Creating natural looking animations?

Fed up with the scarcity of full perm sitting animations for sale, I started playing with Avimator - amazing program! My third attempt is almost usable and I'm really impressed with how easy this seems (for a change). However the sitting animation I created is a little robotic and I think I've actually used a little too much motion in all the limbs so the guy looks fidgety.

Do you study real life movie frames to get an idea of how much to move and how far apart to put key frames? For instance, if I looked at an actor sitting in a DVD movie, can I advance it a frame at a time to find out if he's really staying still for a number of frames? If so, is the frame rate different and would I need to do a simple ratio conversion to simulate it in Avimator?

Also do you normally use the entire 30 secs to avoid it looking so repetitive? Thanks. -- KC

I think I just answered my own question. When we sit we stay still for a time and then quickly shift position which would just take 10 frames or so. I was having the model in constant slow motion which looks weird. I wonder why I didn't see any suggestions on this in the tutorials I read. Didn't read enough I guess. -- KC

I think you've got it KC. You could try dividing up your 30 seconds into however many diffierent sitting poses you want to change between. Hold the pose static for 3 - 6 seconds and change pose over a half second. Looks more realistic if you hold pose for different time lengths I think. Arithmetic depends on the number of frames per second you are using - I tend to like to use 24 fps because of ease of division to get to fractions of a second - 12 frames = half a second, 6 frames = a quarter etc.

Great idea. Thank you! -- KC