We recently connected with Henrike Lendowski and have shared our conversation below.

Henrike, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

As an artist I am very interested in environmental topics and the protection of nature. One of the most meaningful projects I have worked on was my last animated short film “diminuendo” that I completed as part of my MFA in Animation at Pratt Institute. “diminuendo” is a visual meditation on the detrimental effects plastic waste that pollutes the ocean has on marine life. Through visual metaphors the viewer is guided through sceneries that get more and more covered by plastic. To emphasize the contrast between the natural world and the plastic, the animation is done entirely with black ink on paper, except for the plastic, which stands apart from the oceanic life in bright digital yellow. The two parts are united through the pulsing paper texture that shines through the semi-opaque yellow as a constant reminder of the underlying life it covers. Working on the animation was a very long and time-consuming process that took more than two years, so I was very happy when the film started to get some recognition in the festival circuit. Since then, “diminuendo” has won six awards and has been selected to be screened at over 50 film festivals around the world. One of the most rewarding experiences for me was when the film was played as part of a special screenings event at the 9th UNECE Ministerial Conference in Cyprus.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am a 2D Animator and Illustrator, currently based in Berlin, Germany. During my undergraduate degree in Illustration, which I received from the HAW Hamburg in Germany, I was lucky to get a scholarship to study one semester at Parsons the New School in NYC. There, I was exposed to all kinds of different classes I didn’t have access to in my home country, like storyboarding and moving images classes. Since I have been playing cello ever since I was a kid, letting my drawings come to live and combining them with music really resonated with me. I fell in love with 2D animation, especially independent, experimental animated shorts and really wanted to pursue that passion as a graduate degree. As degrees in animation are quite limited in Germany, I started applying to programs abroad. That is how I ended up moving back to NYC, where I began my MFA in Animation and Motion Arts at Pratt Institute. I graduated during the pandemic in 2020, which was really tough, especially as an international student. Since then I started to freelance and have taken on a variety of different animation projects, ranging from joining productions on an animated short film, an animated documentary and a feature length animation to short-length editorial projects. I got to be a part of these projects through connections I have formed in the industry from attending talks and film festivals and through friends. I have worked as part of a team for an animation studio where I got handed a new scene to animate every week and I have been a part of much smaller teams, where I got to take on multiple roles from developing storyboards to creating assets, animating and working on the sound design. Being a part of such different productions has taught me a great deal about the industry. Ultimately, I would like to work on another personal short film project again, which is why I have started to concentrate more on drawing and developing a new personal body of work ever since moving back to Germany.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

Something I often experience is that people completely underestimate the amount of time and work that goes into any creative project. They only see the end result and don’t realize that behind what they are seeing are hours of research and sketching and then of course revisions and corrections before it even comes to the final visual that they are looking at. Especially when it comes to animation, some people tend to think that the computer basically does all the work for you these days. Since 2D animation is such a time consuming process and there are several steps involved, from storyboarding to creating an animatic (where sound and storyboard are combined) to animating rough key poses to cleaning those up, to coloring everything and creating the final cut – I’m oftentimes having a hard time explaining what I do and why I am drawing every single frame in the animation by hand, since there is this misconception that a computer can basically animate anything in any style, especially since conversations about AI have been in the media so much recently. I wish people would acknowledge that there is a lot of creativity and work behind the scenes, not only the research for a certain topic (both content-wise and visually), but also a lot of sketching, coordinating and planning – which requires a lot of passion and oftentimes patience – that goes into just starting a new visual project.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I feel like pursuing a creative career oftentimes puts you in situations in which you have to overcome obstacles and show resilience. After graduating with my MFA in animation at Pratt Institute, I was working in various positions as an animator, assisting a gallery artist in New York and working remotely for Maan Creative, an animation studio in South Africa, amongst other things. Since the animation industry in the US offers much more opportunities compared to the fairly small industry in Germany, I was hoping to find a full time job at an animation studio to get a better insight into the industry. Unfortunately, the pandemic hit the year I graduated and job prospects and with them the opportunity to renew my visa status were very limited. When the job offers I got came too late for me to submit the necessary paperwork, it threw all my work and plans into turmoil. I was unable to renew my visa and had to move back to Germany. I was truly devastated since I had been living in NYC for almost five years. I had my friends and a community there, I had adapted to the culture and found a home. Being back in Germany was very difficult in the beginning. I was happy to be close to my family again, but I had been away for so long that I felt like a foreigner in my own country. I experienced what you can probably call reversed culture shock. All of these emotions were of course standing in my way when it came to getting any creative work done. On top of that, there weren’t many opportunities in the field of animation in Germany. Moving to the UK wasn’t an option for me due to Brexit and my French is too bad to have access to the industry there (which is the biggest animation industry in Europe). So I felt very stuck. Ultimately, I realized that I had to make a choice. I didn’t want to live a life full of regret if I let something slip away because of one setback. I was still in an incredibly privileged position being from a stable and safe country and having my family’s and friends’ support. So I started building a new life in Germany. I moved to Berlin, a city where I had never lived in before, to have access to a large creative community. I picked up my own drawings again and started to concentrate on developing a personal body of work, something I hadn’t been able to do at all in the prior year due to freelance work and the necessity of finding a full-time job to keep my visa. I began playing cello again everyday, what I hadn’t been able to do since I could not take my cello to the states. Additionally, I started taking art and sound design courses to find a creative community. Thanks to my friends in NY I also got recommended for a few projects and could take on new freelance work again. It took some time to find my resilience and I don’t know where I would be without my family and friends, but eventually one step at a time I found my creativity again.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.henrikelendowski.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/henrike_lendowski/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henrike-lendowski/