animation attempt caused many questions (camera, weight painting, lighting ......)

A year ago was getting old, could feel the brain cells atrophying, decided to learn something totally new.  After year of tutorials and classes decided to try to put a nano-animation together and revealed massive holes in what I know.  I was hoping someone could point me to some tutorials that might answer some of them since I am trying to do another simple animation for January.

1. I know the rolling snowman animation is bad, made some poor decisions early on.  The question is,  there is a shape key path created that you can't see  it in the rendered or material view, but can in the other views.  How do I know if it is the lighting, camera,  etc. causing the problem?  Could I have used dynamic paint with displacement?  

2. How do you light a moving animation?  Also the amount of brightness is different if I look at it on my laptop vs a monitor, how do you know which one is correct?  The color also varies some but not a big deal,

3.  Cameras, know nothing.  So I would like to learn not only about lens, focal length, etc.  but also about what camera angles are the best.  I sort of just guessed.  The cameras all use armatures, so anything on how better use the armatures.

4. Weight painting for the armature.  I get weight painting, how do I figure out how vertexes should be weighted best.  The bear weighting is not the best.  I used the automatic weighting which worked ok, but a few bones were pretty bad, assume it had something to do with the mesh design.

5. Animating facial features, both how to animate them and how to create a mesh so that it is possible.  Do I want to use shape keys or bones?

6. Motion blur

7. What could I have used compositing for?

8. Last one, I baked all the particle systems.  Could I have baked anything else.

Thanks,