- 3D Movie Maker
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3D Movie Maker (unofficially known as 3DMM for short) is a program created by Microsoft's "Microsoft Kids" subsidiary in 1995. Using this program, directors are able to place 3D characters in pre-made or custom-made environments, add actions, sound effects, music, text, and speech, and then show these movies off to friends, family, and the world. The results are not realistic due to the limitations of the software, but have the potential to explore similar topics as mainstream movies. 3DMM is no longer available in stores, but it can still be acquired from online stores and auction websites such as eBay.
Contents
Making movies
The normally daunting task of making movies using a computer is made considerably more simple using 3D Movie Maker. 3D Movie Maker has 45 actors/actresses each with 4 different costumes, and 20 different props and dozens of actions you can use with these. Also possible are 3D Logos with a variety of fonts. 10 different scenes are also included with a variety of camera angles. However, experienced Movie Makers should be able to make their own scenes by putting together a variety of props supplied with the program. Many sample voice and MIDI music clips are included, but extra voices can be recorded using a microphone, and external MIDI files can be imported.
The finished movie, however, can only be viewed inside 3D Movie Maker using the virtual auditorium, unless converted to a video file format with a third-party[disambiguation needed
] utility.Today
After being around for more than ten years, 3D Movie Maker has evolved in many aspects. Due to an ever-growing online community, many third-party addons and applications, such as v3dmm, have been developed in recent years, adding features such as new lighting, model importing and scene palettes, as well as extra content such as additional scenes and objects.
The 3dmm Community
Since the board's beginnings on the ezBoard, the forum has gone from strength to strength, boasting a selection of unique members that few other forums can claim to have, and a supply of movie makers that allowed for the huge wealth of 3dmm movies available for download. The new v3dmm modification allows for an unprecedented amount of of visual creativity for the active movie makers of the board, which should be evident in some of the more recent v3dmm movies on release.
History of the 3dmm Community
1996
About a year after the release of 3DMM, websites dedicated to this little tool started appearing here and there on the net. Two of these websites were Mark Boisvert's Addicted to 3DMM and The International 3DMM Site, ran by the Japanese girl Kyoko Kogure. The latter only had Japanese movies at this time, but it did not take long before the first American ones were put up too. As the community was just getting started, the only way to communicate with each other, was through e-mail. There were a few movie releases this year though, like Eric Russoniello's Train Trip movies and the first episodes of Giant Baby Productions' Jim the Cop series.
1997
As the community grew, new movies started appearing here and there. Boisvert released Gang Wars 1 & 2 this year, which were some of the first movies ever to feature violence. Owen Deakin made Assassin 1, 2 & 3, and Brad Connell released Mortal Kombat, just to mention a few.
Other notable mentions include Killer Cave Baby by Malcolm Hodge (superb voice talent), Termination by James Dennett (special effects), Karate Conundrum 3-4 by Paul Marriott (humor), Copper by Tibor Szekely (action), and Antonio the Bumb by Jason Ruiz (special effects, action AND humor).
Tibor Szekely (under the pseudonym "Mitz Sony") started his "3DMM Cinema" website, and thanks to its vast storage space, downloadable movies, contests and reviews, it was a success. So successful that it became the main rival to "Addicted to 3DMM".
This year also saw the light of the very first newbie bashing of the 3DMM Community. A guy who went by the name Andrew Neilson had just released a movie called Serial Killer, a blatant rip-off of Gang Wars. Basically the whole community started trashing him about it and kept saying how he was the worst director ever. When people finally had calmed down, Serial Killer 2 was available for download on a bunch of websites, and the picking went on. However, it was later on admitted by someone that Andrew did not make the movie. Andrew Neilson had already left - for a movie he didn't even make.
The "3DMM Cinema" website is supposedly hacked and defaced, to the shock of the 3DMM Community. What was believed to be urban fiction was "3DMM Cinema" being hacked by a group calling themselves "The Collective" (taken from Star Trek terminology for The Borg). There was no conclusive answer to the mystery, and it was most probably a hoax. The website was re-launched a few months later.
In October Nathan Avery and a fellow director (and friend) Cory Gugler launched a website called The Marky B. Sucks Page (Mark Boisvert). This later morphed into a 3DMM-bashing campaign called The 3DMM Sucks page, to the dismay of everyone in the community. It was removed at the end of November 1997, although their guestbook remains here to this day.
Later this year Jason Ruiz released Action Joe 2, which is in many ways the precursor to most of today's action movies and quite possible the most influential 3DMM film ever created. The animation was years ahead of it's time and it was the first movie ever to feature a whole Offspring soundtrack. He begun work on a third one too, he even released a trailer for it, but unfortunately it got cancelled a few months later.
