Animation Process and equipment

I am using After effects mostly for my animation but i am also including some stop motion as well. I think these two methods together work for the music i have chosen for the video because it is quite unpredictable and sporadic.

My process started with Initial idea planning. Thinking of lost of different ideas and noting them down. Then analysing which ones are better than others and which ones have certain aspects that could be used with other ideas to strengthen them. The main goal of the animation is to suit the music which is in the video (Saukrates- Father Time)

StoryBoarding.
Although my storyboard ended up slightly altering from the animation. It is the crucial guide lines for  my animation. I storyboarded 6 scenes with 16 shots. Noting the character and assets movement, effects, text, audio and style

Asset creating
Before I could start animating on After Effects I had to create my assets that I was going to animate. I did this in Illistrator and made things like, Backdrops (grass, walls, sky etc.) Then I made characters and other elements like props for the characters to hold

Animation
I was using After Effects to animate so this involved the movement and adjustment of key frames to create character movement, Placing layers on top of other layers to get the desired compostion for my animation. I used a screen size of 1280 x 720

How far into Animation i am

My animation at present is incomplete, I have done around 1 minute of animation and still have a large portion of more complicated animation to do. have done 3 scenes out of  6 planned scenes. Overall I think it is going quite well but I need to improve the speed at which I do it at.

I still need to create a few new assets. I would be using illustrator to do this. I have found this is one of the most time consuming parts of the process so I am budgeting for this asset creating time.

I think to speed up my animation process time I will do a mix of a few techniques, including spot animation so I can get on with finalizing the process and creating an animation I am happy with in a time frame that will be quick enough.