The animated short film “Long Live New York”, directed by 2014 Oscar-winner Laurent Witz, aims to inspire activism in New York. In the film (and more or less in real life), the city is dying due to record low organ donor registration and there is only one way to bring it back to life. New Yorkers must step-up to help other New Yorkers, and ultimately ensure New York stays strong.

For the backgrounds, it was complicated to create an entire city, so we chose to create the 3D city as a theatre set, with everything facing the camera and little or no perspective. The depth is created with successive layers rather than real perspective.

The character animation, especially for the janitor and the sculptor, is very delicate. The main characters don’t move a lot and their actions are quite subtle but all the more deep. We used Maya and 3DS Max for modeling, animation, character rigging and rendering.

We separated the characters, buildings, trees, lampposts, New York elements so we could control them individually and work on their different layers: specular, color, texture, etc. This helped a lot in controlling the general atmosphere of each scene.