Blocking is an animation technique in which key poses are created to establish timing and placement of characters and props in a given scene or shot.
Blocking is often the first step in the pose-to-pose style of animating, as opposed to the straight-ahead style of animation (though it sometimes plays a role in straight-ahead as well).
Blocked-in poses may also include important in-betweens, extremes, and breakdowns necessary to establishing the flow and timing of a particular shot.
While this is sometimes problematic due to gimbal lock, seeing the poses in this way allows the animator to adjust the timing of an animation quickly, without the distraction of the software's automatic interpolation.
Instances of this occurs in the animated movie, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse[2][3] and in the game, Guilty Gear Xrd.