Animation is slow and that's all there is to it

I'm working on the end of the video where everything gets abstract. Tonight I did about two seconds, the same as last night. I started working in After Effects but I was chopping shots into such tiny pieces that it ended up being easier to work with individual still frames in Photoshop first. I made a droplet to de-interlace the images since I'm concerned that Frames won't be able to get rid of the interlacing after all the stuff I'm doing.

One thing I learned about animation is that it's inherently time-consuming and you can't use technology to take short cuts. In the nineties, like a lot of other people (notably The Residents), I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to create successful interpolated animations in Premiere or After Effects. For example, I'd put a ripple filter on a picture of a fire to create flames, that kind of stuff. It looks OK, but it doesn't have the energy of working frame by frame. At a certain point you just have to accept the fact that animation takes forever.