Creating keyframes from poses in the scene view (with pictures for clarity)

So, I've been cooking up a batch of sword guards from tradition german longsword using stock models, they look like this http://imgur.com/13djduG

And I simply want to transition the zombies from one pose to the next.

So, i want to put the rotational data of these posed zombies, including the data of all children, into one keyframe.

so I want one keyframe that looks like this:

and one that looks like this:

and then to transition between them. I've been playing with it for a few hours and all I can do is get it to record keyframes for each individual object (leftForearm, rightIndexFinger, etc) and not the whole position at once. animating this way takes hours and hours for simple movements, and as peter norvig once said, "the scope of your solution should be proportional to the scope of the problem". Any ideas?