For our last two holiday cards, we went big, with a gigantifier machine and the destruction of an entire office. This year, we went small, with stop motion animation. Stop motion animation 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, Ben Gibson of BZGibson Productions had done stop motion before, and along with Pizzuti Photography, undertook the massive project of creating the tiny world of our inventor. Stop motion is often associated with clay, but Ben used wood, wire and even tiny chess pieces to build the objects whose incremental movements form the action. Then, using a software program that connects to a camera, a thousand individual shots were compiled to create a minute-long video. 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.