So I ended up having to throw the second animation in a setTimeout. This way the animation waits and does not skip the initial fade in.
I have a follow-up to this same animation. When scrolling the images almost feel like they are behind, and after the user is done scrolling it takes a second for the pictures to stop moving. I have the scrub set to true, and trying to change the ease effects has not changed anything. A better demo can be seen here, which really shows the images feeling like they are "catching up" to the scroll
Thank you!