The lights thing is our old friend interpolation, learn to love your graph editor, the answer's in there, check the colour dials. As to the length of the animation. Web based movies need, IMHO, to emulate TV adverts, quick and slick, short scenes telling a story succinctly. Count the seconds a typical scene lasts, well OK so maybe not film noir, but mostly the scenes are pretty short, 12 frames per second and over a thousand frames you're just going to bore people. So, Phil's absolutely right but, do you need to do this to yourself. If I need to get another scene using the same characters then I just highlight the last frame in the graph pallette and move it over to the first, wipe everything else out and move on from there. Oh, and one other tip, vary the scene's length, it can look really stupid if they're all exactly the same. I always break all of my own rules just to make sure they still work but it was the funniest gang bang I've ever done. Ah, and keep the action away from the start of the scene. Oh, I'm boring myself now, sorry.....