Microsoft 3D Movie Maker Is Forever

As a child, I would often describe myself as being imaginative, but fairly talentless. I enjoyed drawing, but wasn’t a very good artist. I enjoyed reading, but I wasn’t particularly good at writing. I really would’ve loved to make music, but had no real skill with any instruments. So it was quite difficult for me to articulate myself in a creative way. When I had ideas in my head, I always found it impossible to put them to paper.

And that’s when I discovered a programme called Microsoft 3D Movie Maker. It was the 1990s, and my family was not particularly well off. We were quite a poor family, but I had always dreamed of having my own personal computer. We had an Amstrad CPC-464 back in the day, but anyone who had one of those would say it was more akin to the Spectrum or Commodore 64 and not a true computer.

I often saw PC games in various gaming magazines or on TV in shows such as GamesMaster or Bad Influence, and PC games looked amazing compared to anything available on console. I longed for the likes of 7th Guest, Flight of the Amazon Queen or It Came From The Desert.

My parents, although they didn’t earn a lot of money, would save all year so they could get me a rather modest PC from Toys R Us for Christmas. I loved it. It came with a handful of software, including the wonderful Microsoft Golf, of course it came with Encarta — and a little programme that I hadn’t heard of previously called Microsoft 3D Movie Maker.

For those who don’t know, Microsoft 3D Movie Maker was a programme that allowed you to make simple 3D movies. It worked by selecting your scenes, characters and props, then clicking and dragging them around to perform actions. Dragging a character from left to right would make them walk across the screen, and clicking and holding them while a talk animation was selected would make them appear as if they were speaking.

I created my first masterpiece in the form of Big Red Car. Big Red Car was about…well, a big red car. This car would drive around and essentially run people over. Whether it was commuters on their way to work, people doing their weekly shop, or even people in a business meeting, no one was safe from the Big Red Car.

3D Movie Maker came with a number of small sample movies to give you inspiration for what to make next. These little films were surprisingly helpful. They demonstrated how to make intros, opening credits and end credits, and everything else that could make your film feel complete.

I spent many hours on 3D Movie Maker and made some movies that I was immensely proud of, including Space Men from Mars, which featured two spacemen on Earth getting into wacky adventures and misunderstandings; The GeneJack Factory, about a martial arts fighter who had been cloned and had to battle his own duplicates; and Cyber Woman, a superhero born from a computer. They were all fairly basic movies, but I loved making them nonetheless.

I continued to use Microsoft 3D Movie Maker over the years, pouring weekend evenings and school holidays into creating projects and slowly making them more complex as I learned.

My parents were not big fans of the internet. Back in the days of the “Information Superhighway,” it felt like a mysterious entity. The internet was certainly around, but not many people had it in their homes; it definitely wasn’t as widespread or familiar as it is today. It also had a reputation for being quite dangerous (or at least, that’s what my parents believed), which made them suspicious of the whole thing. They’d heard that there were “bad things” lurking online, so they understandably didn’t want it in the house.

You might think my parents a little silly for their unfounded moral panic, but the internet was demonised a lot during the 90s. The UK press would often criticise the internet for various things, such as frequently being used by criminals, or perhaps even contributing to the supposed downfall of society.

On top of that, dial-up could be quite expensive. You often paid per minute, tied up the phone line completely, and it simply wasn’t an affordable option for us when I was young.
So instead, I spent many hours in the library, using the computers there to get online. I became fascinated by it. There was something magical about being able to look up anything you wanted, whenever you wanted. And one day, I thought to myself: I wonder if anyone has uploaded their own 3D Movie Maker films? Surely there must be other people out there making things with this strange little programme.

And of course, I eventually found a website called Dragon Films.

Dragon Films — which, amazingly, is still available today — featured a whole host of movies that I could download and watch. Unfortunately, I was restricted by the limits of floppy disks, which meant the films had to be fairly short, but I still managed to download a good number of them and watch them at home. Some were better than others, of course, but many were far better than anything I was making at the time.

I have to give a shout-out to a wonderful little film I adored as a child called The Big Blue Planet That We Do Not Know About, directed by Noah Nazim. Another standout was a spectacular zombie film called Aarnishoz by Ben Wheele. It was a chaotic, punk-style zombie movie that featured animation techniques I genuinely didn’t realise were possible in 3D Movie Maker.

There was also one major movie on the website, directed by the site’s owner himself, Greg Strnad. The film was called Final Fantasy: The Ultimate Epic. The screenshots alone showed animation and scene-building of a quality I’d never seen before. Unfortunately, due to its enormous size — a staggering 21.8 megabytes — I was completely unable to fit it onto a floppy disk, which meant I couldn’t take it home to watch. So it ended up being quite a long time before I ever actually saw that film.

Eventually, I got older, and spending an hour in the library a couple of times a week just wasn’t enough any more. Broadband had become a thing, and the new packages made it far cheaper and more practical to get the internet at home. My parents resisted at first, but they finally relented and allowed me to have the internet on my computer.

