By the Waters of Babylon *RE-RELEASE*

Filling up the archive. -Aaron


(this should be ready soon if it's still listed as unavailable)

[Aaron Haynes]

Here's an oddity in 3DMM history: an actual historical epic with a serious bent and a morality tale to it. It's too long and gets a little preachy, but I always thought it was underrated (or I assumed it was -- I've almost never heard anyone else mention it).

[Phil Williamson]

haha holy shit the whole time I was watching this I was amazed that what was easily the best-written 3dmm movie ever had flown so far under the radar all these years...then I see at the end that it's an adaptation of a short story from which he lifted basically every line. haha. oh well, still definitely worth watching.

[Phil Williamson]

oh by the way is this still around anywhere: http://3dmm.com/showthread.php?t=7960&highlight=babylon

because the dialogue overlaps in this version were really bad.

[Tuna Hematoma]

I think part of the reason this movie is not really "known" is because Izak didn't want this posted on Maltby's site.

[Santiago]

I actually remember it; just sayin'

[Andres]

the lesson is 3dmmers shoulda never written their own movies.

[Aaron Haynes]

Re-released as part of the 3DMM Preservation Project. This is undoubtedly the high-water mark for difficult encodes; there are sound cues 90 seconds into an unbroken monologue, and Izak's computer clearly had slowdown on some scenes, because even running 3dmm at less than 5fps they were outpacing the voice cues. It took a lot of work getting this one done.

Enjoy!

[Tuna Hematoma]

GOOD JOB HAYNES!

[Aaron Haynes]

thx bro

[Dave Miles]

nice one, thanks.

[Tuna Hematoma]

I remember after this was released, there were constant "weird/artsy-fartsy" movies released for the next month or so. Was kinda interesting. I want to say Blue Cactus was released near the same time, but I'm probably wrong.

[Aaron Haynes]

That sounds about right, cause people were talking about it when I first started posting in early 2002 or whenever. Never got around to watching it though.

[Aaron Haynes]

This movie is really strange, for better and worse it's really unlike everything else that was being done at the time. I vaguely remember the drama that inevitably surrounded anything Izak waded into, but I wasn't really part of the community back then (I had my own controversial release shortly afterward to keep me busy). It definitely helps the movie to be as separated from that as possible, cause it is an interesting project and gets a lot out of the quality of its story.

The direction is pretty decent, there's some genuinely good sequences in it, though it does take its sweet time getting anywhere. The construction techniques are obviously pretty dated, but the movie nevertheless has a pretty unique look with the grey skies, ever-present sphere clouds and hills, and scattered debris. The water effects impressed me a lot back in 2001, and even today they stand out among pre-v3dmm releases.

The voice acting...well you get used to it after a while. Brossy had some long monologues to read, and apart from a few points where he was clearly given line direction ("I HAVE KILLED THE PANTHER, YAHHH"), it always sounds like he's reading. The movie sometimes feels like it's narrated by an eighth-grader miserably working his way through the entire short story for the class. The quality of the writing helps.

While the pacing makes the experience a bit of a slog (especially on the repeat viewings Izak prods us to do), it has an interesting effect of widening the setting of the story. You really feel how far apart everything is, the world can't help but seem huge when you spend six straight minutes watching this guy walk from village to village and across all different kinds of terrain.

While Izak's closing notes read a little self-congratulatory, he's right that this is a difficult movie to classify in the 3DMM catalog, there's very little that's quite like it, and that alone makes it pretty valuable in looking over the history of this program. Luckily, it's pretty good as well.

[The Chinese Jew]

I miss Izak MD, he was a funny guy. This movie...I saw it a long time ago. I didn't really like it, but I probably didn't get it either.

[Phil Williamson]

he thanks you in the credits for giving your "completely honest opinion" on his "opus," so I guess you disliked it in a constructive way at least!


Thanks so much for doing this one, Aaron - it was really difficult to watch in its .3mm form. I still think this is a really great little movie. I actually really liked its, shall we say, ponderous pacing, with all the travel scenes. I'm not really sure I could even say why, but somehow it worked for me. I think a lot of it was the music, which I think was extremely well chosen.

