You can! You do not have to use a person. I don’t. I use my persons for my memory palace. If you search a post for Port500 you’ll see how I do this.
I was struggling using people, and I was always confused with who did what, and was getting them wrong. When you use a person, you’d really have to see that person first before you see the action and or the object. When I recall I could see the action and the object involved but was always trying to guess who the person was. Using a person, you’d have to get to know the face, hairstyle, clothing,accessories, etc etc which is time consuming, and even then you could get it wrong unless otherwise you’d studied that person inside out. It does work for a lot of people, but not for all.
You can just use everyday objects and animals. Those do not take as much time to learn and to remember when you recall. What you need to do is to Create An Action for each of your objects/animals. If the object/animal has a natural action, then use that, if not then just make one up. So each of your Object/Animal has a unique action to the next object or animal. So all you’d have to do is to find the matching objects/animals and the actions that goes with it.
For example;
00 - Eggs
Eggs get cracked, and comes out the next 2 digits from the Egg.
So all you have to do is to see a cracked egg, so that the next 2 digits would come out of the egg on your loci.
With the Clue-Shape-Method, You may just see the 2 digits with egg-yolk running down from it which gives you 4 digits at a time.
For more examples of this you can perhaps see my post, I was struggling like you were and created the images from the number shapes 00-99. It can be used with 2, 3, 4,5 and 6 digits at a time. It may give you some ideas.
Hope this helps.