animating my crack o_O .... your what?

My part to animate was the ice crack so when i finally got my ice crack finished i looked into images of ice shards before starting as i knew this is what i wanted it to look like and have ice shards flying past the camera. Here's the images i worked from-

So i started my animation and imported the robot and mammoo as reference so that it would look more realistic. With the robot's two drills i presumed that most of the shards would come out the sides and as the robot jumped out the ice shards would crack. So i did the best i could with what i had and figured if all else fails a good camera angle would easily fix it. 

Here's how i did it - 

I used cubes to think best where to position the cracks and where the most of them would appear. 

and here's them after texturing i tried to add different blues into them in photoshop with different opacity's but you couldn't really tell in the animation, i tried though.

Here's some play blasts of my animation, i really like the first one best as the shard flys straight past the camera, I'm going to look into doing this with the camera's and it should work out better than this

Overall i was confident whilst animating and felt that i could figure out the buttons much easier than previously animating. I thought much more about time and the principles of animation, as in gravity wise what the ice shards would do, how much they would way, what the force of the robot would have  impacted on them and i tried my best to apply this in the short amount of time we had left. If i were to do this again i would take longer so i could get this down to the point where i was completely satisfied with it.