Just thought I'd post some step by step progress to let people know what I've been doing.
I decided to animate the mouth before animating the body, this because it's a bit easier to see what you're doing with the lip-sync when the character is standing still.

Iteration 1:
Basic mouth animations. Still needs some tweaks here and there. During this stage I was trying to imagine what he'd do with his body during the dialog.

Iteration 2:
Basic mouth animation are pretty much done at this stage, just needs some details added to it. Slightly started on the body animation. The hands are constantly linking/unlinking to the notation board using a couple of link constraints. This was a somewhat tricky process but I eventually got it working just as I initially wanted.
For this project I'm animating with more a straight ahead method as opposed to the standard blocking animation. This is mainly due to the rather static nature of the character, standing at the same exact spot throughout the whole animation.

Iteration 4:
More body animation, time scaling, added in the shoulders and continued working with the eyes. By this stage I've switched the default eye direction controllers with a look-at constraint solution. It makes the character have a actual focal point.

Seems like I've been able to avoid any annoying gimbal locks this time around. Come to think of it, It's probably because I'm using only inverse kinematic animations for the arms throughout the whole sequence.

PIE!

For my full-body animation I'm going to animate after a clip from Shaun of the Dead, where Shaun is speaking in front of the other employees at the place he's working. You can listen to the sound clip below.

Sound Breakdown
"As Mr. Sloman always says, there's no 'I' in team but there is an 'I' in pie. In... There's an 'I' in meat pie. The anagram of meat is team... I don't know what he's talking about. Look, that's it."

AS MSDS-SLOMAN-OVES-SES, DES-NO AI IN TIM BUD-ER-IS-EN-AI IN-PAI. IN... DES-EN-AI IN-MIT-PAI. DE-ANAGRAM-OV MIT-IS-TIM... ADONOISTOKIBA. LUK, DAS-IT.
(Accents marked in red. This sound text actually makes sense when you've listened to the sound clip for a while)

When animating the lip-sync, I'm trying to imaging the clip isn't a language but just some sound made with the mouth - looking away from the actual letters inside the words and just concentrate on the actual sound I'm hearing. This method seems to work out the best for me.

Next mandatory assignment coming up. In short, we are to find a short sound clip and create a full body animation based on that sound.

As a starter we had to form groups of three or four students and find out which four animation principles are the most important for this project. After a little discussion, we ended up with the following four principles:

This is my very first time trying out lip-syncing and I hope the end result isn't too horrible. So basically, we had to find a very short sound clip and then try to synchronize the rig's mouth with the sound. I went for a guy supposedly standing in a crowd cheering for someone.

While I think I've got the mouth to behave just about right, I don't really like the body animation. It just doesn't feel right and should probably have been much more powerful and to the point. Also some more anticipation?

Another short school assignment. This time we've been posing the character holding a dirty smelling cloth and rendering out some images. I have created three poses in total and rendered each pose from two different camera positions. Because it's such a small assignment I didn't look up too many reference images.

I especially like render number four and five in the series just because they're the most appealing to look at.

It's what will happen if you try sniffing "a really dirty smelling cloth full of damp, rotting fish, bugs, fungus and dirt". Do not try this at home folks. Your brain just might die.

Together with the line of action I also tried to draw a flow line through the arms leading up to the cloth effectively drawing the viewer's attention towards the smelly cloth as explained by Keith Lango in his second posing tutorial.

For this assignment we were to pose the Max rig into two opposite poses like warm/cold, happy/sad. I went for the latter, though, I replaced sad with a more terrified or shocked expression.

"A gang is a group of three or more people who, through the organization, formation, and establishment of an assemblage, share a common identity." ◘

With the basic definition of a gang nailed down, I commenced browsing various Internet search engines to find more information about pre-1960 gangs. I was first about to settle for some classic Caribbean pirates, but after some more reading I eventually ended up going for the Norse Vikings. They were kinda the pirates of Scandinavia anyways - it was just way easier to find reference images I could use.

I then went to find a story I could use for inspiration - yet again searching through multiple texts. I eventually found and decided to use the story of Olaf Tryggvason, who was the king of Norway from 995 to 1000, he also played an important part in the conversion of the Vikings to Christianity.

Name: Edgar Æirikson
Age: 12
Personality: Committed, selfless and clumsy

Edgar is a 12 years old boy living in a Norwegian viking village around the year 1000. He lives alone with his father who is the town's local blacksmith. His mother disappeared a couple of years ago in the midst of a viking raid. Nobody know what really happened.
Edgar's dream is to become the mightiest viking warrior there is.

The final concept/model sheet image was drawn both by mouse and tablet. This mainly due to bringing and installing my monitor tablet to the school computer isn't worth the hassle.

The green and orange colors were subconsciously added before we learned about the power of complementary colors. I used those because it looked nice with the character design and at the same time were quite close to my reference art. Of course, upon learning about the importance of colors, the image suddenly appeared a whole lot better.

I enjoy 3D modeling far more than drawing concept art and used about a day on making all three of these accessories. Box- and partly subdivision-modeled, rendered with V-Ray. Wire and color renders can be found a couple of posts below this one.