Serious lack of coolness.
 

So I've been asked to make a little animation about how nerves grow from the nervous system to the heart in a young critter. The catch? I have to use someone else's 2D illustrations. So I'm like the South Park guys, using big bad powerful Maya to basically manipulate little cutout figures. :p

I don't have the illustrations from the other person yet, so I downloaded some crummy clipart from the web and sort of pieced it together so I could start trying to figure out how I'm going to do this.

Here's what I have so far, using the crappy web clipart:

http://eduvis.com/nerveblast2.mov

Thing is, it looks lame. It'll look better with real, matching illustrations, but I'm thinking there has to be something more I can do on my end to make it look cool. Do any of you have any suggestions, or places I could look for reference? There has to be neat ways to play with 2d shapes in 3d, I'm just totally having a brain fart today. :D

maybe play with the timing. I'd say make the camera moves more bold and dynamic. Like have the camera move quickly and then slowdown and stop on areas of focus. At present its all a bit floaty. Also maybe you could have some of the body parts move rather that just the camera. I think the main problem is, there's no area of focus. You can't really see that the camera is following the nerves. Perhaps if you have the nerves begin to grow, and then have the camera follow the nerves as they grow this might me more clear. I've read before that the camera should always follow the action, rather that precede it. I hope you understand what im getting at.