Why is this important to my Animation?

Creating the poses and uniting the specific Key frames in which these poses happen create animation. This step involves the movement of the character, the said movement that contributes to an animations attractiveness due to its closeness to life.

What I specifically going to go over is the Pose to Pose technique, which is more organized in my opinion. An animator would utilize Pose to Pose animation if a director of a film had given them a script and specifically laid out where they wanted the character to be within a scene and at what time the character would strike a pose in question.

So what did I do to get this character to leap off this building? (I promise it did not involve blackmail)

First things first anyone working in Maya needs to be sure of their settings, so step one would be to go to the bottom right corner of the screen and change the character set from None to animcharacter. 

 In Maya one would also go to animation preferences and change the settings of the Tangents. The in being changed to Linear and the out to Stepped. This helps with setting a characters poses so they don't immediately run together. On frame one the animator would press "S" to set a linear step key, which sets the beginning pose of the character.

I am not going to thoroughly  bore you with EVERY ASPECT AND DETAIL of what I did in Maya, but I will provide a basic outline. I moved the individual body parts of the character, rotating and stretching them to my desired pose at the desired Key frame in which they would take it on and hit "S" to indicate that the character would switch into the pose there.

This is very basic animation at it's finest and it allows for a scene of action to be created, making the animation interesting and fun. Very much unlike the animation failure known as Food Fight (don't look it up).