Frog Prince

Inspired by Rebel Without a Crew I've decided to do a number of shorts. The hope is for each one to be significantly better then the one before it. That said, I figure I better start ultra crappy or it'll be hard to double the quality with each one. The music is temp right now, and sound effects need to be added, but otherwise this is done. I'll get input from people, see what's needed, and mostly adjust for the next one I make rather then spending too much time messing with this more.
Total time making this: 8 to 16 hours.
What I learned:

• I know nothing about foley, but will by the next short. I now have some good resources.
• I need more friends willing to do music, or I need to borrow a keyboard that I can plug into my computer and do it myself. This seems solvable as the floor I work on has two professional sound companies that do exactly that for mainstream movies and commercials. I imagine I can figure something out.
• Youtube's dimensions are 640x360, 16:9, which my 4 year old laptop can fortunately handle. I'll probably use the work computers in the future. It'll half the time, atleast.
• Create a standard mouth with all the phenomes for front and side in future shorts rather then straight aheading it.
• A bic pen goes a long way, and it's fun to use the first drawing as the finish...but certainly not the ideal method.
• Doing more on paper saves time when it's brought to the computer.
• If building a person to be animated in AE, make the overlapping limbs in a way that lets them correctly overlap.
• Always draw the blinks.
• If possible, a cut every 3 to 10 seconds is ideal.

That seems like a good number of lessons learned. I'll aim to start on the next short on Tuesday.