TEDdy Bear fever

I put together a Teddy bear Rig to try out some animation working with skeleton rigs. I thought it might be cool to see a teddy do some karate so i animated it.
here it is:

Teddy Karate from Ted Adair on Vimeo.

I came across a few issues which i could only see after the render. it was with the lighting setup. midway through the bears foot blocks one of the main light sources which causes the lighting in the room to change. Now 3d rendering is one of the most strenuous things you can put a computer through and on my new Pentium i7 core 3Ghz with 9GB RAM this 13second animation took 35hours, 40minutes and 20seconds to render. and because this was just a play around i couldn't warrant spending that much time re-rendering it.
Just thinking about it there were a few things i could of done to cut off some major time in that rendering process. I used things like ambient occlusion, global illumination, reflective floor and Hair(teddys fur) which were optional tools that i used to make it look pretty. ah well next time will be smooth i hope :)
Learn by doing!