My Workflow

I've discovered my workflow and here it is. Basically, this is the way I understand animation... and it's not necessarily the way that is taught or approached by schools. I've taken a little bit of process from SCA, Animation Mentor, and what I understood myself and threw it all together into a bowl. 

JORDAN METHOD of ANIMATING:

STEP ONE: 

Find WHAT you want to animate. Watch DVDs and TV and find the scenes that motivates you to, and/or would be a good animation test. Because that's what they are... tests. That's how you should approach animation... not in singularity but in quantity. 

I have multiple projects going on at once and once a project gets to the refining point I find another to start while I finish refining that one. I like to call it Animation ADD. But it works for me and allows me to practice and try out different scenes. 

STEP TWO: 

(clip from The X-Files "Pizza" Video Reference)

Use "CamStudio", a free screen recording software, to record the portion of the DVD that you want to animate. This will be done twice, one in a regular speed setting, and another file in a more "choppier" setting which resembles blocking. 

During this step you also extract your audio into a separate file to drag into Maya using Quicktime Pro, required for Animation Mentor. This allows you to record audio straight from the speakers, so anything that plays on the computer will be recording, but no through the mic. 

STEP THREE: 

Set up your character(s) and your set/props in a Maya Scene. I don't like drawing out my poses all the time... it depends on the project I'm working on. The more complicated shots, where there is ALOT of movement all over the place is when I choose to draw out and really plan my shot on paper... because it will be a NIGHTMARE if you don't. But with a very subtle acting shot like this one I just go based off either my recorded video reference or the actual film/tv version reference. 

I learn a lot more from video reference than my plans at this stage. Begin blocking out your animation. I go back and forth between my video reference and Maya and pose the basic poses for my character. 

Here's my two different video references. 

This one is the normal video that you'd see on the DVD...

And below is the "Blocked" version. Basically all of your main poses with some breakdowns. It might not seem like a break through to most people but this is what made me really see what was moving and when and in what order. It made blocking ALOT easier. 

I block straight ahead and pose the WHOLE body at once. I also knock out my Key Poses AND Breakdowns... approaching it like Stop Motion Animators have to. 

So, here's my blocking based on my video reference:

STEP FOUR:

Refining the animation. Basically, going into the Graph Editor and TONING stuff down. Especially with this animation. I moved stuff WAY too much. 

The Graph Editor is basically a bunch of line graphs representing keyframes and the actual line being the computer's representation of what should happen between keyframes. It looks like this.....

(zoomed out view of Graph Editor)

Every Control has a graph and each control has multiple graphs for translate (X,Y,Z)  and rotate (X,Y,Z). You HAVE to go through each of these graphs and make sure its smooth and is doing the appropriate things. 

I'm still in this process right now but here's what it looks like.