Technique

I was trying to animate the characters and background at the same time on different glass, but the difficulty is that the lighting from the bottom and the lighting on the top are not even, it will make some shadow on each layer. So I decide to animate separately and composite in Adobe After Effects.

Crew

Film Title：The Umbrella
Produced at GFS
Director, Producer, Animation, Sound design: Xin Li
Music Composer: Timothy Bond

Technique

This short film has been made with oil painting on glass. This is the first time I tried this technique and I find a lot of interesting characteristic not only in the texture of oil painting but also the painting inbtweens. It can be a little bit abstract and it can gives the audience a realistic feeling of the animation. But the difficult part in this technique is the planning. I have to make sure how the timing and spacing works before I started painting.

Story Planning

There is a big time gaps in this film crossing 30 years. For a three minutes film, this is a difficult situation to deal with the storyline. I did seven versions of animatic and finally I decided to choose flashback to tell the story.

I have been inspired in a friend's wedding. This film is about a relationship between a father and a daughter. A father sitting in a park waiting for the daughter. It starts raining and it reminds him the memory in the rainy day with his daughter. He took the umbrella in every rainy day for the daughter till her wedding and the husband took the umbrella for her.