The Beginning of My Creative Career | Microsoft 3D Movie Maker Retrospective
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ก.ค. 2024
- For nearly three years, I've looked back at numerous video games to critically examine them and see how they've held up. Today, however, we're taking a trip back to a software that I have a huge personal connection with. Not a game per se, but rather a movie-making program for Windows called Microsoft 3D Movie Maker - and even though it is incredibly outdated now, it was an incredibly important tool for me as I was growing up, and it helped to blossom my creativity as a young kid. So come join me as I look back on the application that paved the way for CloudConnection all these years later. #3DMovieMaker #MicrosoftKids #McZee
----
Subscribe!
tinyurl.com/y8hebek3
Join the CloudConnection Discord!
/ discord
I stream on Twitch!
/ cloudc0nnection
Want to support the show? I'm accepting donations on Patreon and Ko-fi!
/ cloudconnection
ko-fi.com/cloud
Check out The Cloud Collection - buy some games and support this channel!
www.nexus.gg/cloud
Follow me on Twitter!
/ cloudc0nnection
----
TIMECODES
00:00 - INTRO
01:13 - ABOUT THE SOFTWARE
02:55 - THEATER EXPLORATION
08:34 - MOVIE MAKING
15:50 - FEATURE PRESENTATION (A BONE TO PICK)
18:29 - EXPANSIONS AND MODS
20:16 - CONCLUSION
----
SOURCES / RECOMMENDED READING:
3dmm.com (www.3dmm.com/)
foone on Twitter (bit.ly/37DQ3Cu)
3D Movie Maker Early Footage / Unused Content (bit.ly/3azAj5f)
WIRED UK: Vincent Connare - Comic Sans is 'the Best Font in the World' ( • Vincent Connare: Comic... ) - เกม
My sister and I would play this game for hours in the late 90s. My favorite sound/audio dialogue was "Oh, I don't know" and I'll still randomly say it to my sister for a laugh
It had a pretty amazing library of sound effects. But you HAD to get a microphone and do your own voices, not enough defaults to use for sure. And then get some MIDI MUSIC!
YESSSSS I do this too.
“I’ll check to see if there’s time before dinnner”
This software was so much fun. The kids in the neighborhood used to all get togheter in this one kids basement, and when this came in to our lives, we would have moviemaking contest and have week long comptetions where we would make movies and everyone in the neighbourhood kids and adults would have to vote on the best one. Nostalgic
Have a massive soft spot for 3D Movie Maker and like yourself, was my first foray into making shorts and little films. My brother and I would get bored of the preset scenes and spend hours building scenes from scratch with spheres, cubes, cylinders...and making a moving shot with those meant moving each of them one at a time, it was tedious but satisfying. Would also do similar props, text could be rotated round to make guns and blasters. The community was so inventive and clever and we'd share different ways of making effects back then using what the programme came with.
I now work as a stop motion animator and honestly, I have to hand it to 3DMM to getting me into doing that. Simply a brilliant bit of software and I'm stunned there's not been an attempt to do something similar with newer technology
Well they probably haven't done anything newer because these days you've got Unity and tons of Asset Store assets to work with.
I thought as a kid I invented making hand build characters. Once I got the internet...I found I was so very wrong! So many new techniques learned after seeing what was online.
Brooo, I played this so much in elementary school! I wish I still had the movies I mad as a kid. All I remember is that I never used the voice over option because we never had a microphone for the computer. I also remember a lot of fights consisting solely of karate kicks.
I made several movies, and even did wrestling events, You had to frame by frame animated the moves unlike using the karate animation. Tedious. I will get them uploaded eventually.
My brother and I spent many hours making movies with this, mainly to make us laugh. It wouldn't be unfair to say it's where I got my own start movie making too. We always found the pre-programmed voice lines that you could use to be hilarious in how specific and useless they were. Every now and then we still just randomly quote those lines, although ours sounded a lot different because it was the version with Scottish McZee. Also 100 percent agree on the limitations of 3DMM breeding creativity. Finding work arounds for stuff was incredibly fun and I've noticed everyone who used this when they were younger have their own idiosyncrasies on how they go about it. Good video. There was a lot of stuff I didn't know in here.
