My first experience at all with film making came from an old computer game I got when I was about eight or nine. People who grew up with computers in the 90's probably knew all about it, but by the time I had gotten my young hands on it, it was already about half a decade old. Microsoft's 3-D Movie Maker (abbreviated as 3DMM) was incredibly influential to me growing up and I know that a lot of other creative types toyed with the program way back when- including the likes of James Rolfe (The Angry Video Game Nerd) Arin Hanson (Egoraptor) and Jon Jafari (JonTron).
Essentially, the program gave you some pixelated, polygonal character and prop models with preset animations, a handful of pre-rendered environments, and a bunch of MIDI sound effects and music. Unlike a video camera, which takes individual frames taken all at one time, 3DMM would allow you to move the models in a 3-D space to let you edit each frame individually. It ran at about six frames per second, so it was never too strenuous to animate characters and props one at a time. There was no real limit to what you could do with it, you could make whatever you wanted with the preset items with no restrictions to how long you wanted your movie to be or how many 3-D models you could put on the screen at one time. In the end, it would always look something like this.
By the time I had turned thirteen, I had forgotten 3DMM like I assumed the rest of the world had. But I was sorely mistaken. Even in the early days on the internet, people were making their own movies with the program and sharing them online. As time went on, they even modded the program to make new polygonal models and increase the frame rate. Even though the program wasn't capable of high-quality video or sound, these filmmakers were pushing the programs limits to create impressive works of art. By the time I had discovered 3dmm.com, there was already a sizable community of talented people who used 3DMM creatively. Most of their works were just funny, hilarious even. Mostly, they just involving one of the pre-made models called “Bongo” who looked like a big fat guy.
Other works were more experimental and unique. Even with the crippled aesthetics of the program, some of the movies made were visually stunning and beautiful. I'm not exaggerating when I say that if you search deep enough, you can find some 3DMM movies that are Oscar-worthy. I'm serious, some of this can be emotionally involving if you allow yourself to overlook the fixed expressions and limited animation. These people took their crafts seriously and spent a lot of time making them.
Unfortunately, as of recently it seems like most of the 3DMM community has been disbanded. You have to download the program and its mods to see most of the user's works, although some of it has been uploaded to youtube. If you can be bothered to look through the archives, you'll be thoroughly entertained if nothing else. 3DMM is considered “abandonware” now since Microsoft's “Microsoft Kids” division has gone down the drain, so you can play with it yourself if you like. And if you do take the time to painstakingly download and install the program, here's a few 3DMM films I recommend:
“Pamela” - A clever film-noir parody about an incompetent detective who investigates a series of seemingly random murders.
“God” - A man becomes homicidal after losing his wife and demands audience with God himself for revenge.
“Handsome Man In Japan” - Dan's obnoxious friend won't stop gloating about her trip to Japan so he decides to blow her up.
"Default Lines" - A collaboration of short scenes centered around the strange voiced lines that were included in the program by default. For example, one of such lines is "What's that noise?" and the scenes involving that line have to add context to that particular phrase. In other words, the movie tries to make funny scenarios in which the weird default lines could be used.
"The Big Movie" - Another collaboration of short scenes, this time centered around nonsensical rules - for instance, if one particular character looks at someone, they fly to the ceiling.
