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Apartment D With over 50 Million views on YouTube alone, Apartment D makes branded entertainment that engages!

Our stories combine action, emotion and pixel burning visual design to create content that gets you exhilarated, inspired and most of all...animated!

08/27/2026

When it came time to bring the signature attack of Master Wu’s pupils into a stop motion world for the latest DEATH BATTLE! episode, we had a lot of possible routes to explore. We could scale up the Lego Spinjitzu toy or even experiment with glass blowing. Ultimately our art director⁩ Marisa Gehrig created our spinjitzu tornado prop out of painted plastic wraps and clear vinyl. The bottom contains a drill bit to help with registration and it can be spun by the animator by hand or from a rig above. In these timelapses, stop motion animator Capsule.Ghost is creating in-camera motion blur by physically spinning the tornado while the camera shutter takes the photo. The final piece to bring it all together is blasting through the translucent top with a handheld LED, giving Kai’s tornado a fiery glow! Storyboards by Charlie Rose, fire blast FX animation by Danny Ruiz, and behind-the-scenes by Zoe’s Trope Studios!

08/24/2026

Time to heat things up!! 🔥 Stop motion can be like a magic trick, and for the Kai VS Tahu Death Battle we pulled out every move in our arsenal. The upscaled Kai puppet has detachable limbs similar to a traditional minifigure, and with extra rigging brought in we can bend reality towards camera to hit poses that aren't otherwise possible.

The Rising Dragon Technique was created with an MOC built by the director Sean Malony and contoured with fluorescent paint that reacts to a UV light, creating a glowing effect which then was recolored in post. Stay tuned for more behind the scenes and rock on!

08/23/2026

Our stop motion Death Battle between Ninjago and Bionicle is up on the DEATH BATTLE! YT channel now! Stay tuned this week as we share some cool behind the scenes, starting with the very first shot that was animated on the project! Kai launches a fire blast back at Tahu, but with the Kanohi Hau there’s nothing to fear 🔥 Featuring the work of some of our incredible crew, with animation by Hans Voegeli, storyboards by Charlie Rose, lighting and camera by Warren Sheetz, art direction by Marisa Gehrig, custom Kanohi Akaku by Eastern Temple of the Bionicle, and VFX cleanup by Brice Brown. Rock on!!! 🔥🎸

05/13/2026

Why our made a short film about Asian American History.

These days, we’re able to re-approach and re-evaluate American history with a more critical lens as we recognize how white washed it’s been. But that doesn’t make it any less painful to come to these realizations. Animation as a medium can be used to make these more difficult conversations easier to approach.

This is where Cami wanted to use her skills as an art director to be part of the conversation, which is why she made her short film, Paper Daughter. A gothic Chinese American fairy tale told in stop motion animation about a young Chinese woman grappling with the guilt of using the identity of a deceased girl to immigrate to the United States via Angel Island in 1926. Cami wanted to create something that shows how deeply engrained Asian Americans are in American history as well as highlight the treatment of immigrants (it’s unfortunately not a great track record).

She made this film because she wanted to show that as much as American history has been built on oppression, it’s also built on love, support, sacrifice, mutual support and solidarity. And that Asians have been part of that conversation since the beginning.

05/01/2026

We’re celebrating Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month with our upcoming indie stop motion animated short film, Paper Daughter! Directed by our very own , the story is a gothic Chinese American fairy tale about a young Chinese woman grappling with the guilt of using the identity of a deceased girl to immigrate to the United States via Angel Island in 1926. Based on the real life immigration experiences of Cami’s great grandmother, Paper Daughter is about the guilt of receiving a sacrifice and learning to see it as an act of love rather than a debt to repay.

04/13/2026

Don’t worry Mochi, we’ll see that Henshin transformation in due time. Happy Stop Motion Meme Monday!!

04/10/2026

Our Ruff Ruff Yellow now has a cardboard fellow of their very own📦💛🥹 The Makeship plushies have finally shipped! If you haven’t received your plush already, you should be getting it very soon! A huge thank you to everyone that supported us and this campaign. We hope that Ruff Ruff Yellow has found a happy safe home with you!

04/07/2026

Check out ’s video breakdown that inspired us to make this one!

It’s been a few weeks since the announcement that Open AI is shutting down Sora. Are we artists allowed to be happy about this or are we waiting for the other shoe to drop? Does Open AI have a bigger plan to unveil a bigger badder version of Sora under a new name? Or are they just gonna hide it under one of their other workflows so it’s still active and available? The answer to that as of right now is… surprisingly no. While there’s no changing the fact that other generative AI video apps exist that people will try to turn to now that Sora is gone, it’s unlikely that Open AI, one of the biggest AI companies currently in existence, has a new one cooking because of how much money it was hemorrhaging them daily. This along with the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear a case which currently sets the precedent that AO generated content can’t be copyrighted, there’s no way they’re gonna make that money back!

But what does this mean for the animation industry? While Disney has already gone on record that they’re in talks with other AI companies for AI implementation, their new CEO, Josh D’Amaro has also stated that AI will not replace human creativity. So time will tell what direction they decide to go. As for us artists and creatives, this just showed everyone that the “generative AI can make art cheaper and will replace you!!” argument isn’t true. And as easy as someone can give you a plagiarism machine, they can just as easily take it away. But you can’t do that with art. Which is why we’re still here, and Sora isn’t.

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