and getting patched up when it gets torn, being a physical representation of their friendship (always involved as a tool to pry open doors, sword fencing and baseball bat when they are fighting, or used as an actual umbrella -sun or rain in all the clips)
Guy picks girl up on scooter
girl is waiting outside in the rain, guy come to pick her up
Traffic accident
see the girl on ground, surrounded by bystanders, all with umbrellas because of the rain, looking to her side seeing her own umbrella broken beyond repair
Girl rushed into hospital
medics rushing her through a hallway on a stretcher with this heart meter sound in the background
Girl in hospital with friends
The girl is sitting in her hospital bed, her friends have some to cheer her up, when she nods to her broken umbrella on the chair next to her, her friends shy away, not wanting to answer her
Funeral
The girl is standing in a lineup in front of a coffin with her broken umbrella in a white dress, she drops the umbrella into the hole
Another Rainy day
The girl is dressed back in black walking past a person in the rain, looks down at her hands where she has the patch that used to be on the umbrella, stops and stands still in the rain, returns to hold her umbrella over the stranger she just passed.

She was supposed to just drop the broken umbrella down into the hole with the coffin at the funeral, I don't know if to keep it or not though, my lecturer suggested putting it on top of the grave. I kind of like the idea that she gives up for a while, letting go of the umbrella itself, but keeps this one little piece of it - the patch that got stitched on, then passes by anther person that is who she used to be, she stops and thinks for a bit before realizing that just because that person that meant a lot to her is gone doesn't mean her life is over, and she can mean something for someone else just like he did to her.

Sort of a "pay it forward" thing.

Open Happiness II

The finished animation of Open Happiness.

I didn't really change anything on it, I found that making the map flat or oval shaped simply ended up confusing and looking pretty bad so I went with the round planet instead. There is an instance or two I would have liked the animation to be smoother - it seems a bit quick, but I only had 20 seconds to play with. The end was supposed to be animated, not still shots of them jumping all into a pile, but I simply didn't have the time to animate and color it all if I were to hand it in on time.

Either way I had fun doing this. Even though I worked alone on it I had a lot more fun than my initial project simply because I was making it not only for myself, but for my friends as well. It is a whole different feeling working on something when the people around you are positive to what you do.