A Time Apart: Animation Progress/Update and MORE GLITCHES

Since my last post I have been working more on animating and sets. I have made the train carriage for the first scene and have a better idea of how I'm going to texture my world which I will do between animating. By the end of March I want to have Act 1 completed and 2 mostly done.

For Scene 1, I've been trying to get the characters to rock against the train's motion in a responsive attempt to regain balance, the first video was my first attempt where I feel I had too much exaggerated movement and that it wasn't rocking with the train correctly, the second video I can see improvement but it can be better and less intense... I'm starting to think it only needs to be a subtle movement.

Animating for me is a massive struggle, I understand more how it works but I struggle to do it for myself - I can't get the realism and believability in my movement. I know what I have to do but I can't get that click to happen in my head where everything starts going right - or at least better. The paragraph below is just what I understand about animating to show what I'm thinking and what I'm trying to do whilst animating.

To animate a character I have to think emotionally - I need get inside the head of my character, their thoughts and feelings drive their actions. Movement starts in the middle of the body and has like a domino/ripple effect going up the body, so the hips/waist drives the chest, the chest then drives the neck, which drives the head, but the head is a heavy part of the body so I have to take into account how the weight of the head affects our movement. The chest also drives the clav, shoulder, ebow then wrist and fingers - a ripple effect starting at the middle of the body. Every noticeable pose has a slow in and slow out and a slight moment where a pose is held before moving into the next one. I have been trying to figure out how to use motion tweening as this is supposed to make animating easier and faster but I can't seem to get to grips with it (installing is not a problem), I read somewhere it works better when everything is in a stepped tangent but that also throws me off when previewing what I've done.

Also how can I not share some more glitches I've come across courtesy of the poltergeist in my Maya files... It turned Doris into a possessed demonic angel thing...