Animatics

The first thing I'm hoping for is that the animation lasts longer than a minute, because I gave myself two weeks to animate and it usually takes me a week to animate a little under a minutes worth of animation, therefore I'm hoping for something longer than a minute.
I also have a rough idea of what the background are going to look like but I've yet to decide the full details. Lately, I seem to be really enjoying background art for animation seeing as I put quite a lot of time and effort into it, and really study the accuracy of surrounds from different angles. So I'm hoping to have well drawn scenes for my final animation, that compliment the eeriness of the animation.

After finishing the animatics, I immediately started animating without consulting with anyone and merely showed it to the people who had a clear idea of what's going on. Only after having finished my animation did I show it to my tutors on the day it was due for adding to the showreel. It made clear sense to me about what was going on. However, when showing it to a few tutors who didn't have a complete grasp on my theme, they got lost towards the end of the story. It isn't clear enough what was happening. I had to explain the storyline to them causing them to let out and "ah" and finally understand. We agreed that this was a bad point of the story because along with the lovely concept of the story, it's not very clearly shown through the animation which is a disappointing waste of a good message in a story. I just wasn't working well enough.

I hadn't spent too long working on the clarity of my story because I knew exactly what I was trying to do and forgot that the audience, who know nothing about what's happening, wouldn't understand a single thing and would just be thoroughly confused.

I took this criticism into account and went to think about how I could improve the storyline and make it easier to understand without having the audience have to leave with confusion and disappointment.