Attack Animation

For my third animation I have to create an attack motion, with the mage using his staff as a weapon that could theoretically fire out magic from the attack.

I have looked in a numerous differently locations, such as forums, video hosting sites and even simple google searching for any form of secondary research to help with the creation of this animation, but have come up with no useful results. That being said, I did create primary research just like I have for all my animations so far, by recording what I would imagine a staff attack could look like, whilst bearing in mind the fact that I want my character to still seem relatively old.

I went for an under-sweeping attack, but after play back and analysing the movement that I created, I believe it is too youthful in the sense that I was watching the spine and how it had to bend back fairly rapidly. So instead of using it I went for another approach of having the overhead sweep attack. This way his spine can remain haunched over and therefore retain his old characteristics.

Here are the two attempts, the second video being the one I prefer most and am going to take further:

I also made sure to reference the different orthographic views in this latest video referencing, as the last few I did I only took one or two angles of reference.