Bean's 3DMM Site opened at the end of the year. It quickly became the second hub of the community, after Addicted to 3DMM. It had everything you could possibly ask for; movies, posters, contests, director profiles, polls and reviews - you would find it all there. Updates were frequent, sometimes it would update daily.
1998
This year marked the closure of "3DMM Cinema", leaving opportunities for other websites to pick up.
One of the first real popular guestbooks started this year at Ozkizil's site, McZee Ate My Trousers. It was always quite a highlight, imagine the bulletin board now-a-days with a few hundred less members, no real way of navigating for the stuff you want, and it pretty much being all in one chat brawl.
This was also the year of the websites. Space Goat joined the community in April and launched his site called XSG Industries. At first it was just a place where added his own movies, but as time went by he started adding others as well. Ryan Ames aka. Whitey and Mike Grathwohl aka. SamuraiBob started their own website called White Samurai Productions. They had the first ever 3DMM 2 Petition on their website and over 70 people signed. Lmac opened HBK Films, which became very popular as it had a huge movie archive and lots of other features. Even Bean tried to bring his old site back up, but that attempt died as quickly as it started. Later on, in September, Greg Strnad launched Dragon Films. Dragon Films was pretty much independent from the community and kind of started its own. The site is actually still alive as the oldest 3DMM website ever.
Once there was this kid called Dan Kulpa. He used to run a website that linked to every 3dmm movie on the net, and ripped off from other's bandwidth, and later on he created this forum/guestbook villain called "Acid Burn". "Acid Burn" would sign guestbooks, telling everyone how he would destroy the 3DMM community. Dan Kulpa did this to try and make himself into a "hero" to take the blame for remote-linking 3DMM movies from other peoples servers to his website. He would sign the guestbook as "Acid Burn" and threaten the 3dmm community with all sorts of bullshit. A few minutes later, he would sign as "Dan Kulpa" and tell "Acid Burn" to back off, and all sorts of stuff. He would continue to sign as Acid Burn, and Dan Kulpa to make it look as if a "fight" was going on between the two. In reality, it was just one person masquerading as two. "Acid Burn" also started to send viruses through e-mail to several 3DMMers. That was just to make people think that Acid Burn was a 'dangerous' hacker that could send viruses etc. So Dan Kulpa told the 3dmm community that he had "fried" Acid Burn's computer in retaliation, and that the 3DMM community would be safe. Acid Burn never signed the guestbooks/forums after this, making the 3dmm community believe that Dan Kulpa really did "fry" Acid Burn's computer. Mickazee, another member of the community, came up with some evidence about Dan Kulpa and Acid Burn's guestbook. There were IP matches! So Mickazee and Yusuf Ozkizil confronted Dan with this evidence, and Dan said that Acid Burn wasn't him. Dan said that there is a 'real life' hacker that lives across his street and knows him, and is trying to set him up... of course, this was just complete and utter bullshit.
After the Acid Burn hoax, Dan Kulpa got a hold of this 3dmm movie called "In Pursuit" and changed the director's name from Martin Hayward (a long forgotten director) to Jason Ruiz (the director of Action Joe 2). Well you're probably wondering why Dan Kulpa would change a director's name in the credits (from Martin Hayward to Jason Ruiz). You see, Dan Kulpa didn't want to post the movie on his site for us to download... he wanted us to PAY for it. I repeat, PAY for it. So basically, he changed the director's name to Jason Ruiz because Jason Ruiz had the "brand name recognition" (Naturally, being the director of Action Joe 2), and I'm sure people would love to get ahold of Jason Ruiz's 'latest' 3dmm movie, even if they had to pay for it. If an average 3dmm guy saw "In Pursuit by Jason Ruiz..for $1.25 US" - they would probably buy it. If an average 3dmm guy saw "In Pursuit by Martin Hayward...for $1.25 US", they probably wouldn't . But little did Dan know that the 3dmm veterans had the ORIGINAL versions of In Pursuit on our hard disks. And it clearly stated that MARTIN HAYWARD directed In Pursuit, and not Jason Ruiz. Dan probably thought that no one had downloaded the In Pursuit movies in the past, so the 3dmm community members would be none the wiser. Some 3dmm community members did buy copies of In Pursuit from Dan. What Dan was doing was illegal..he shouldn't be SELLING these movies. He shouldn't be selling these movies, especially since he didn't have permission or consent from the creators/owners of the 3dmm movies he was selling. He put on his website: "That's right! Jason Ruiz's famous 3dmm movie, IN PURSUIT has been found in the DannyBob DirectMovie Archive! You can get it from DannyBob DirectMovie for just $1.25 (US). You can't find/download this movie from anywhere else..not even from Jason himself. So act now! Supplies are limited". And that's the story of Dan Kulpa, more or less.
