Shallow People/Deep City

An animated short that builds on traditional animation techniques. The characters (and some objects) are hand-drawn, scanned, colored, printed and cut out. The sets are built in miniature, matching the size of the characters. The whole thing is shot like a stop-action animation. Instead of moving a character's limbs between frames, a different drawing is placed into the shot. Digital animation techniques are used sparingly to add atmospheric effects or elements that are otherwise too complicated to draw or too big to build.

I've been interested in animation, and understood its core concepts from an early age. My background is in Fine Arts (with drawing as a concentration) and Video/Film Production. Naturally, these different disciplines combine well in the world of animation. Though I am mostly interested in learning to animate in the way we think of animation, I have an urge to create something original and inovative, but at the same time, aims to undermine the over-use of special effects and CGI that has become so common in the world of cinema

Popular animations in both the realm of Disney and Warner Bros., and Japanese Animation use 3D graphics to create rich backgrounds for their animations while the characters remain mostly traditional 2D animation. Examples of this are "Ghost in the Shell II" and "Beauty and the Beast".

Stop-action animations like "A Nightmare before Christmas" use modular heads for their figurines in order to animate detailed facial expressions. One is removed and another placed on the figure between frames.

A recent commercial for United Airlines used shillouette animation techniques, but without the shillhouette. The characters were in full color and moved about the 3D space. This is the closest example I've found to the technique I am using.

Anyone who likes animation.