Friends Are Like Umbrellas - Report 1

To fill in the gaps between the long waits of cinematic progress in the other projects I am working on, I have found myself employed in another bachelor project called Friends Are Like Umbrellas, directed by Elisabeth Haukås. In this short, a girl is in posession of an umbrella, which keeps the friendship of her and a boy very strong, despite hardships along the way. I was put on the project to do rough animations for certain shots, which I am posting below, and I will explain how I went about each of them. I hadn't done any 2D animation since my first year in the course and was really rusty, which can be seen particulary in the last clip, however I did get a lot of advise from Elisabeth on how to approach these problems. I have almost entirely focused on 3D character animation this year, so it was nice to have a chance to develope my 2D animation skills as well.

In this shot we have the girl grabbing a star in a shot that shows how she uses that star to mend her broken umbrella, that was ripped up by thorns. As such I had to animate a human hand going in a upward motion, extend it's digits, close the digits around the star and then move the hand downwards and in opposite direction. The problem I had here was the speed of the motion was too constant all the way through the animation, and it also had last for only one second. So I had to make it look good in terms of animation, but it will be gone in a blink of an eye due to the short duration. So it has to look belivable in a very short timeframe.

This one was a very difficult shot for me, being very rusty when it comes to 2D animation. I had to animate the girl and the boy sitting on a blanket, and then the girl uses her umbrella to give them shade by planting it on the ground, but then a strong wind comes and flies it off. The difficulty of this shot presented that I had to do a 2D character animation, which has different approaches since the benefits of 3D animation is that you don't have to re-draw the characters. This made the characters look wobbly when they move, which I would try to cure by animating by two's, but the integrity of the characters still looks uneasy. I do enoyed having a go at making a 2D character animation, but it is obvious that I do need more practice at it.