Recently, Featured Creator Gabriel Aronson was kind enough to talk to us about his process animating his animation “Mrs. Bobbitt”, one of our selections as a Youtube Animation of the Day.  So let’s get right into it!

“Mrs. Bobbitt” came after a string of After Effects based animations 
and began with my desire to step away from the computer for a bit and
 incorporate my background in puppetry and set design.  The project was 
born out of research into the dark backgrounds of nursery rhymes.  I
 decided to write a nursery rhyme corresponding to a contemporary 
scandal.  Because of all the different objects, planning was key to 
saving myself unnecessary work.

Most of the time was spent building 
the various objects, and I ended up only spending a couple of hours on 
actual filming. Most of the shots were filmed live on a pretty
 standard camcorder, but some of the close-ups are stop-motion, shot on
a Pentax k110 SLR, and a few things were shot on green screen and 
incorporated later.  I composited in After Effects, where I also created some of the sequences such as the shadow-puppets and the bloody platter.

Being fairly new to the whole film thing, I’m not terribly tech savvy. 
The equipment I use is pretty standard, nothing too fancy.  I spend a 
lot of time in post-production, doing color-grading, etc., in After
Effects.  I do like to draw, and hope to incorporate more hand-drawn 
elements in further work.  My preferred medium is chalk pastels.

In terms of time, from concept to completion, [Mrs. Bobbitt] took about three weeks.  However I did some character animation for the 
BBC, completely in After Effects, and, due to having to wait for 
feedback sessions from the studio, the process was drawn out to two months.