Software: I used NewTek Lightwave 3D 9.6 to animate the door sequence at the beginning and the end of the animation. I used Photoshop CS4 and a Wacom Intus4 Tablet to compose the rest of the frames for the animation. I used Adobe After Effects CS4 to compose, edit, apply special effects, and render the final animation. Inspiration: Visually, I wanted to make an animation that looked and felt like an old graphic novel set to motion. I wanted to fuse Crime Noir (Black and White) rendering of the images with an aged comic halftone dot print treatment. As for the concept/ subject matter, I decided that an introspective nightmare setting would be a good way to portray contest theme. Project Time: The animation took a while, because I blended 3D animation with hand drafted (frame-by-frame) animation. The drawings and render times took up the majority of time, because I chose to compose the animation at 1920x1080. The concept and storyboard work took about 2 days. I spent roughly 10 hours on the 3D elements and about 40 hours on the 2D frame work. The final compositing, editing, special effects applications and rendering took nearly 20 hours to complete. All in all, the project set me back about 118 hours (nearly 5 days) of work. The final render only took 59 min to complete. Hope everyone enjoys my animation.