Unity Camera Animation, Animating Prefabs

I had thought that Unity animation would be quite complex and confusing and to one extent I was very wrong, it can be unbelievably simple to do some basic animation, such as a camera fly in (seen on my main menu).  I learned how to do that here! a very simple tutorial showing camera animation.

The animation features in unity get very confusing when you try and animate a prefab (as I had to do for the heart and the bubbles).  I had assumed that you could just apply the animation, convert your object to a prefab, duplicate it a few times and place them around your scene, alas, you cannot.  The prefab keeps taking the animated coordinates and the after many hours of trying to fix this, and after following many different solutions online (none of which worked) I realised the answer was straightforward (once you had figured it out).  You must animate the prefab AFTER it has been converted.  Then place the animated prefab inside of an empty game object.  This empty game object can then be duplicated, and THIS can be placed around your scene.  The animated coordinates now occur inside the empty game object so from the outside it looks like you are mapping the new coordinates to it.  You're not.  But it works.