Trevor (Quote1):  It's good that we have multiple departments to go to because there's other specialists in other areas besides just art or the technical side of getting the software up and running.  We need specialists who know how the motions and the body work, how to hook us up correctly so all the motion capture data is being captured correctly because as a student, one major can't cover all aspects of animation.  Animation is a big word.  In the industry there's multiple jobs, there's subcategories, and subcategories within those subcategories that you can go into.  For example, say modeling; I like to practice modeling and texturing.  Modeling now-a-days, you can concentrate on high-end modeling, low-poly modeling.  You can even specialize in displacement maps and how to get those working with your bump maps.  Even having knowledge of what's going on in the industry helps you to know what to be prepared for in these subcategories.  For instance, I know now-a-days more companies, persay as Pixar, are looking into areas where you don't model on the computer so much, but we're also looking into 3D scanners so it brings back the artistic sculpting aspect of modeling.  Now that we have technology that can just scan the model, it's so much more important to be aware of what technologies are out there and not completely shove artistic talent off to the side and embrace technical schooling as your academic base.

Trevor (Quote 2):  What I learned from this, besides the wide array of probably 50% of the work which was just learning the programs and learning how each little aspect works.  The good thing was finding out how to 'pipeline' this in the school because 'pipeline' is an industry term known for how each little software from the beginning of motion capture up to the fine aspect of rendering and compositing, you have to be prepared to know how each step along the way affects each other.  This project helped me get a good understanding of how this 'pipeline' works, how each step goes.  That just further gets me prepared for what I'll face for the projects down the year, and also when I want to go into the industry.

Trevor (Quote 3):  Some very useful aspects of  Ball State is we're a relatively small school which means all these HD cameras that we're getting in, all this motion capture equipment is up for use and very hands-on to the students.  The professors encourage us to use them.  Going to other larger schools, even the prestigious ones, you're going to find that a lot of the equipment is very unavailable just from the mass use of all of it.

Trevor (Quote 4):  When we started this, the most important part is conceptual base; we tried to come up with an idea.  We wanted to utilize animation in the best way.  What's the point of trying to gain realistic human models, realistic world, realistic story, when you can just take a camera and go out and film that?  So, we tried to use motion capture to portray a dance that ended up using things that can't exist in reality, trying to show lighting that can't actually happen in reality.  So, we start off trying to find a dancer in a woodland setting where the woodlands would try to be rendered as realistically as possible but we would keep almost a ghostly appearance of a dancer moving through the woods.  Now, the first part of this project is we had to go and find a dancer.  Here at Ball State, we were able to find a good dancer that agreed to help us out, and she agreed to be hooked up to the motion capture system, and we went through a volley of routines and captured what was going to be used for the animation.  That was the fun part of just trying to get everything moving, showing her where she should be walking, and we tried to develop the concept through those movements.