"A Robot's Life," the story of a tin toy robot trying to make it on the streets of Los Angeles, is a combination of live-action and computer-generated animation. It was written and directed by Elad Offer, a veteran visual effects supervisor and artist as a side project. The robot was modeled, rigged, and animated in Autodesk Maya. The modeling (done by eye from a real toy) and the rigging took a few hundred hours, and the animation took an additional 120 hours or so. Rendering was done with Chaos Group's V-Ray, and the compositing was done with Adobe's After Effects on top of live-action plates shot on Melrose Boulevard in Los Angeles with a Canon 7D. The music and sound effects were done in Chicago by Earhole Studios to a rough animatic, but then went through several back-and-forth cycles with the director and the animators to make it all come together.