First Pass/Final Pass.

The concept of "first pass/final pass animation" is something I picked up at my first job. We were a small company that was constantly under pressure and crunched non-stop. I was still learning how to animate but was surrounded by people who could crank out multiple animations every day, along with a couple of Super Designers who could put the moves in the game at a ridiculous speed. There was no time to block out animations, much less plan them. It was always just "go."

Out of necessity I got faster. I learned to set up hotkeys, picked out a workflow that suited speed and accessibility over anything else, and started cranking out animations, too. I learned to use interpolation and overshoot to my advantage, how to make strong key poses, how to keep clean, well organized keys, and to work smarter, not harder. I began to animate from start to finish, one pose to the next, until returning to idle again. If I had to go back into the middle of an animation to change something I deleted everything after it. Anything I altered also changed what came after it so it got deleted and besides, if I did the rest before I could do it again, the next time faster and most likely better.

The schedule and the sheer volume of animations required forced all of the animators to work as quickly as possible, keeping in mind that we might never get to touch these animations again. This turned out to be the case more often than not towards the end of the project and at one point someone joked that our work was, "first pass/final pass."

On the next project our lead animator took me aside to review one of my animations. It was a snappy jab that hit behind the character on frame 6 in a sort of pseudo martial arts style. It was 40 frames long and took me about an hour to animate. He hit play and we watched in silence. After a few loops he stopped the animation at a random point and then started it again. He did this again, starting and stopping at a random spot. Then five more times. Each time he stopped the character was twisted in various ways, winding up, hitting, recoiling, returning to idle. He told me, "You see how this looks cool whenever I stop it? Good work."
(That animation eventually became Kung Lao's backwards snake attack in MK: Shaolin Monks.)

First pass/final pass had taught me to focus on key poses. The clean, linear, straight forward and kinematic way I'd learned to animate led to poses that fed into one another. Having a 2d background, it only then occurred to me that in-betweens are largely unnecessary in 3d. If you let the program do the work for you and are smart in your posing most of the transitions between your keys will shake themselves out with minimal adjustment. You can work faster and more efficiently by simply understanding what came before and what comes next, always thinking that this is final, and that the next pose absolutely has to work.

Though I have more time than I have ever had to work on characters these days, I still keep the first pass/final pass rule in mind. It's something I won't ever be able to get rid of, but then again I'd probably get bored if I had to work on anything too long anyhow.