The animated short film “Long Live New York" 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.

From a technical point of view, we animated walk and run cycles for our ‘crowds’, with different rhythms and speeds, that we altered in accordance to each character and what they were carrying. What was important was the general impression given by the crowd, above individual animations.

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.

The project received a lot of press, both in the general market as well as the medical field. It is still too early to quantify the signups related to this launch of the short film, but awareness has been high on the client’s social media channels and beyond.