Jump Cycle Finished

I have managed to complete the jump cycle animation. As usual I used Richard Williams' The Animator's Survival Kit as reference for the key frames. However, I ran into a few technical problems whilst placing them. The first was that the right arm of the rig's zero position changed towards the end of the animation, meaning I couldn't make a loop cycle. Fortunately I found out the it was because, at some point, I had moved the position of the shoulder without realising. The next problem was that the movement of the arms from one key frame to the next was not direct, meaning the arms waved about, seemingly at random in between each keyframe. Because the jump is much more of an extreme action than the run or the walk, I did not think the move the arms the shortest possible distance to the keyframe location. As a result, the rotation values exceeded what they needed to be and Maya interpolated this either backwards, or rotating around twice before reaching the key frame position. When this action is squashed into only a few frames, the arms looked as if they were waving around at random. I found that the best fix was to place the arm in the position I wanted and the rest the x,y and z rotation values to zero and then move the arm back to where it was using the shortest possible route. In future I will simply have to remember to take the shortest route every time.
Although I believe that everything is there in the jump, I do not think it was executed particularly well. I would have liked to have spent more time tweaking it. Although the logical solution to this would be to just keep more focused during a project, which is something I have been working on, I work better under pressure. I will continue to work on my ability to stay focused before the deadline begins to loom, but I think a plan to avoid such problems as rushed elements would be wise. After about halfway through any project, everything needed for the completed piece, animation, sculpture, game, essay or otherwise, is there. The rest is tweaking. I should have laid out the keyframes of all three loops before begining to tweak and clean up the curves of each loop. This way I could avoid having 2 good animations and one inferior one.