This opened up the entire 3D Movie Maker world in a way I’d never experienced before. There were countless websites I’d only glimpsed in passing at the library, but now I could explore them properly. One of the biggest was 3DMM.com, a forum still active today and now the main hub for 3D Movie Maker content. There were also websites like LockAndToad.com and Explode Productions, each hosting their own collections of movies. 3DMM  Studio hosted movies too, and even offered tools and utilities that made creating 3DMM films much easier.

Having proper internet access also meant I could finally watch more of the famous 3DMM films I’d only heard about, such as Action Joe 2 and Redux. There was even a really impressive 3DMM Doom adaptation that repurposed the game’s storyline as a dramatic movie rather than an action-driven shooter. It also finally allowed me to watch Greg Strnad’s Final Fantasy: The Ultimate Epic, and it absolutely blew my mind. It looks fairly rudimentary today, but at the time, for 3D Movie Maker, it was astonishing.

I managed to track down Dragon Films’ Greg Strnad while researching this article. I discovered that he had a similar experience to my own, and discovered 3DMM during Christmas of ‘95. The programme immediately helped his creativity:

“I was very interested in hand-writing short stories at the time, and very quickly 3DMM became my new platform of choice to get those stories out of my head.”

We discussed his movie Final Fantasy: The Ultimate Epic, to which Greg told me how he viewed it as a creative experience:

“-my attempt to simultaneously write a novel and produce a movie that followed that novel word-for-word-”

“The story would thus be a ‘film-novel,’ where one could either pick up the book or fire up the film and get the exact same story.”

Greg’s home life would also play into the movie in a major way:

“A more amusing bit of trivia: the hoverboard halfpipe scene in Chapter 6 was a nod to my brother’s love for skateboarding, and the multi-level chess game that follows was a nod to my own love of chess.”

I asked Greg why he built the Dragon Films website in the first place, and why he keeps it going almost 20 years on from its last proper update:

“Somewhere around 1996 or 1997 a website called ‘3D Movie Maker International’ popped up online that was one of the first 3DMM sites where people could send in their own movies to share with the world. One day the site went down, and I felt an internet without a space for people to share their 3DMM creations would be quite a sad internet indeed.”

“This was the impetus for me to build the Dragon Films website in 1998. I actively ran the site for about eight years before deciding in 2006 that it was time to finish that chapter of my life, but I continue to keep it running today as a read-only time capsule of sorts in hopes that newcomers can catch a glimpse of and veterans can relive what early 3DMM films were like.”

I uploaded my earlier efforts to Dragon Films, but compared to what I was seeing now, those movies were child’s play. These new films featured custom scenery, handmade characters, and techniques far beyond anything I had ever done. Inspired, I began working on a sequel to my GeneJack movie. The project became a huge undertaking with all-new custom scenery. I got maybe maybe two-thirds through it when disaster struck: my computer broke. The hard drive was gone, and I lost everything.

After that, I lost the motivation to continue. I drifted away from 3D Movie Maker. I was getting older, I’d gone to college, I was spending more time with friends, and I didn’t really have the free time to sit down and painstakingly make movies.

I did try to make several other 3D Movie Maker movies. I tried again to make a sequel to The GeneJack Factory, but I couldn’t make it stick. I started a film called Zombies, which never really went anywhere beyond a full intro sequence. I put together a remake of Visitors, the sample movie included on the disc. Later on, I tried a few new projects: Man Man, about a man bitten by a radioactive man; DaggerFace, a science-fiction comedy; and an untitled film noir project. None of them progressed very far.

I guess life just got in the way, and I drifted away from 3D Movie Maker. But it’s still an important part of my life. I still think about it, and I would still love to have the time to go back and tinker with it again someday.

3DMM is far from dead, however, and there are several projects that have made attempts to keep 3DMM alive for modern audiences. 2004’s V3DMM by Travis Wells (Foone) was one of the biggest developments in 3DMM history, which allowed easy modding. It allowed users to add custom props, scenes and actors, totally changing the game, so to speak.

Others looked into the technical experimentation side of the programme, including a user named Jayrod, who desperately wanted a true 3DMM sequel. He spent time reverse engineering 3DMM with his ‘3DMM2’ project, which eventually became open3DMM — a hugely ambitious undertaking. Jayrod made some great progress, judging by his YouTube channel, but the project has not had an update in years.

In 2022, internet archivist Foone Turing directly asked Microsoft if they would release the Microsoft 3D Movie Maker source code — and they said ‘sure’. Publishing the code base onto GitHub allowed users to pore over cool and at times strange 90s code. There were other fantastic tools created too, such as 3DMM Pencil, 3DMM Animator and Actor Extractor.

I’m so glad it’s still around today, and that people are still releasing 3D Movie Maker movies. Just looking at the website now, I can see lots of films being released throughout 2025. And I think it’s wonderful that people are still finding 3D Movie Maker after all these years, and that people are still using it to express their creativity in ways they perhaps couldn’t through other creative forms.

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