Animation Short - Umbrella Malfunction
Bo doesn’t have the best luck with tools 🌂
Short Commentary
One of the goals for 2026 was to flesh out the Giggle Gang characters. Since I want this series to be focused on original gags, I thought it’d be fun to do some character acting based on the topic of ’Spring’ and see how each of the characters would react with the topic. It was fun to put Bo in a situation where I can explore his character through motion. Since Bo was alone in this short, I thought it’d be fun to see how he behaves alone. He always felt like a grumpy character to me, but he seems very comfortable skipping across fields and taking in the sunshine. He also doesn’t have much good luck now does he? That might have been unclear in previous shorts, but it seems obvious in this one.
Each of the Giggle Gang characters have their own quirks and rules that animate them. Please look forward to seeing the rest of the gang show up in future shorts!
The Production
The production for this short was mostly painless. One of the most fun parts about making it was giving Bo so many different facial expressions. Animating with puppets can be pretty limited, but I made it a priority to give Bo as many distinct reactions as possible. One of the more cumbersome aspects of the short was the effects. Before making it I knew I would have to animate the lightning in After Effects. What I didn’t know was how frustrating it would be to animate Bo getting shocked in Toonboom. The problem appeared when I needed to switch positions between Bo’s skeleton, and his flesh. This short uses the V6 puppets so this came as a surprise but before this short I had never used the ‘full body swap’ switch on a puppet. Lesson learned, and notes made for the V7 puppet. One of the other notable quirks of this short was the rain. I dislike hand animating particle effects a great deal, and usually I do them in After Effects where possible. However, this time I wanted to try to animate the effects in Toonboom and put simply: that didn’t work out. I still have a lot to learn in regard to Toonboom’s particle engine. It’s not intuitive at all, unfortunately (especially in comparison to After Effects). So after that attempt failed, I went back to what I know. The rest of the short progressed fairly smoothly once things moved from After Effects to Premiere.
Overall, the short was fairly convoluted to make. Even though it has a simple set up (1 character acting), it somehow caused me trouble in places I didn’t expect. Sometimes that’s just how a production goes.