The original, genuine copy of "In Pursuit" was restored to Yusuf Ozkizil's "McZee Ate My Trousers" site by veteran Paul Marriott. Paul released his final 3dmm movie "Karate Conundrum 4 Part 1 1/2" in November 1998 (during his first semester of University). On a notable mention, he would return briefly around 2000 to play the voice of Yousef Blum in Tony Teulan's "Escape and Sacrifice" before retiring from the community.
Andrew Neilson came back to the community and joined White Samurai Productions, but left after a few months again, for good this time.
The hub of the community, McZee Ate My Trousers and the guestbook, shut the doors at the end of the year and Yusuf Ozkizil left the community.
1999
After Ozkizil had closed his site, the hub of the community was gone. This opened the doors for other webmasters. White Samurai Productions opened a temporary guestbook for the community and it got over 1000 posts in less than a month! Space Goat moved his site to 3DMM.com in January, but it was still called XSG Industries for another month. It then changed to McZee's Nuclear Bungalow in February, and became the new hub of the community, after Ozkizil's page. Goat also started a new guestbook, and it was an instant success since the community was sort of scattered after the downfall of Ozkizil's guestbook. Midee Movies got launched this year by Andrew Sales. It quickly became one of the biggest, most successful websites the community has ever had. Unfortunately, the site only lasted for six months when one of the most popular web hosts around, Xoom, closed down. Midee Movies was one of the many websites that disappeared. HBK Films another.
Will Maltby launched his site, Willsmovies.co.uk, in June, but he didn't really join the community before late 1999 and he was quite anonymous at that time. Little did he know that this site would become the enormous 3DMM.co.uk, hosting a huge movie database, nearly 1000 movies. In August he also released his first big film called Enriched Enlightenment. It was pretty well received by quite a few, and got well known for it's Matrix-effects and fast-paced action.
Believe it or not, people back then actually said the community was dying and that it was in a terrible state and wouldn't recover. Predictions, "the community will die within the year". Tony Teulan and a guy called Chris Hoffman (aka. The Vipe) tried to start a second community, completely separated from the main community. If you joined their community, you could not communicate publicly with the main community, and you could not give your movies to the main community. You were completely isolated. They wanted their own world, but it was more about Tony wanting control over something he had no idea how to work. They met heavy resistance, especially from Mickazee and Goat, and only a dozen people joined. They were pretty much tearing the community apart, and it was detrimental for both sides. Suddenly, one day, Hoffman and his brother Mackdaddy kicked all the members out. The reasons remain unknown, but rumours says he wanted it all to himself.
Two of those who got kicked out were Tony Teulan and Cal Flavell. They were not happy for this, and opened their own website, Full Moon Studios. The site got very popular and received high ratings from Goat and others. They even had their own forum, the first board to grace the community. It got pretty popular too, but unfortunately after a little while people started to accuse Tony for stealing several ideas from people and taking credit for them, and they said he never appreciated work others did for him. It was about this time Lmac, the creator of HBK Films, started the infamous thread called "Hey FMS, read this!" where he trashed Tony and his site, which raised a huge debate between the members. Eventually the thread got closed down when someone posted gay porn in it. Tony was on holiday at the time and couldn't witness it all himself, but when he returned after three weeks he closed the site down.
Now that Full Moon Studios was gone and their forum got closed, Goat made his own using Ezboard in November. People were a bit sceptical at first, but it didn't take long before it became the new hub.
2000
Space Goat closed McZee's Nuclear Bungalow on March 10th, and left the community. He gave the site to Will Maltby and Mickazee, who used it to run 3DMM News Network and the Bulletin Board. A few months later Goat returned and took over the site again. One day two community members, Matt McGowan and Jon Sapone (who knew each other in real life), decided to pull a prank on the community. Matt suggested they would do a death prank, so later that night while Matt was talking to Tony Teulan on ICQ, he said he was going over to Sapone's house. This made a perfect setup for Sapone's thread the next day, where he said Matt McGowan was killed in a car accident when he was on his way to Sapone. What ensued was a day and a half of both skepticism and mourning. Some websites even started to make tributes! Eventually, it began to cave in when Matt became scared that people would actually travel to his house "with flowers" to mourn his death. Also, Sims Odom called and got ahold of Matt, further destroying the secret. McGowan then admitted the whole thing on the board and they were both banned indefinitely.
Will Maltby released Diabolical Delightenment, the sequel for EE, on Halloween. Just like the first one, it got very well received and liked for it's crazy brit humor and fast-paced action. This is also one of the most influential movies ever made and started a brand new cult of short movies.
