making of “Something Left, Something Taken”

Aharon Rabinowitz and the gang at Red Giant TV have just posted a wonderful making-of video by the folks at Tiny Inventions, showing how they made their short film “Something Left, Something Taken”.

This 31-minute video is a masterpiece of education and inspiration. It teaches new techniques (new to me, anyway) and shows how to use the basics in a systematic and creative way. Bravo!

The parts of the video that I rewatched and paid really close attention to were in the ~05:00-09:00 range. Those four minutes or so are dense with excellent character animation techniques involving parenting, linking character parts to control layers with expressions, time remapping, and Puppet tools.

There’s a companion blog post that shows the workflow in text and stills, too.

They also show how they made the wonderful video for the They Might Be Giants song “Electric Car”.