TL;DR - I made this, hope you enjoy:
some screenshots:
Some backstory:
Lately most of my personal projects crashed horribly, because of my overly ambitious ideas resulting into scenes I either could not manage to model sufficiently or had so ridiculous render-times that I could not devote the computer time needed to render them.
This was my attempt to reverse the situation. A relatively simple model - not even rigged - no background, just a few materials, with the simplest story imaginable. The result is kind of bittersweet 
I managed to finish and render the project (yay), but at the end I kind of feel the result (while hopefully good enough to share) is lacking a certain “wow” factor for me. Basically I had more fun creating it than I have watching it. Still had fun though, so it is a win anyway
What I learned:
- I finally learned about curve hooks - which was a priceless way to solve the wires for a whole animation in a second.
- I learned about AO bounces simplify option which cut my render times basically to half (to 7mins per frame) withou any significant sacrifice in the resulting image.
- And finally I learned the hard way, that for animations I should use constraints instead of fixed parents
I will probably be unable to re-render this one, but would still very much appreciate any honest feedback. And thanks for reading so far 