Animation: shooting while jumping/falling

Is there out there a good platform movement example? I'm trying to make my own but I'm quite sure many things could be made better.

For now I have troubles with the shooting animation: if the player is running and 'spacebar' is pressed, the player should stop, play an animation and shot an object. If the player is jumping/falling while the key is pressed, he should play another animation and shot the object, then return to the jumping/falling anim.
The problem is that I'm trying to control all the possible characters using the same conditions, so instead of using 'While animation x is playing', I have to use a timer. Any ideas?

Basically all the characters are at 0,0 from an invisible box object. When you move the player, you actually move the box object. Upon pressing 'S' the current character becomes invisible and the following one becomes visible. In this way you can switch the character you're using. The animations of all characters are controlled via flags (set as alterable values of the box object).

Thanks for the tips Del_Duio, at first I wanted to handle the change of the animations using timers and flags but it's too complicated, so I created a group of conditions for every character. The groups are enabled only one at a time (the one corresponding to the character being used), in this way I can use conditions like 'Animation X is playing' etc. Now everything works perfectly. Still, I'll take a look at the examples posted by you and Sparckman, maybe there are other parts that can be improved.
Thank you for the help!