Ideas for animation style

This is horribly horribly late in to the project, but Sean showed me something recently that got me thinking about how to make my life a whole lot easier in terms of animation;

After effects tutorial on Mesh Distortion and Head turns

In turn, this reminded me of the style of animation adopted by Vanillaware in most of its games; making puppets in photoshop and then animating the frames in aftereffects;

Vanillaware Trailers

Muramasa Trailer 4

Muramasa Trailer 1

Given that most of my film is already roughed out so I already know exactly what sort of animation I'm going to be doing in each shot, I won't have to waste any time figuring out what parts I need for each puppet, and painting each puppet will be a day's work at the most

Admittedly this will probably take about a week of messing around before I can get it spot on, but the time I save on drawing and painting each character frame by hand and the knowledge that I'll gain about aftereffects from doing this will be invaluable, so It'll be well worth doing as far as I'm concerned.