This was a really cool project to work on! I modeled the scissors and the background with the help of some tutorials, and I used nParticles for the tracks the scissors leave on the ice. I thought at first that it would be easier to animate a non-human-like character. I think this is true, but it's also very helpful when the character is stretchy, which scissors are not. The rigidity made it hard to make movements realistic, because we're so used to seeing squash & stretch in animation. I spent a ton of time tweaking the movement to make it look more realistic, especially at the beginning of the animation.

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What took more time than that, however, was rendering. The animation also ended up being really long because I wanted to put a certain song from the movie Luca to it, so that was my fault. I initially was going to render with Maya Software but I was having a lot of trouble with the Color Management of my rendered images, so I decided to try my hand at Arnold. It was, in a word, eternal. At the beginning of the animation you may be able to see where the quality falls off when I realized that to render with minimal noise took over 4 minutes per frame, but with noise was only 2 ish minutes. I also didn't realize that nParticles don't show up as white with Arnold until it was halfway rendered, so I left it but used Maya Hardware to render the aerial scene in the middle. The watermark on the ice texture was also a surprise, I tried to hide it as best I could throughout the animation.

 

Even though the trees in the background were much bigger than the scissors, it looked really unrealistic at the beginning because they were the same shade. When I was using the Maya Software renderer, I added an environment fog around the camera. When I moved to Arnold I tried to recreate it, which (classic) was much harder and took much more time. After a lot of tweaking, I decided to use Arnold's Atmospheric Volume in the render's environment node. I liked the way it blurred out the mountains, but unfortunately it also gave a ton of noise. I ended up upping the samples to 10, but I didn't want to go any higher because it was already taking so long to render. Despite the noise, I'm happy with the way it turned out.