Need Freelance Illustrator/Animator for 30-60 Second Cartoon-Style Animation

Budget: $1,000 to $2,500

I'm a graphic designer working with a colleague on projects for a software startup and one component is a video.  For the video we'd like to include 30-60 seconds of cartoon animation to give a unique, engaging, and fun style.  The software is about communities/relationships/connections...It will feature things happening in a residential community with characters communicating and an aerial view of the neighborhoods.  So we'll need illustrations of homes, foliage, and people, and we'll need to pan around this world and zoom out from it to show various types of neighborhoods.  Illustrations should be fun and colorful but modern and stylish, a vectorized look is preferred.  The theme is "threads" which may need to be tied in somehow through clothing or street grids.  Animations will not require any voiceover work. 

- Please provide timeline requested to produce best possible results for 30-60 seconds of animation.  - Please provide your payment terms.  Fixed price preferred in lieu of time & materials.
Story/concept is tentatively planned to be ready by early to mid January and then we would have until mid-February to finish production.
I'll be working with you closely on the storyboard and art direction of the project, but would like to get as much creative support from you as possible within our budget. Let me know if you have any other questions related to the project to assist with an accurate estimate.  Local Minneapolis-area animators very much preferred but not required.