village people.

'TOON COUNTERPARTS OF REAL ACTORS SEARCH FOR ROMANCE IN THE EAST VILLAGE

WHAT WOULD YOU GET IF YOU COMBINED the action and story line of HBO's hit show Sex in the City with the look of an Andy Warhol painting.* Something that resembles Avenue Amy, a uniquely animated television series that appears on the Oxygen channel as part of the station's X-Chromosome programming lineup.

Avenue Amy, produced by Curious Pictures in New York, chronicles the dating exploits of Amy, a 23-year-old hip urbanite from New York's East Village who is constantly on the prowl for romance but ends up attracted to the loser du jour. The show, created by director Joan Raspo and writer/actress Amy Sohn, is based on an autobiographical column written by Sohn for the New York Post, called "Female Trouble," which provides comical, colorful commentary about the complicated world of dating.

"Every week I'd read her column, in which she would give euphemisms for the male characters she would date and the places she would go," says Raspo. "Amy's writing style is incredibly cinematic, like a script. As I was reading it, in my mind I'd have a picture of a cartoon-like world that [partially] separated the real identity of the people and places from those she talked about in her column." Raspo then approached Sohn about creating an animated sitcom based on the column content and Raspo's own conceptual visualization about that world.

"I had a clear idea as to the kind of animation the show should have. I didn't want it to be cel, and I didn't want it to be character-based in a goofy way," explains Raspo. "Rather, I wanted it to resemble reality but with a distorted look between the live action and animation--similar to how Andy Warhol would shoot a portrait and later alter it in the silk screen process."

Developing a technique that would help Raspo realize her vision in a compelling yet efficient way was left to the computer graphics department at Curious. According to Lewis Kofsky, visual effects supervisor for Avenue Amy, the team spent months in R&D, at times going down blind alleys. "We played with just about everything we have in our toolbox--motion capture, pure rotoscoping, and all kinds of new software and hardware," he says. "We knew we were going to produce many minutes of animation a week on a production budget, so we had to find an economical way of achieving the look. Our solution ultimately takes the expressiveness and nuances of live-action performance and mixes them with the magic of animation, walking the line between both worlds"

The result is a mixture of multiple techniques live action, cel animation, 3D computer graphics, and compositing--to produce a gritty, downtown live-action production with an animated cel finish.