Hitting the books...

Received our brief and as always, my first stop was the library (NUCA and public) to pick up some research books.

Being as the large majority of the FGA was being done in Maya, I focused my book search on Maya and Maya character animation.

I found the following books...

Game Art Complete - Andrew Cahan: This book mainly dealt with subdivision modelling but did have some information on rigging and animating in Maya.
3D Toons  - Steve and Raf Ansovin: Although this book also had little in the way of rigging, it did have a lot of information on character animation and movement which I think will be helpful when creating my short animation in Maya.
Learning Maya: Character Rigging and Animation -- Dwelly et al: Though since the book was written (2003) Maya has come a long way and is now a lot more intuitive, the books basics remain relevant and I was able to transpose a lot of the books teaching to Maya 2010 without a problem.
Character Animation -- Doug Kelly: This was another book that dealt mainly with character creation and polygonal modelling with very little information on Maya.
The Art of Game Characters -- Leo Hartas: Although devoid of any information on rigging, this book was useful to see how character are designed and which type would work best in my simple animation.

I also hit the forums again, which I've found to be invaluable as they can connect you with experts. On CGTalk http://www.cgtalk.com/ I placed a post requesting recommendations for the best rigging books/websites. On their advice I picked up two DVD's on Maya character rigging which were Gnomon's 'Character Rigging' and 'Animator Friendly Rigging' by Digital-Tutors. These DVD's were excellent as although they repeated a lot of what we had been shown already in the tutorials, they provided refreshers and simple tasks which helped me get to grips with Maya again.