One trick I found from rigging models in gem, is to create a small sphere at the location of the pivot and then parent the geometry into that. Then if you rotate the sphere it is rotate its child geos.

For the helicopter blade you don't need to do this, as long as the pivot is in the center of the blade and not the tip. But for an a leg or arm the proxy geo-pivot can be very useful for creating animate-able hierarchies.

for the alias face, you probably want to use blend shapes for any complicated type of facial animation. You could do some basic things with animating eyes, eye-brows, and lips. Now you know why they use video clips in video-games, to show character detail between levels.