Animating Greek Mythology: Heroes - Perseus

For this animated short, I will be condensing and retelling the story of Perseus and his task to slay Medusa. I have been reading translations of varying interpretations of the tale as it has been recorded by many poets throughout antiquity and the Roman revival prior to the dark ages.

For visual inspiration, I will mainly be referencing both red and black-figure vase paintings from ancient Greece. For the designs of clothing, buildings, weapons, monsters, etc; I will be drawing from Greek and Roman mosaics and sculptures as well as historical artifacts such as bronze-age armor and weaponry. I have found a pretty decent collection of images from a variety of museums from around the world which will be my main source of reference for all of these items.

In combination with these art and artifacts, I will also be drawing inspiration from Lotte Reiniger's stop-motion animations from the first half of the 20th century. The contrast between characters, objects, and the backgrounds will be necessary if I want to create a sense of depth to the scene and I think that working in a similar style to silhouette-puppetry will be a good way to do just so. Rather than being only in Red-Orange & Black, I will use different colors for each scene to denote the mood/tone which I think

Currently, the plan is to animate everything in Blender, which has a surprisingly loyal following of 2D animators. I will import 2D characters and many of the foreground and background objects will also be 2D vectors. However, I will still use Blender's 3D tools to stage the scenes and create depth, while also incorporating low-poly models, 2D shaders, and the EEVEE render engine to make things look cohesive. This will be similar to using the 3D camera in After Effects, but should be easier to manage, similar to a side-scrolling 2.5D level in Unity or Unreal Engine.

2D vector assets will be created in Adobe Illustrator and Clip Studio Paint.