Thanks fellas.
I really wanted to mix the animation with more premade stuff and some more puppeteering but that pesky transform key issue kept popping up. Short story...I posed the character and then started working with pose to pose animation. Then at certain point I either tried to work in a premade animation or use a puppeteering animation. However, the transition between the animation elements reset the pose so the characters went from the sitting pose to a standing pose and then back to sitting. Its an issue that I think RL really needs to work out.
I'm going to have to revisit rampa's thread to see if there's a way around that.
Still I was generally happy with the result. Kinda reminded me of moviestorm animations.