STRATOSTORM Umbrella

We last spoke to you back in 2018 – what’s been your news since then?

Helena Hilario (Executive Producer): First of all, thank you so much for your continuous support, we appreciate it! Corona has been a great partner in our productions since the beginning of Stratostorm.

Everything at the studio is going great! We continue providing animation solutions for advertising projects and we are also creating original content, Currently we have several original IPs in development for kids and young adults. 

We started the year producing the 5th season of our on-going original project Toontubers for Cartoon Network, and also creating weekly original content for Netflix. 

We hit for the first time the film festival circuit with our new in-house project “Umbrella” and we are massively honored and humbled by the great response we are receiving from audiences and film festival juries around the world.

What lead to the initial idea for “Umbrella”?

Helena Hilario: “Umbrella” is inspired by a heartbreaking true event that happened to my sister in December 2011 when she visited an orphanage and little boy kept on asking for an umbrella.
In our story our main character never turns negative on the world or his life. Through the story, we find out why a simple yellow umbrella holds a lifelong fascination for him. 

Mario and I we wrote the script and we wanted to make an animated short film – but we didn’t work with animation at the time. The years went by, and we ended up working in post production and animation and we knew in our hearts that one day we would be able to bring this story to life.

The message of the film is empathy for others. That one can make a huge difference in the lives of others by just being kind. We never know what others are going through or what they may be struggling with. 

This story was chosen over others because it’s our personal project, and we thought that if we were able to get it right, it would put us and Stratostorm in the spotlight as a creative studio committed to beautiful and compelling storytelling. 

Did you always plan for it to be a full, in-house animation?

Helena Hilario: Yes we always wanted to produce Umbrella independently. It took a few years of planning financially for us to be able to green-light the project and start a full time production at the studio.

Our small but resourceful animation team took 20 months to bring UMBRELLA to life, but in reality the project took a total of eight years from ideation to completion. Our 3D team was lead by Alan Prado, along with Hannry Pschera as the animation supervisor, and Danlo Pinheiro as the rigging supervisor.

The main character, Joseph, and six supporting characters were designed by Victor Hugo (Moana, Disney; Marvel) – what lead to him becoming involved with the project?

Helena Hilario: We came across his work and  loved his style, and we wanted to invite him to be involved in the project. We met Victor Hugo at THU (Trojan Horse Was A Unicorn) in Portugal back in 2015 and I talked to him about Umbrella. He was touched by the story and we thought he would be the best artist to design our characters.

We heard from Victor Hugo that he has started using Corona Renderer since learning about it through this project – how did the design process with him work?

Helena Hilario: When he joined the project, we handed him our concept art for the characters and told him we were using Corona Renderer.

He was in charge of the work in the all the character stages, from first approving sketches through to the look-development and grooming. He was not directly involved in the rendering stages, but after we had most of scenes rendered, we talked to him again to get some more input from him. 

It took 20 months to complete the animation, can you share how that time was broken down?

Dhiego Guimarães (Art Director): After a long pre-production/preparation period, the first elements of the short film to be produced in 3D were the main characters.

Because everything would unroll around them, we started to develop the scenarios and the whole visuals of the short as soon as the main characters were close to being completed, when they were ready to begin the rigging process. At that moment, we decided all the key points involving each shot and created layouts of all the scenarios, so that all the animation could be made in parallel with the detailing of those environments.

From here, it was a very collaborative process between animation and modeling/look-dev, as the shots were taking shape simultaneously with the refining of the animation. After several months, we had all the character animations done, then we spent the last 6 months refining each shot, adding details such as the rain and falling leaves, and adding all the cloth and hair simulations to finally render the full scenes.

The animation makes extensive use of cloth and hair – What was that process like?

Alan Prado (3D Supervisor): For the clothes, we used the native 3ds Max cloth simulation, and once simulated the cloth was baked and reloaded as PointCache data. That way we could map different parts of the cloths with different simulation parameters and have smooth control overall.