Multiple Iterations of Enemy 1

This week I've revisited the animation for enemy 1, after receiving very helpful critique.

The main issue people had with my first animation was the fact that it was very static. People was expecting more dynamic movements from enemy 1. Something representing the enemy's "walk cycle", actually seeing the alien shell move along with the body and the big teeth opening and closing.

So what do you do when you have a finished animation and you need to apply so many changes to one character? My decision was to start over from scratch. The reason I made that decision is because if I have created something, can do it again but better using the experience from the previous attempt.

I have almost been able to fulfill all the things I wanted add to the animation. I have unfortunately crashed into a rather big problem. That problem can will be known as the video timeline in Photoshop CC.

It's been no problem animating with the video timeline and I understand it a lot better than I did when I first started out. The big issue with the video timeline is that when I try to transform a video layer PS wants to convert my video layer into a smart object, which causes the copied video layer to become un-editable.

Removing any ability for me to edit and draw on the specific frames that I need to draw on.

I'm not finished and I have to find a solution for mirroring an animation layer. After I find a solution for that issue, I can continue working on coloring the enemy.

One of the solutions would be to export all the individual frames over to Adobe Flash and continue working in Flash instead. However I'm not familiar with Flash, and learning all the tools might consume more time than I have.

The one solution I'm most certain that it will fix the issue with mirroring the video layer, is by saving the current animation I have at the moment, back into a key frame animation. This will be very time consuming and tedious, but it's a certain way to be able to mirror the frames i need to copy and continue on my work.

To summarize: I need to revert back from the video timeline workflow, to the key frame animation workflow.

*UPDATE 22:09*

After I uploaded the post, I had a talk with my fellow students and came to the realization that I've been working on a single key frame video layer instead of dividing them into separate key frames. So I've been basically adding my key frames in a single layer meant for the in-betweens.

I'm a bit annoyed that I've been missing such an important aspect of animating with video layers, but at least I managed to figure it out. Though mirroring a video layer for editing is still a mystery so far.