Need critique and advice on my rigs and animation techniques

Support Animation and Rigging
#1

I’m in the process of making my first “real” Blender animation. A little more advanced than moving a cube across the screen, a lot less advanced than a walk cycle. I chose to have a dragon fly by a camera, which I’ve done. I haven’t animated the dragon yet, I’d like to do more with the camera movement first. Small steps.

Here’s the flyby as it is..

What I’d like is to have more freedom to move the camera around and look at the dragon as it goes by. Starting with speeding up the camera in the beginning so it stays abreast the dragon longer.

Here’s the .blend file

I know I’m doing a lot of things wrong here, so tear it apart.

#2

Start by puting everything on a Path, the dragon and the camera you’ll get a more curvy animation this way, add a path for the dragon and the camera , define where it’s going, make them follow the path using a follow-path constraint, make sur to put some tilt in there using T key in path editmode so your object following the path is rolling. Actually only the dragon will need that, because for the camera you can use a Track-to constraint so your camera will always look at the dragon. This way you can make the camera turn around the dragon without needing to tweak the view.
Also make sur the camera is far enought to see all the Dragon in the view.

#3

That sounds like what I’ve already done, except I’ve done a bunch of extra stuff with empties.