This is a progression of a scene I did showing various stages of concept and production. The whole project is a concept project with no final art or render.
My goal as an instructor at FullSail University is to inspire students and get them to explore their work, problem solve, and understand animation and mechanics better.
Teaching an animation Portfolio class, it is essential for students to develop concept/ pre-production methods as well as continue to develop their skills as animators.
These passes show the original thumbnail concept done with the grease pencil in maya, the creation and analysis of reference for the animation, a layout pass in maya, rig set up, then on to the block out and break down, refinement passes to emphasize that mindset, Background replacement (I used photoshop's 3_D tools to turn the flat back drop into geometry quickly), a more finished pass with lighting and fog play blasted in maya viewport 2.0, then a last quick pass to edit it together and a few quick tweaks in Adobe Premiere.

Layout tweak, and ruff Block out

Ok, on this pass as you can probably see I began to work on some of the animation for the character he is riding. I wanted to get the over all motion of that established, I tweaked my timing & camera some to continue to try and stage this so it reads well. Then I continued my block out of my character Timmy. I have the basic idea of how he will land, bounce and drag throughout this ride. Keys are laid out quickly, I'll go back and push them so they are as clear as I can get them before I move forward with more poses.

Timmy 1611- Layout

Ok, here's my next installment of my test. I consider this my layout pass. Very quick poses to stage the character and work with the camera and timing of the shot. I did reanimate my camera to pull in closer to better stage the action. Nothing else is really animated at this point, this would be the starting point to begin animation. I would suggest that when working on your own shots, that you should take time and tie down your camera and staging, and then work hard to stay within the boundaries you have created to make your shot work. That is what production will be like and you will learn a lot by working hard to make that animation work within those set up parameters. Not to mention, you will not go around and around adding more and more to your shot, which most of us are guilty of. By the way, did I say how important concepting and pre-production is before you dive into your product is ? Well now I did ;)