Learning After Effects

I'm still trying to learn more about after effects and it's taking longer for me to make my projects than I expected. There are a lot to learn and remember and I can't seem to remember most of what I've learned. Must be "short term memory loss". However, I'm trying to start from animating cartoons because I don't have a good video camera right now and videos are nice to edit if they are high quality which in my case is out of my league.

So what I'm trying to do is to start a 1-3 minute animation in cartoons and see what I'm capable of. I'm having a hard time thinking of what my characters would look like and the plot of my animation. So I'm researching on the net but can't seem to find a good topic. I'm still trying though. I'm also learning from some cool websites and would like you to check it out also.

• Creativecow.net - a lot of tutorials here from a lot of sources
  
• allbetsareoff.com - a good site with cool and useful tutorials
  
• videocopilot.net - the best site for me and my mentor

So I hope I could start animating my cartoon and hope to post it here soon. :-?