Machinima

I mentioned the art of making movie out of video games, and Peaceful Blade reminded me of the correct term for it, "machinima", and pointed to this funny and raunchy example.

Obviously you can't make good movies with this tool, it is made for gaming, not movie making. I don't see a great leap to a tool which is made for movie making though. Software with relatively easy-to-use tools for amateur film makers, so they don't have to get a degree in 3D animation, but can simply ask the characters to do what they should, and so on. This software could be sold with extra modules for various characters and settings for what you need. Maybe you could buy a complete model of 42nd Street in NYC, for example.

If somebody made this, I think we could see quite interesting movies being made by single authors. What William Gibson called "the garage Kubrick", and sort of made the focus of his wonderful novel Pattern Recognition, except that one was based on the technology of around the millennium, and so one person couldn't do it.

Actually exceptionally clever individuals are already sort of getting there, witness Till Nowak's Delivery. This short film is pretty damn awesome, it's hard to believe it's made by one man, more or less. I have a 96MB version of the whole nine-minute film, which I downloaded a couple of years ago, but it seems it's not available for free download anymore, they are selling it on DVD. (If it were me, I'd sell it as a download, much more interest in that, rather than wait for a DVD.)

Update: Alex points to this interesting movie.