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.

Open Happiness I

I'm on it again.
Attacking animation with photoshop.
Think I'll end up making the globe into a flatter oval-ish map instead, the way it looks is bugging me....

Anyways, was told to do "a personal animation" something "that represented me".

I didn't really know what to do in the beginning, but after an unhealthy amount of hours listening to Monkey Majik songs I found that I'd do one of their songs in a style based on anime openings/endings. I went with the English version of their song "open happiness" not only because my teachers would have no idea what the text is in Japanese and I don't want to subtitle it, the English version, although sounding the same actually have a different text from the Japanese version which fit better with what I was doing.

If anyone argues at any point this animation is not personal just because I say it's based on anime and I picked a song by one of my favourite bands...they simply don't know me well enough to find the personal meaning in it. ù_ú (and I have no intention of explaining it to you if that is the case.)

Tumblr

Because tumblr is is the place to be these days I decided to make an art blog in addition to my main one Fuego Philippe, where everything I post seems to drown in reblogs of really cool things that I didn't make.

The artsy fartsy one is Fuego's Sketchbook, where I will probably post a lot of the same things that I post on my personal blogspot, Fuego's colored pencils - except without the walls of rambling and text. The people of tumblr don't seem to have the attention span for that.

The Amazing Eyelamp

Uni decided to give us a project to practice making short movies for our third year. I went with the option of picking a picture and making a story out of it.

I came up with the idea of eyelamps.
Because that is totally not a recipe for creepy things. At all.

Somehow this ended up a bit more violent than what I initially wrote down. I guess that's what happens when you don't really have it fully structured all the way.

I chose not to add sound to this for a couple of reasons:
- I didn't want to do the voice over for the news reporter/commercial commentator myself. I felt like my girly voice would kill any kind of gritty mood this thing has.
- I don't actually have a music track in my head for this one. Just the squeaky sound of metal joints moving and "I have been running too much" breathing.
- If they don't understand the story from this...then I don't think sound adding would do anything for it.

ChickenFox

My blog has decided to hate my youtube today so I just have to link them instead.


ChickenFox_9A
This scene was a bit tricky for me as I had to do a run cycle with a basket, but without the basket since the prop wasn't finished. The director didn't like it too much the first time around, so I had to animate a run cycle on the spot and paste it back into the animation.
The bear wasn't difficult at all, and was given the green light the first time around.

ChickenFox_5C_wip
This scene was something I started, but didn't quite finish, so it mainly consist of keyframes, especially the tail since I like to do the individual movement on that later once I get the run cycle right.


Both of the backgrounds are the stand in version from the animatic as the finished version was not done when I was working on the scenes.