Moustaches - cool or creepy?

I'm currently working on a pilot episode of an educational kids show for the UCSD Autism Center. My team consists of five men and one other woman, and we needed character designs.

One of the characters is a giant talking oyster with a face. I tried some designs with different eyes and different mouths, but honestly, how much can you do with an oyster? No matter what I did, he had a very large expanse of FACE, and not a lot of features to fill it up with. So, being the genius that I am, to break up the space, I gave him a moustache.

It started out as a joke, and I never intended for the moustache to make it to the movie. To be honest, my own drawing creeped me out. But all the guys on the team jumped on it. They LOVED the moustache. They thought it was the greatest thing ever. Then the other girl and I pointed out that it was creepy, having an old guy with a bushy moustache just approaching these kids and wanting to play with them. We wanted to get rid of the moustache. It took us at least half an hour of debate until finally, the ladies in the group pointed out that if moms think the moustache is creepy, they won't let their kids watch the show. Thus, the creepy moustache was scrapped, and all the men in the room lamented its loss.

Color coding in animation

My current project is about a flying squid, and after three months of pre-production, I'm finally animating the first scene. This is my first time animating an eight-legged creature in 2D (I've done it in 3D) and one of the first things I realized would be an issue was keeping track of which leg is which.

The solution here - color coding. Leg #1 is red, leg #2 is green, and so on. It looks something like this:

Makes it a lot easier to keep the tentacles separated. The same method works great for animating quadrupeds, insects, spiders, and aliens with prehensile antennae.