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Moviestorm is enabling a new generation of amateur film-makers to realize their visions.  It offers easy, affordable animation tools that can produce sophisticated high-quality films on practically no budget. After several years in development, Moviestorm has demonstrated that home movie-making needn’t be limited to cheap hand-held cameras and clips of the kids goofing around. Its virtual movie studio allows users to break free of the limitations of the real world, and allows them to direct, film, edit and distribute 3D animated movies without any knowledge of animation techniques or 3D modelling. And best of all, it’s free, and comes without any copyright restrictions.

Iain Friar, known as IceAxe, is one of Moviestorm’s many successful film-makers.  His short film, Clockwork, a dystopian vision of a totalitarian Britain after a Soviet invasion in the 1980s, is winning accolades and awards around the world, most recently the audience prize at the Atopic Festival in France and the Grand Prize at the Machinima Expo.  Clearly influenced by both 1984 and A Clockwork Orange, with a visual style that evokes both Communist era propaganda posters and more recent animated movies such as A Scanner Darkly, it is a stark, powerful film that belies its modest origins.

Iain, who’s 42, works in marketing, and started making movies just 18 months ago. “I’ve always been a hands-on person, in music, sport, and everything else,” he says. “I thought it would be fun to shoot a music video, but I’m not the most technical of people, and it seemed extraordinarily hard.  I remember when computer games started using in-game animation to tell the story instead of video clips, and this interested me, especially now that game technology has become so sophisticated. So I bought a book, Machinima for Dummies, which had Moviestorm on the CD, and I was hooked. I liked Moviestorm because it did what I was looking for, even though I didn’t really know what I was looking for at the time, and the Moviestorm community was very supportive.  I initially made comedies, but I could see that the movies people respected were more dramatic, so it seemed that was the direction to go in.”

He spent four months working on Clockwork, and then the same again on his next short, Cloud Angel, a steampunk thriller set on board an airship.  Apart from the voice acting, he made the entire film himself at his home in Basingstoke, England.  “I’m lucky that my friends are so willing to step up to the mike and read my silly scripts!” he laughs. His next film is Gridlock, a science fiction comedy which he is co-producing with another successful Moviestorm director, James Thorpe.  For this, they’ve stepped up the production costs a notch: they hired a recording studio and got the local amateur dramatic group to do the voice acting.

Iain is realistic about his future, though.  “Am I ambitious? Yes. Do I want to keep it as just a hobby? Well, probably yes, because I imagine that if it became a full time activity, the fun might go out of it. I make movies as escapism. That said, I think that this industry would be really interesting to work in, because it’s embryonic; I’m not sure what direction it will go in. It’s exciting!”

Moviestorm’s CEO, Jeff Zie, is hugely enthusiastic and supportive.  “Iain and the many other Moviestorm users are an inspiration to us all,” he says. “We’re really proud that we’re giving talented people like this the tools they need to unleash the creative potential they never knew they had, and to produce these wonderful films.”

Try it and see!

You can download Moviestorm for free: Windows and Mac versions are available. If you want, you can expand your virtual film studio and buy extra costumes, sets, props, and sounds in their marketplace. If you’ve ever wondered whether you might be the next Tarantino, Ang Lee, or J J Abrams, now’s the time to find out!

Image by …-Wink-… via Flickr

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Here’s a list of my top 10 Entrecard droppers for the month of March

As anyone used ESPN in the past? I would still like to require a 5-10 fee with small prizes at the end.

I’ll send emails out soon or contact me if you want to play this year. You all know the address, if not just leave a comment here.

later,jb

It’s Friday the 13th!!!! LOL

She was so proud of herself.

Walking and crawling, now she is really mobile!

jb 

Maybe its time to convert it to a wordpress site….We’ll see what my host says. If they have any ideas about the postnuke site.

jb

But when I try to pop my email using outlook 2003, it seems to be going to my old host!!! The mail settings are all using DNS not IP addresses and I even tried to setup another POP account within outlook and it still goes to the old host!! WTF.

I decided to try Google Apps to host my email for my domains. So my new host is updating my MX records to point to google. Maybe that will fix it

I just hope I don’t have the same DB issues with this host as I did with my last.

later,jb

EMCWORLD was great, wish I could have met some of the other storage bloggers well I was there, maybe next year at Vegas.

I’ll be getting into navisphere Analyzer on Tuesday to look at some of the reports I learned about. I’ll also be dicussing EmailXtender and Avamar with my local EMC rep.

later,jb

They so need to release Wii Sports 2 with an online mode!!

later,jb