Animating a Robot Arm

Last week we started animating with rigs and our latest assignment was to make a Robot Arm pick up a can and place it on a block. Since this was a complete rig of a robot arm complete with joints, I initially made a big time mistake and messed up the whole thing. See, the key point here is to setup your preferences to be able to select only the manipulating curves leaving the joints out. If you don't do that, you will end up setting the key frames sometimes on the joints and sometimes on the curves. This really messes the whole thing up. So anyhow, after my first failed attempt with the joints selected, I had no choice but to start over.

The result of my animation exercise is posted here. The concept of the story is that the robot arm is not expecting to see a can there and is casually looking around when all of a sudden it sees the can lying there. So it suspiciously looks around first and then quickly picks up the can and places it on the block. It then inspects the can, but cannot make out it's purpose and so raises it's "hand" in a "What's this?" gesture.



Now the problems that I observe in this clip are:

1. The entire clip appears to move too fast than what it should. So I think I tried to squeeze too many things in just 100 frames
2. The angle at which the robot arm "looks" at the can is not right for the camera view. It actually gets hidden behind the can. I should've changed the arm's angle to look at the can from the top

Anyway, do let me know if you have any other suggestions. I am always open to constructive criticism :)