I want to make animations, is Blender the right program for me? I want to create a short 3D animation series. I found out about source filmmaker but as time goes on I am starting to look elsewhere.

It will be a simple male character, holding a monologue behind a desk. I would want to save certain gestures for use later&nbsp;— for example, once I get a few different goodbye waves, I might not need to create another and being able to recall or save old gestures would be great. It also would be the same scene (sitting behind a desk).

I started off with using source filmmaker, but as I learn more about it I realize I will be using custom stuff anyway and it might be smarter in the long run to start with something like Blender instead.

As you can tell I'm totally new and realize that it will take months before I am ready, but I figure I'll ask as I want to make sure I'm heading in the right direction.
Blender is definitely a good program to use, seeing your purpose. It just needs a bit of patience and practice.

And  about saving actions — it can be done using the action editor in the Blender interface, so that you can use it multiple times. Though you should go through some tutorials on how to do this. There are numerous tutorials on YouTube that explain this functionality. Here's a link.