Modes of Animation

When I started thinking about my final project, I was really interested in making a world that looked very artificial and sterile. I thought that the best way to achieve that would be to make the background very angular and gray. After some more thinking I decided that the people in this artificial world should also be angular and box-like (sort of like Rock-em-Sock-em Robots).
At this point, I wasn’t sure exactly what the story was, but I could distinctly picture one of my Rock-Em-Sock-Em (RESE) guys walking down a very film noir looking street at night. It was at this point, I decided that I wanted to make the animation about a forlorn and forsaken main character. This character would be shown on an empty street feeling lost and alone, when he comes upon a building with a marking on it. It would be in this place that he could find kindred spirits and find a “home”.
The more that I think about this idea the longer that it gets, so it is likely that this will be a piece of a longer story. I want the story to begin with the main characters birth where we see that he is different from his parents and the all the people around him even before birth. The narrative will then skip forward to his teen years, where the main character is caught by his parents with a same-sex love interest. It would be then that the thrown out main character and his love interest would be walking down the lonely street and find the building with the others like them. From there the main character and his love interest would push forward into a life of activism.
The animation is obvious entrenched in queer politics, which is a passion of mine, but as queer people are known as the invisible minority—and film is a visual art—I had to find a way to show that a person is gay in the animation. My decision was to have a double helix with the binding proteins (DNA) in the chest of the RESE. I also wanted the gay RESEs to have different colored eyes than the other—the eyes are going to be the primary source of expression for the RESE people. I plan on having them shrink and expand.
As of this moment my plan is to do initial sketches by hand and use photo shop to color and manipulate them. In order to continue the odd artificial design, I want to use the lights in AfterEffects to light the scene—thereby making it so there is not shading on my actual drawing.
As for sound, I would really enjoy an electronic/industrial soundtrack, but I do not plan on incorporating any dialogue. At the moment, I plan on working with Porcelain by Moby, but I’m hoping to have an original song at some point.