Trying to do proper frame by frame linework never seemed easy to me but by golly did I make it suck for myself. The animating itself wasn't that hard once I roughed it all all out but when it came to lining, I couldnt've made the process more complicated. Instead of lining frame after frame or the keyframes first then work in between: I decided "I'm going to line all the heads first" on a layer only to get 5 heads in then decide I wanted to line all the torsos separately. It would end up in this chaotic jumble of body parts spread out over multiple layers which got confusing. Then when I merged everything to save me all the chaos, it would rearrange some frames which meant lots of combing over and erasing. Rinse repeat across multiple files and you end up with a confusing mess.
After the chaotic lining process, I rendered the video with a transparent background and imported it to its own file. I realised this cause the quality of the linework to go down a tad. Regardless, colouting was easy enough! Very monotonous but after all the lining I was thankfull for it. Stuck a green background behind the animation, rendered it, then imported it into the parallaxing background file and shortened it to accomodate for the 20 frames I had cut from the animation in frustration. After changing lighting effects and adding the forest sounds, it was ready to render! Phew.
Overall: despite the awful process, I'm very happy with the animation and movements themslves; the bunny jump in particular worked great for a first attempt! Wish I had remembered the smaller details like Aephi's shirt actually being a lab coat, and his coat cuffs but for the most part it doesn't affect the final product much. I wish I figured out a way to do gradients and such but oh well! I wish the transitions weren't cut out by the looping animation but ah welll,,
Here's the link to the final group looping animation!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_NbuZD7i0o