Work Flow - Combat Abilities

Most combat abilities I work on are no more then 2 seconds long. Gives me a time frame where I can follow a work flow that works for me at Bioware.

1. Plan
2. Create a simple outline of an ability that defines the look and feel.
3. Study video reference, or video capture myself.
4. Identify strong poses in the video or create your own by sketching them out.
5. Set my character up with the correct weapon, and get ready to animate.
6. Pose my character in correct combat pose and create golden poses based off of outline / reference.
7. Use your golden poses and reference to create key poses that will support golden pose. Anticipation, secondary movements, exaggerated poses, follow through and drag, and make sure my poses feel balanced.
8. Move all my poses around the time frames to get the timing right.
9. Go into graph editor - clean up the translation of the root bone. making it have nice arcs and slow-in and out. Delete useless root bone keys and adjust the tangent handles to get the curve you want, don't be afraid of over shoot. That will be fixed later.
10. Re adjust timing - and hold the golden pose for 2 frames, add subtle movement so it does not feel stiff.
11. Polish - Play your animation and zero in on areas to improve. Foot placements, Anticipation, Arcs, Drag and follow through, secondary actions, and exaggeration.

This work-flow worked for me with hand key animating abilities, and I did not use step mode because I am working in 1-2 second abilities. And we have a good idea what the timing is going to be like with the Anticipation, Strike, Follow through, and Recover. If I was working on longer animation, I would work in step mode.