Oh yeah, the voice clips are so hilariously odd and specific that they're damn near useless for making movies, but still fun to listen to just because of the cheesy acting. And it really is amazing what people can do with such a limiting software. I've seen a lot of impressive stuff done with the cube and sphere props alone.
hahaha i actually had the spanish version of the game (won it in elementary school) so all the voice lines were of course, in spanish. it still cracks me up to this day, especially the one of the lady saying "APURATE!" in spanish hahah
@gnu_andrew Each totem on the pole is a symbolic representation of one family
The sound effect library was pretty big though, and I always found those sound effect collection CD's in stores like STAPLES and got them JUST for 3DMM!!!
Out of nowhere, I remembered my time with this program and all I could think to search for was “movie maker game 90’s” and wow, is this a nostalgia trip. Immediately, seeing the intro screen, I felt at home again. I probably wasn’t even that great at it, as I was around 5-8, but I absolutely loved this program.
Playing this game is pretty much my earliest memory. This triggered sooooo much nostalgia. Incredible to relive it. Thanks for the in depth review!
I put a lot of hours in, a great creative outlet. I'm getting mine recorded and uploaded now.
This was such a trip to watch. This program was so influential on me, too. I’ve been thinking about it for years and could never remember the name. 👨🎨🙌
I still love it, it really let me create without a lot of other equipment even at a young age.
I have never ever heard of this or at least have no memory of it. It looks pretty cool and unique. I'm surprised by how much you can actually do even though the resources are limited the fact you can make a 3d movie is sick!
Oh yeah, for a small computer program from 1995, it's amazing how versatile it is. Of course it's limited nowadays, but it gives you a surprising amount of freedom when it comes to animation and movement.
The DEMO was on Windows 98 I think, or some Windows version. I HAD to find the real version after making a movie of a guy getting kicked in the balls.
@@MBXfilms3D Ahh Bongo. A go-to actor for me forever because of that demo
@@greenwood2802 Just look at him. The comedy is already there before he even moves.
Man, I made a 2 hour film on this thing and uploaded it online and then my computer was lost in a fire. We have got to all get together and make a massive 3DMM movie!
yoo where is that movie?
@@mateomoreno331 lost on a hard drive somewhere never to be found again lol
@@1990sDialUpWeb oh crap, didn't u say u upload it tho?
@@mateomoreno331 yeah but where is the 3DMM message board archives with action joe and dragon gem? I thought that site was long gone
Ha ha WOW 2 hours? I think my longest ever was 30 minutes.
Ahh... the nostalgia... the memories! Thank you for this video, I remember playing this when I was a kid.
It's amazing that there are GOOD movies to watch people have made using the program. I made a lot of crap before shaping up a little better.
As a child I believe I only had the demo version. My recollection of the game has haunted me like a nightmare. The fat guy character with the bug eyes disturbed me deeply. Most of my life when I remember this game its been easier to believe it was just a hallucination created by my childhood brain than actually believe it existed in the first place. I was easliy frightened as a child. Chex quest also wrecked my shit.
You brought me back to my childhood so hard man. The best times in this game. It's a tragedy that my computer with this data is long gone
I spent hours playing with this game/program. It was funny and time consuming. The voice over and sound effect is hilarious. For the longest time, i never knew how to make two or more actors/objects move at the same time. When i finally figured it out, my mind was blown, lol. My masterpiece was when i made my version of the movie "independence day" with will smith. I remembered using the astronaut black guy with the space suit as will smith, lol. I did a scene where the hero ship fires and blows up ufo's. It was very short and cheesy, but i thought it was the shit back then, lol. Ahhhh, the memories and good times.
This game was absolutely 🐐'd; hearing that intro and seeing old McZee again are the biggest nostalgia bombs for me. God, I wish I still had had the TONS of movies I made on this thing.
