As you learned from last year's holiday card, stop motion is animation that is captured one frame at a time, with physical objects that are moved between frames. When you play back the sequence of images rapidly, it creates the illusion of movement. When you think of stop motion, you might think of Wallace & Gromit, The Nightmare Before Christmas, or the classic 1964 Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer movie.

Luckily for us, Andy Bailey, stop motion animator at Laika, undertook the massive, 200-hour project of creating a tiny winter wonderland, all in a small garage space of 10 feet by 20 feet. In addition to clay (what stop motion is often associated with), Andy used wood, resin, and over 100 pounds of sugar to build the objects whose incremental movements form the action. Then, using a software program that connects to a camera, over a thousand individual shots were compiled to create a minute-long video—one frame at a time, 24 frames per second. We think the process is as cool as the final product, so we wanted to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how it came together. Be sure to check out the time lapse for the full effect.