Sabrina Fox wears another hat, so to speak, besides the snug-fitting stocking cap with four shiny reflectors she wears now for the mo-cap session. She is a game artist on EverQuest, and has worked on EQ since early development of the original release. She began as an intern, creating textures, designing 3D dungeon levels, and applying lighting effects throughout the game.

Sabrina is a self-proclaimed "D&D nerd," having played the roleplaying game all through junior high and high school, and admits she was not a big Star Wars fan at the time. "I like dragons and unicorns and magic spells. Star Wars was cool aliens. I was more into the fantasy side." So work on EverQuest fit well with her. It was on EverQuest that Sabrina did her first motion capture work.

"They needed someone to do some walking motion captures, and a couple fighting movements, things like that. I had a karate background, so I thought, well, I'll give it a shot. It turned out okay. They were the original movements, so there was a lot of tweaking that needed to be done."

Some of that original work can still be seen in the game. One of the better known is the rude gesture, which was done mostly as a joke at first, but made its way into the game. The SWG team has its own share of secret and sometimes funny captures. It remains to be seen which will make it into the game!

Sabrina looks a little nervous today, standing alone in the middle of the big studio with a room full of men looking on, but remains focused as Jake explains each move. To help her concentration and loosen the mood, one of Sabrina's music CDs is put into player. Sabrina has brought a wide selection of music types appropriate to the many different styles of dance she has to perform.

"We ended up going with mostly lyrical jazz, basic jazz, and a lot of Eastern Indian," she says of the dance styles SWG is drawing from. Much like the combat moves in the Star Wars movies, the dances will be hybrids of different styles. "I do tribal belly dance, which is Eastern Indian, not the typical Turkish shaky stuff. A little West African, too. We wanted the rib and arm movements."

Sabrina is hypnotic as she performs the East Indian dances. Her arms seem to take on a life of their own, no longer a part of her body, but slow moving serpents charmed by the pulsing, exotic music that fills the studio. Her fingers trail her arms, waving like silk ribbons; her hips rock and pivot as if her waist were balanced on the tip of a pin, shifting opposite her arms but in smooth rhythm with them. Her head floats on her slender neck. Her expression reflects the serene place the music has inspired within her, the only element of her dance that the cameras cannot capture. There are murmurs of awe among the onlookers after each move.

This is Sabrina's favorite dance form, and seems perfect for Star Wars Galaxies. "I think it's very feminine, so I enjoy that the most. And I think the movements can be used for alien creatures very easily, because your hands and your feet and your neck move very independently of your body, so it looks very alien."

Not everyone is a dance expert like Sabrina and Cosmo, which goes for your SWG characters as well, so not all of the dance captures are serious. Equal effort is devoted to creating movements for characters of average dance skill, and even some for those with absolutely no dance skill at all.

The Elaine

Damon Waldrip sits at a folding table at a desktop system hooked into the big black bank of studio computers. He reviews each capture as they come in to make certain they satisfy the design needs of the game.

"What I want is to make sure I'm getting the in and out motions to make the cleanup later easier." It's kind of grunt work, Damon admits, but very important. "I need to notice if something didn't quite go right, or if the pose is off, and let them know to reshoot it." Back at the studio in Austin, Damon will continue work on the captured data, ironing out technical issues with the other artists and assisting with animation and skeleton set up.

Damon is impressed by Sabrina's work on the novice dance moves. He shows me these on his screen. The wire figures stumble, trip, misstep, flail and fall in hysterically funny parodies of the refined moves we watched earlier. "This is the goofy moonwalk," he explains as we scroll through the many moves, "and then there's the slightly better moonwalk."

Then I notice one, a single-word description of a move: Elaine. I ask Damon what that is all about.

"There's this Seinfeld episode that showed Elaine dancing. She was just awful. So that's where this one got its name."

This move alone is worth becoming a newbie dancer. It defies description.

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