It served as the same for me, the beginnings of my creative passions that I've kept with me to this day. Don't care how dated it is, it's still a 10/10 🙌
Same, I used it for YEARS into my teens. Even spread it around my school.
3-D Movie Maker has a "move in time" function, where by you can move an actor forwards or backwards in time, so that you can line-up when two actors need to collide, or otherwise have something occur simultaneously. It's under "More Tools" in the studio. Between that the the "Move" tool (the Hand icon), you can translate actors in time and space to align them.
Or re-pace them frame by frame. That's what I did. Damn I should make a guide video on how to use it, despite no one using it now.
I had this in the UK and it had the American voice actor. Also great video man, thanks for the trip down memory lane.
3dmm stills kind of holds up (well, for me).
Then you are a real one.
Also I’m now getting a McZee tattoo
Video or it didn’t happen
Video link?
I've never used Microsoft 3D maker, so I don't really have any nostalgia towards it. However, hearing you talk about your path with the software while also teaching me WHAT it is had me engaged early. Great video!
Thanks dude! This is a very important software for me as a content creator. Glad I could introduce it to you properly!
I'm not going to lie, I thought it was funny how it wasn't the unstable bridge that killed off your character but the speeding car. 😆😄
McZee is voiced by Mike Shapiro. He's mostly done small cameo voices in games, background, crowd, some GTA radio, but uh, he does have one other notable role.
He's Gman.
McZee is voiced by Gman
I used this as a kid, and now I make video games professionally. Good times. Good vid!
Video games for sure inspired a lot of what I made using this program.
I know I played a lot of this as a kid, but I actually have very few memories of using 3D Movie Maker to...make movies. I primarily just hunted for the actor bios, and I dunno why, but that was tons of fun for me. But this was an awesome video, and it's really fun to know other people have fond memories of this software. It really was one of a kind.
Now the software I DID use to make movies was the Spider-Man Cartoon Maker!
Yeah I remember having a ton of fun just exploring the theater and looking for Talent Book pages when I was a kid. It's only now that I realize how shallow that aspect actually is, but it's still nostalgic for me. I've been really happy to hear people who used this software when they were a kid share their memories!
Woke up this morning and WMM just popped into my head so I thought I'll see if TH-cam has anything on it. This video was amazing to watch. So many memories. Heavily inspired by the matrix, many I my films would include Kung Fu fights and bullet time animations. So when I saw your bullet fly from the gun I thought , so I'm not the only one who thought of that! Not sure what you used for the bullet but I usually used differently types of punctuation and scaled then accordingly. Then moved them manually frame by frame. It took what seemed like ages but it was worth it. I would always try and squeeze everything out of this game and push it to it's limits. Thanks for posting this video.
I never did find all the talent pages. And I clicked everywhere!
The memories of using this software is flooding in. OMG.
The ending of A Bone to Pick caught me off guard and cracked me up so much!
So glad I found your channel. 3DMM is very nostalgic for me
FYI, both of the seemingly arbitrary limitations you mentioned -- frame rate and audio quality -- were due to technical limitations at the time.
Keep in mind that 3DMM predated widespread adoption of 3D video cards; the GPU-for-home-PC industry was still in its infancy. All of the rendering for 3DMM was done in software, and many architectural decisions (like the pre-rendered z-buffer, and hence fixed camera angles) were made to reduce the computational cost of rendering as much as possible.
The frame rate was throttled at 6 fps because that was as fast as a typical PC could manage at the time. This ensured that movies authored on different PCs, even more expensive ones, would play back as intended. The underlying animation architecture didn't provide a feasible mechanism to e.g. drop animation frames to keep audio and animation in sync. Throttling was the most practical option at the time, given development constraints.
As for the audio quality, again the PCs of the time just didn't have the storage capacities that would have been required for higher quality audio (and some wouldn't even be able to keep up with the bandwidth requirements). Movie files would have gotten huge, on a platform where disk space was already very tight (hence the content from the CD being cached on demand to the disk at runtime, instead of the entire CD being copied when the program is installed).
