Making Progress on My Stop-Motion Animation

I am so close to being done with my stop-motion animation! In the beginning I had such basic drawings and now I have a piece of production that I think looks pretty cool. Of course I had a couple setbacks like not knowing how to light any shot, accidentally making my project 4K (literally have no idea how I did that), and struggling to hide the paint marks on the bottle cap. A number of people helped me solve each of these problems as they came up (thank you Arturo!) and now I have this:

Ta-da! I'm still working on the sound design and the LMFAO song that's in there right now is more of a placeholder than anything. I'm hoping to get an original track from a friend to swap in for it. Let me know what you think.

Explorations in After Effects

I recently got After Effects onto my laptop, and oh boy.  Despite feeling absolutely awful the last few days, I felt kind of like a kid at Christmas getting to use the program and explore some of its features.  A slightly dorky kid, but hey, it is what it is.

Naturally, I did what any successful student would: I pressed buttons and played with things until my little MacBook Pro sounded like a 747 taking flight.  Then, I realized I'd probably have more straight up directions from a tutorial on YouTube or something of the like, saving my poor computer...and continued on blazing my own trail through the program.

It's kind of funny, but I feel like I learn better by making mistakes and being shown the right way from there, rather than just having the answers to my questions given to me straight away.  That way, when I do something right, I've figured it out on my own, and will therefore remember what I did much better.  Being instructed is great, but I really do enjoy exploring new things while they're still somewhat mysterious to me (computers and technology are not my forte, to put it simply).  I guess the same thing goes for my philosophy on life, make mistakes and learn from them, but that would be another blog post entirely, and I'm considering a very early bedtime tonight.

Looking at other things I've dealt with this way (learning another language, teaching myself better photography, some life lessons, things like that), I can say it's not a bad method for me; in fact, it's usually a pretty successful way of getting things done.  Plus, every now and then, mistakes turn out wonderfully, so I'm hoping that a few of my After Effects snafus can become something fantastic.

Anyone else feel they learn best like this?  I'm kind of curious.