For this animation piece, David and I wanted to play around a lot with layering and 3D.  We looked at some sites for inspiration and really liked a game entitled The Graveyard.  We found a beautiful picture of a forest and thought it would be interesting to play with cameras, null objects and animating on the X, Y and Z axis. We also placed a few lights in the scene.  Our piece is somewhat abstract where interpretation is left up to the viewer.  Below are pictures of our assets.  The bulk of our pre-production and production time was spent gathering, cutting up and tweaking our assets in photoshop.  We originally were going to try to manually control the camera with code to navigate the scene, but that will be part of a bigger project.  In our previous After Effects experience we always animated the entire scene at once.  That meant a lot of keyframes.  In class, we learned how to nest compositions, which made our workflow less messy and a little more efficient.