Your scene was actually hilarious. Nicely done!!
Your videos have always been top friggin quality.
Thanks so much dude! Yours as well.
Oh man! This takes me back! I wish they still had something like this.
Me and my siblings spent a lot of time with this program as kids. You did a great job explaining why it's good.
It's actually kind of impressive how much 3DMM rejects any sort of complexity because it's so focused on being easy for kids. That kind of super-simplicity is rare. The closest example I can think of recently is the Super Mario Maker series.
13:10 the best part of any video ever hahahaha!!!! You win all the Oscars for that. Ok you topped it with the other movie hahah!
I expect my Academy Awards in the mail
Amazing thanks for shouting our foone. Their awesome
it was boldly wacky, like many products back then... I made tons of movies with it, and I was have only the demo of 3DMM! thank you for this nostalgic gesture
"A Bone To Pick" was legitimately entertaining and more fun to watch than many high budget cartoons to be honest.
Those walking animations still get to me even though I haven't seen this game in 20 years or so.
Microsoft released the source code in the public domain recently, which is really cool! It now belongs to the people completely.
Anyone remember Action Joe or Dragon Gem?
I remember Action Joe 1 and 2! IIRC Action Joe 1 was one of the very first 3DMM movies that used advanced custom scenes. Jay Ruiz inspired many other directors to push the creative (and technical) boundaries of 3DMM.What about Litterbug? I found out Jimmy Pozin passed away a few years ago... He created an absolute masterpiece of 3DMM cinema. Rest in peace Jimmy!
@@tklown he’s the reason I made a resident evil 1 hour movie on 3DMM - Jay if your reading, thank you man.
@@tklown oh no NOT JIMMY! 🥺🖤
Holy crap, yes!! Those were big influences for me. I also enjoyed the Vlarion series and have fond memories of Cosmos.
This video has made me create 3.5 movies in the span of 1 day.
I loved messing around with this when I was a kid in the 90s. It was one of the few things that made the PC feel like an upgrade from the Amiga, instead of a backwards step. This game's music actually sounded good on Sound Blaster 32 ISA sound card with its MIDI synth module & built-in instrument ROM. MIDI music just sounds horrible on modern computers.
MIDI music was so great for these, I remember getting online and downloading tons to floppy discs to use!
Professional animator now. I spent sooo many hours doing crazy things like animating a spider made of 16 cylinders for the legs and some spheres for the body. God modern rigging and parented joint structures with tweening and animation curves would have been so nice. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. 😂
This software got open-sourced recently!
There was even a spin-off game of 3D Movie Maker, where you get to use characters of classic Nicktoons such as Ren & Stimpy and Rocko's Modern Life.
i remember making dragon ball z style fighting videos (minus the cool sfx) with my brother on this program. thanks for making this video, the nostalgia is potent
wow! great!
I used that program for 7 years. And that's better than anything I made. Granted I was probably 12 at the oldest with it. I loved this program. Oddly enough I felt the much newer and more adult focused game "The Movies" was more limiting than 3DMm. I might have to pick this up again now I am over 30 and married.
LOL bro you said you were making a HORROR movie , I couldnt stop laughing at the movie it was a epic commedy movie lol
Man I used to love this as a kid…
Ahh, I made so many ridiculous movies with friends with this program. So many tears of laughter that I could fill a dam. My final crowning achievement was 20 min long Dragon Ball Z ripoff called Dracon Bol C. Hours upon hours were spent painstakingly creating kamehamehas and other energy attacks with the limited tools. Really good for creativity when you've not got much to work with!
I've still got my old movie files. I think I'll upload them to TH-cam one day.
I made my first movies with this (in fact, I've uploaded some more recent ones I've made to my channel), so this is relatable.
I'm toolin' around with Scratch and I was thinking '3D Movie Maker walked so Scratch could run' 🤣
I make video game trailers and have for 6 years now.
