rjandron: Your BStar site looks pretty cool--good luck on that! I think Poser has great potential for fanfilms (or any SF-Fanasy film) if only because it gives the producers more latitude for actors since pretty much anyone who can act and looks like a movie star is a movie star, or at the least doesn't tend to hang out on the set of a fanfilm. Animated characters look however you want, and then if you get a good voice, it can carry the story. And you need people, really, for a compelling story. I've seen some great space battle animations online, but without characters in peril or triumph, they're kind of cold.

Ockham: totally true about simple moves--animating a character floating in space is a breeze compared to having one convincingly stand up and turn around. NaturalPoint has finally come out with its $5k mocap system, which, if it works well, could open up all kinds of possibilities--mocap is really the last piece of 3D animation production that's been completely unattainable to the hobby market, but $5k certainly gets it closer. Ironically, if you saw Ratatouille, they proudly point out in the credits that it was done with no mocap, which sounds kind of odd, but if you saw "Monster House" it makes sense, since the character movements in that were actually too realistic for the cartoony-looking characters, so that in some shots  it looked almost like real people walking around in big-headed character suits.

DaleB: good idea cutting down on those impossible shots--do it now! It's worth the time, especially to do a storyboard to visualize the shots--that, almost more than the script itself, has been critical to knowing what sets/items need to be fully built, and what can simply be suggested with a bit of smoke and mirrors.