James Stewart is adding another dimension to a traditional artist medium with his new short film, Beatrice Coron’s Daily Battles.

The Geneva Film Co. founder and 3D director is at the TED Conference in South Beach, California this week for the world premiere of the film today (Feb. 26), which is built around New York artist Beatrice Coron’s papercut Daily Battles piece.

Stewart and Coron, who also creates works in stone, glass, metal and rubber, first met at a TED event in 2011.

“She has cut out the silhouette story and it’s very abstract and very non-linear, and it struck me that even though she was working in a flat art form, there was potential for a lot of depth, which 3D gives you,” Stewart tells Playback.

The Daily Battles piece is a single papercut canvas two feet by two feet in size. Within the canvas are 61 scenes, each one a different vignette about day-to-day trickery set in a medieval castle – including, for example, a scene with Cinderella sweeping and her sisters trying on the glass slipper.

Stewart, working from a digital vector file of Coron’s piece, applied sound, 3D and lighting techniques to create effects around it.

“It struck me that when you look at a canvas like that in an art gallery, you tell your own story because your eyes move around it and everybody sees it in a different order. So we tried to do that in the film,” Stewart says.

He adds that he didn’t just want to animate the characters in Coron’s piece, but wanted to use the animation, depth and light to keep the piece at the centre, and make the film into a journey around it.

The result is a seven-minute film that Stewart says took about a year to make.

It’s the first time Stewart has applied 3D technology to paper. The idea continues the thinking behind his 2011 TEDU talk, about the way that applying 3D is changing storytelling. And echoing his recent Ad Week talk about hacking technology and using it for non-traditional purposes, he says it’s interesting to try to create work “in a medium that doesn’t exist.”

“I find that technology is changing so fast as a creative medium. As an artist, there are so many things that you can do with technology getting cheaper and you can find all these great storytelling tools,” he insists.

But he acknowledges that as an indie filmmaker, the chances of getting funding in the current marketplace for an obscure, abstract film with no story that adds technology to the mix would be slim.

That’s why taking the project to events like TED – where global artists, mathematicians, activists, tech wizards, scientists and VCs come together with less emphasis on siloed views of creative content – makes sense.

“It’s a great environment to show it because they get it. No one’s going to look at it and say, ‘why did they do it?'” he adds.

The film will premiere between sessions at TED2013: The Young, The Wise, The Undiscovered. This year’s speakers include economist Robert J. Gordon, U2’s Bono, robotics entrepreneur Keller Rinaudo, neuroscientist Stuart Firestein and multimedia artist Phil Hansen.