First-hand research

For a section of my fibonacci animation I wanted to animate a hand picking up a shell, but having never drawn  something like that before, I wasn't sure of the exact movement. After the gif I made ofMr Rufus Rabbit went so well though, I figured the best way to handle my problem would be to film my own hand picking something up and then watch the movement until I could replicate it. There is a certain amount of intuition that still goes on with this method, as this time I'm not rotoscoping the image the way I did for the rabbit gif. 
Using first-hand research (pardon the pun), is definitely the best way to approach animating something new, otherwise it is very easy to get the movement wrong. For something as commonplace as hand gestures, I did not want this to happen as it would be very noticeable if the action wasn't naturalistic.