I love the extensive usage of frame by frame animation used for this long music video.
The character drawings were extremely simple; However, a lot of special attention was paid into creating plenty of strong poses.
Sometimes, the shadows didn't interact with the characters and backgrounds as a combined entity.
Shadows often create a more polished flash if the lighting has obvious clear direction.
The rockets, fire, explosions, sunlight were often combined light sources.
It becomes increasingly difficult to give direction to shadows needed from multiple light sources.
The 2D backgrounds and characters would also have creases, folds and angles.
Basically you want to animate the shadows while your characters interact with their environments.
The pencil tool in flash is very effective for assistance with animation of shading.
You can use the onionskin tool to move those pencil strokes before additional coloring and eventually deletion of assistant pencil tool strokes.
You did a lot of work out the poses.
Why not workout the shading, lights and shadows too?
The characters seemed to move very freely in a three-dimensional fashion but the shading looked wrong to me.
This was extremely awesome frame by frame animation.
Most other animations on this site will mostly use tweens and other animation short cuts.
I'm pleased to watch movies use the most difficult way of creating animation.
Excellent work.
- Mightydein