A way to speed up rendering animations be reusing parts of the last frame that haven't changed. There are sectors that blender see that contain where the objects, shadows, and reflections will be in next frame. It looks at those and finds what sectors are going to different from the last frame. Then it renders only that part of the frame. It will give a result like what you get when you optimize a gif animation for web in gimp. It will render faster since it doesn't need to render the entire frame. (NOTE: blender tells difference by where the geometry is not be pixel change because then it would have to render before it could render!) If you would like, I could post some screens of what I mean at BA.

Problems: *low pass AO might yield some problems.
*Lack of anti aliasing might give some more weirdness.
*Halos.
*Moving light(s) or cameras will almost get rid of all optimal rendering but the resulting image can be optimized for space after the render.

A way to scale vertexes from the vertex nearest them. It would be like if you duplicated a model and slowly scaled each point from the cursor which you snap to the original vertex. Almost like how a bonsai grows. (It gets thicker but not bigger in any direction.) Let me know if the was clear.