EMAIL:	        mcavoys@aol.com
NAME:	        Stephen McAvoy
TOPIC:	        Dancing
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE:	        Waiting for Copernicus, with apologies to Samuel Beckett
COUNTRY:	UK
WEBPAGE:	None
RENDERER USED:	PovRay 3.5
TOOLS USED:	Poser 4, 3dWin, PoseRay, TMPGEnc, Moray, Moray Plugins and Excel.
CREATION TIME:	33.5 hours rendering; 120 frames, 640 X 480
HARDWARE USED:	AMD 1.7 GHz, 512 Mb
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS:	Full Screen if possible at 7.5 fps
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:	Before Copernicus published his conclusion that the Sun was the centre of the universe, everyone knew that the Earth was the centre of the universe and that the universe was a closed space surrounded by a spherical envelope beyond which there was nothing.
This is a view from those times.
It is a simple cyclic animation with no storyboard but a little bit of symbolism. The viewpoint is set in the Primum Mobile with, as you would expect the Earth at the origin. We can see the spirits or angels wending their way to and from the earth. Thus fulfilling the dance motif. Only the spheres of the Moon, Mercury, Venus and the Sun are seen to move. The spheres of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the Fixed Stars, the Frontier to the Beyond, look stationary.
	As for apologies to Samuel Beckett, that I'll leave up to you to decide :-}

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:	I have been playing with some BHV motion files I found on the web at Stanford University, for some time. When I saw that the animation topic was "dancing". A gift from heaven or the Empyrean, I thought. I quickly created a "flat Earth" and the Solar system, in Moray 3.5. That took a couple of weeks. I modified two ballet BHV files in Poser 4 so that they were almost cyclic and converted the resulting OBJ files to Moray UDO's using both 3DWin and PoseRay. I spent a month or so fine tuning the animation and the P.O.V. in Pov-Ray 3.5.