By MANON BANTA, Contributing Writer

Director Osbert Parker worked on his own for 15 years to create his 2006 AFI FEST animation shorts entry, FILM NOIR. But for his newest animated short, YOURS TRULY, he created a self-imposed deadline of one year and teamed up with several animators, writers and researchers.

YOURS TRULY is full of noir-ish elements that one may not normally associate with animation. Yet the intriguing film is infused with a horrific, surreal humor not possible in live action.

"I like taking a technique of animation, one frame at a time and drawing parallels to detective work - finding clues and piecing together pieces of a story," Parker explains. "The facts of a case are close to the process of filmmaking and animation in particular."

Parker has a background in graphics, mixed media and commercials but describes himself as an impatient filmmaker, acknowledging that is an oxymoron for an animator.

Parker is like a DJ sampling from a cross pollination of genres. He films with Super-16mm Bolex cameras, cuts in live action to contrast with the animation and converts old techniques to make them modern. With small clips of footage from the Getty Archive, he takes a photo of every frame, cuts out the image and then re-photographs it.

The cutout photo is placed in a toy car and in flip book fashion - one photo, move car, replace photo and take another photo - six seconds of film takes half a day to create. Using a multi-plane camera technique similar to what Disney used with Snow White, he films these photo cut outs next to three-dimensional objects in a pop-up-book style. This gives the appearance of a three-dimensional collage nearly the size of a shoebox. Found objects from Portobello Market in London: cupboards, drawers, and a 1950s fireplace, when filmed at certain angles, become the buildings of the forty-foot long set of a car chase. It took eight weeks to film ninety seconds.

Parker wraps up all this work thusly, "The beauty of short films is to challenge what you cannot do with features."