Criticize Yourself

Well, I have completed 10 scenes of my film in rough animation. As nice as it is to move on I find I constantly have to look back over my work with a critical eye. This is a constant struggle. Because it's always easy to find fault with your own work while at the same time not wanting to redo what you've already completed. I realize I will have many more chances to refine these scenes but at this point I need to be sure it's flowing as a film and inside individual scenes I need to be sure the acting is coming across. As I completed this 10th scene I felt that even though the hand action is working it needed a little more of the frantic feel that the dialog has. It's a short line in which he says "No, no, no...don't say it" very quickly. I knew the facial expression couldn't change too drastically in order to make it read. So I looked at the hands and saw that I could push the action further.
In order to be sure I didn't lose the original I animated the hands on a new layer then once I was satisfied I erased the old hands and merged the new ones into the same layer as the rest of the character. I ended up doing a few more tweaks beyond this that helped with the overlap of action even more.
I like the way the actions overlap even though the entire character flows as one. With the overlap in timing it helps a bit with the frantic nature of the scene. You can watch the scene here