ALL I DID for YEARS was play this and make videos. The similarities between making game trailers and making videos in this are hilariously striking. I guess it's technically a game.. so makes sense but lol if I knew now what I knew then.
thanks!!!
God the nostalgia of hearing all the music
“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”
-Orson Welles
I loved 3d movie maker so much. I never did have a microphone for the computer back in the day and really hated that.
I mean, if you look at a lot of '90s kids cartoons and older newspaper strips, McZee wouldn't be out of place.
I never did find all the sodding Talent Book pages. And then my dad lost the smegging CD.
I'm glad this old thing has support. It's limited, sure, but it's a lot of fun to work with and can make some genuinely fun stuff. In some ways, it can be regarded as a precursor to SFM. Although with much easier to use controls, based on what I've heard from SFM filmmakers.
Microsoft missed a trick by not remaking this game when TH-cam took off.
Same with me! This and RPG Maker 2k the Russian english translated hacked version.
I had a diary in the 90s... I wrote 'played 3DMM' on every date
Has any other software ever attempted something similar? Like theres a zillion "game-making for kids" apps, but this is the only one of it's kind that comes to mind. Seems to me that the possibilities today would be endless and should be relatively easy to make a far more powerful version of this idea today with all the options and ressources available online.
Spent years using this. So if your computer was sub-par, like mine was, it created big problems when sharing movies. I would send projects to my friend and he would be so confused and I would be disappointed. Then I'd go to his place, watch it on his fast computer and realize the sounds were all mashed together because his computer ran the frame rate better. Then I'd bring him over and show him on mine and he was like "oh!? What the hell? That's really good!" Only then did I feel relieved, aside from having a turdputer.
I remember playing this game as a kid, any chance their is a game like this now or any chance their will be another 3D movie maker with McZee and his assistant but with much better ability/program to make movies?
They just made this open source!
Melanie's dead eyes always creaped me out way more than McZ.
How do you not have more subs
Microsoft just open sourced 3D Movie Maker.
God my sister and best friend and his brother and I played the HELL out of this!
I'm pretty sure i saw A Bone To Pick back in the day
If someone could update the graphics I think kids nowadays would still love it.
I can say I started from here too
Fun Fact:
That "Foone" guy on Twitter is indeed the creator of v3dmm! You should also check out Open3DMM, a project written by another 3DMM code guy (Jayrod) to implement his own graphics engine into an open source port of 3dmm!
I still have my original 3DMM CD-Rom.
wait this guy has been on youtube for years and has a subcount under 1 million?
I want to go back.
13:39 so this uh, a program for kids eh? that whats that button in the bottom right of the music selection doing there?
You can also add gore to you movie XD
Idk who the F you are but I am here for 3D movie maker - this was THE SHIT
13:17 lmaooo
WAIT UP WANDA!
hm. I doon't knoow.
He’s…BARNEY!?!
how do i try 3d movie maker out?
I have downloaded this game, but opens up in a small window. Is there a way to play the game in fullscreen or such? I tried using a Fullscreen emulator but puts the entire game screen on the upper left corner and the window size remains the same.
As far as I'm aware there's no way to play the game in fullscreen.
How do you make it full screen?
If you mean how did I get the footage full-screen for the video, that's just a simple zoom-in. If you mean how do you make the program full-screen, as far as I'm aware it's not possible.
1:39 Amogus
That weird, non Scottish McZee is freaking me out.
This used to terrify me lmao
Not to offend McZee, but he sounds like Lancer from Deltarune
wait UP whahnDAH.
mr dink
I'll trade you a magic trick for a vase
change the thumbnail? oh well that's fine :/
Oh no! A Rat!
Real ones know
Do you remember Addicted to 3D Movie Maker website????? And Gangwars the first 3d movie maker movie with guns
Didn't ask
Did you ever find yourself posting on old vbulletin forums like 3dmm.co.uk back in the day? I remember guys like Tuna Hematoma and Andres De La Haz (sp?) among others were inspiring.