Animation guide Squill

Reference

When you creating a particular animation find or record as much reference as you can. Act it out for yourself or let someone else do it to see and feel what a certain motion does and how it is achieved.

Poses

When your animating in 3D think of strong poses that tells the viewer what it communicates. I usually check the poses by turning all the lights in the scene off to only look at the contour of the character (body language).

Scene blocking

When your animating a scene/action set up each pose (blocking). This will help you seeing the general motion and timing of your animation. You can easily make adjustments by just moving a complete pose instead of having to adjust a lot of keys.