3DMM.com Awards 2000 were held in December, where DD totally swept the awards winning nine out of ten possible. The director, Will Maltby, also won for best comedy and action-director, and best overall director. Coming on a good second place, is Redwampa's NUTS series, winning three awards out of nine possible.
2001
In October, Goat closed down the board due to Ezboard adding huge ads and popups to their forums. However, he bought his own forum package off Vbulletin.com and launched a new one at 3DMM.com without all the ads and with a whole lot of new features. Tom Simpson, the webmaster of 3DMM Upcoming Movies and creator of movies such as Psycho and McBain, left in November as the first person who got emotionally and mentally damaged by the board.
At the end of the year, the infamous BB riot took place, led by Will Maltby. It all started when Maltby was bitching at Goat about the movie forums, how it wouldn't work and wasn't popular. Goat, of course, wasn't impressed with being told how to run his own website and started to get slightly pissed. Here's where the real fun begins though. The next day Andrew Metcalf (aka. Prof. Spaz) started a campaign to bring back the sigs (which Goat had disabled at the time). Maltby immediately went off to create some gifs just for the hell of it, and asked people to put them as their avatars. A few people quickly joined in on the idea and pretty soon a huge mob of people were adding this sig, and even changing their avatars and custom titles to add to the protest. People started to moan and bitch about the lack of sigs, which ended in Goat shutting down all kinds of personalisation on the BB bar our user names. Avatars, custom titles, no posting URLs, no posting images. Then people started complaining even more, and Goat then snapped for the second time. He allowed everything to be back on and started spamming the board. The next day the madness ended, most of the threads got deleted and the bulletin board kept going like normal, only this time with sigs. And that's the story of the infamous BB riot.
2002
At the end of March, BR, Spencer Crabb and Greg Aronov were banned from the BB due to spamming. This eventually led to Chris Lohr opening the UBB, where people could pretty much do whatever they wanted without getting banned. He invited several members to the board over AIM, and soon an underground community arose. Some people were pissed at 3DMM.com, so they (Chris Engelsma, aka. Panda Man, in particular) gathered up friends and raided 3DMM.com. A few days after each raid, the member would contact Goat, apologize, ask to be unbanned, get unbanned, and then raid the board again. This got nearly everyone who was on the UBB banned from 3DMM.com. About a couple of months later most people were unbanned again, including BR and Greg Aronov. Chris Lohr was banned a few months longer and eventually unbanned, then banned again, because he put his password in his avatar and someone logged in and did things that, uh, weren't good. Engelsma, however, left the community after the UBB had died. In August, Andres De La Hoz released the 3DMM Manifesto, a 10-page article explaining why the community was going to hell, why 3DMM movies suck and how they should be made. This, of course, kicked off a huge debate on the board. The manifesto can be viewed here.
The same month, Frankie Weindel obtained the Japanese Doraemon expansion pack and made it work with the English versions. The pack included lots of new pr-emade scenes, characters and sound effects. Despite the fact that it hadn't been translated into English, it was still well received and gave movie making a little boost. For a few months, at least.
In September, Andres announced a film festival. The idea was quite simple really, making a forum dedicated to the festival, and there would be one or two movie releases every day for a week or two, depending on how many movies they got. Of course, there would be massive hyping of the movies through teasers, posters and casting. In December, the festival was held and although only a handful of the movies were done in time, it was very successful.
This year's 3DMM.com Awards results were released in a movie made by Frogman, which presented each category by showing clips from the nominees and then the winners. The movie can be downloaded here. JP's The Awakening: Doom 2 was this year's favorite, taking home four out of six possible. Explode Productions won the prize for Best Website.
2005
Early in the year, Travis Wells unveiled v3dmm, a tool allowing the custom importing of actors, props, and anything else imaginable.
Later in the year, the Bulletin Board made its first major change in 4 years when Space Goat unveiled a new layout.
Notable 3dmm Movies
- Redux
- Moderately Confused
- Satanik
- JDR (Series)
- Ninja Gaiden
- Pamela
- Men of Seattle
- Dragon in America
- Dead Heart In A Dead World
- Derelict
- Vlarion (Series)
- 00 Dee Boned: Venison Jelly
- Enriched Enlightenment
- Diabolical Delightment
- Killing Ramza Brave
- Bodily Functions
- The Knights of Camelot
- Bongo the Travelar
- Gnomes
- Medieval travels (Series)
- Sgt. Steve
- Community clash (Series)
- Liquid Sunshine
- 3dmm monthly magazine (Series)
(Please note almost all of these films require Third-party addons)
External links
Categories:- Software stubs
- Discontinued Microsoft software
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