Blender Underground

Check this out - this is the one thing that always had me blocked from doing animated people: motion capture.
For this, all you need is a MS Kinect and the NI Mate software for Blender and you can do your own, cheap !

This is still in beta but wow, I can see some great promise here.
No more battling with curves and timing, trying to get a natural human motion (er, well, that's the theory anyhow!)

http://www.ni-mate.com/