Hi!
Are you familiar with Animation Pose Snapshots?
When the light shines on your Pawn and it freezes, create an Animation Pose Snapshot.
Blueprint is called “Save Pose Snapshot”. Target is AnimInstance.
more details here: Animation Pose Snapshot in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.1 Documentation
When the pawn continues with a certain animation, the animation BP can smoothly blend from the frozen Snapshot to any other animation.
In the AnimGraph is a node “Pose Snapshot”. Give it the snapshot name under which you saved it earlier.
A bool that holds the info if the animation currently should be frozen or not can be used to control blending with regular animation by using “Blend Poses by Bool”.
One example can be seen here:
Animation Pose Snapshot | Live Training,
Cheers!