Opening scene redesigned|Extended Practice

Last week, after chatting to various people and showing my finished animation, I've decided to re-do opening sequence. I tried to follow given feedback as closely as I possibly could.

 First, I've started with compiling all the assets in the Photoshop. Each element that I needed/wanted to move had to be on separeted layer. In the original opening scene there are only trees moving and camera is moving around, however doesn't show river and rocks. Also, later on in animation, mountain in the background is introduced. Somehow, viewer looses a sense of scale/space. There is no clear explanation of how far kids went, how deep in the forest is river with fern flower. I tried to include al those elements in my .psd file.

 Next step was creating new composition in After Effects and setting all layers to the 3D. I've arranged them and keyframed position value changes to imitate motion. I then tried to set a camera but it only came out with black screen. At the beginning I thought it was my PC fault as it only got 8Gb of RAM. Unfortunately even After Effects on college computers couldn't run it properly. So I had to approach this problem differently.

Knowing I can't rely on camera to the zooming, I decide to keyframe motion of the assets toward the basic camera that is always implemented with scenes in AE. After a bit of time this scene started to look as I wanted.
I've added a light and set 'cone angle' and 'intensity' keyframes. It gives a nice feel to it, revealing a scene slowly, like when a curtain goes up in theater. I added a few subtle movements, like moon and clouds moving.