Enough is enough: It's time to attack!

I am officially waving the white flag of defeat with Duik. 

For now.

Try as I might, I was wrestling and finagling with this thing for the past month and a half with little success.   Unfortunately, the combination of my impatience, the steep learning curve of onboarding with this program, and my lack of finesse with the controls has made a very tall mountain out of this task.
So, I unfortunately need to put it aside for now and do it the good ol' fashioned way: in Photoshop.
It's laughably labor intensive and clunky, but it's what I know for now, and it will work. I can even get more curves/effects baked into the individual frames that I want to make it look more dynamic.

That being said, I fully recognize the fact that Duik is an extremely powerful tool. After my current goal has been met, I would actually love to go deep into Duik and learn the in's and out's of it and utilize it for future projects that don't have such a tight deadline.

So, after all this, I have 4 weeks to deliver 4 different cycles of animation for 6 different enemies. (Laughs, then cries).

Anyhow, here are some really sketches and rough thumbnails that I've done today to help get my mind going.