But yeah, if nothing else this is an interesting footnote in community history. I'm not sure I can think of even one other movie that was adapted directly from some other sort material, but it seems to work very well here. I wonder why no one else ever tried it.

[Compcat]

I remember when I first saw it, it was much like Phil's earlier comment in this thread, I didn't know it was a short story, and so I was kind of pissed when I found out, and that gave me an unfair bias against this movie. It's good for what it is, though nothing that I'd call a 'classic.'

I really liked the long interlude with the psychedelic rock song, when he's doing the travelling. I mean, that's obviously an example of seriously lazy directing, but somehow it just works.

Otherwise it was mostly long-winded. Narrating a short story with cheap 3dmm animations is not a recipe for success.

[Andres]

I don't even really remember who Izak MD was anymore.

[Tuna Hematoma]

go fuck a nihilist

[Aaron Haynes]

Originally Posted by Compcat

I really liked the long interlude with the psychedelic rock song, when he's doing the travelling. I mean, that's obviously an example of seriously lazy directing, but somehow it just works.

I don't think it's lazy, more like self-indulgent. It was kind of a bold choice, because it's literally 6 minutes of narration-free travelling, and that could be insanely boring. And at times, it is. But I agree, something about it works once you settle in and let the movie do its thing.

[Compcat]

Yeah, wrong word choice. I was thinking more that most of the scenery and animation during the travelling was really minimal and bare-bones, and so that's more what I was accusing of laziness rather than the idea itself. I think it was executed lazily is what I was trying to say, which is why I was suprised that it worked so well.

[Izak MD]

I logged in an did an ego search, and this thread came up, so here I am, I guess.

Thanks for preserving this in Vimeo form. When I was like 14 and made this thing, I had no idea that 10 years later people would still be viewing it. That's pretty damn impressive. I'm also impressed at the fact that this video is now synced up as precisely as is possible. Back when I made it on a Windows 95 -- and not a terribly great one, at that -- I wasn't quite aware of how 3dmm software actually functioned, and I didn't have the foresight to understand how ridiculously annoying it would be to try and watch it on a better computer.

Overall, I like my movie still. I agree with most of the criticisms here. The six-minute travel montage was more self-indulgent than lazy (even in Hollywood movies, they don't do montages that long), because I was basically trying to imagine what I would do if I was a director who was interacting with real environments, and actual plains and fields and things. In a bare-bones cartoon, it doesn't quite work out so great. But the song choice sort of saves it. The direction is definitely lazy at other times. I think that Andres de la Hoz made a pretty good point in his mostly negative review, right when it came out: the scene where the humans get nuked is supposed to be the climax of the film, and it's supposed to be tormenting and emotionally gripping, and etc., but it's not at all. I didn't really make use of any of the gaping potential in that scene; it just sort of begins and ends quickly.

If I could go back and do it all again, I probably would've done the following things:
1. Do my own voice for the main character, because it just makes no sense to have an Aussie play an American (although Brad Ross is a kickass dude). Plus, it'd be nice to hear now what I sounded like as an angry youth caught in the throes of pubescence. Or maybe I would've just gotten Tuna to do the voices, I dunno.
2. Draw out the nuke scene much more, perhaps to be about half as long as the travel scene, replete with shots of wailing citizens holding their own eyeballs while fist-sized drops of black rain rain down from the firmament, and stuff like that.
3. Do more with the scenery, fix up the moving camera sloppiness, etc.
4. Nix the very self-indulgent credits and just throw in a good old-fashioned "Fin."

Since my last post on this forum was kind of obnoxious (John Sapone put me up to it, I guess), I figure this ought to be a better one.

It's pretty cool to be back here, and I can't deny how impressive it is that most of the stuff everyone used to fantasize about when I was around has more or less come true. Back in 2003, people would dream about being able to put shit like Sonic the Hedgehog in their movie, and not have to make him entirely out of circles, squares, and characters from the Latin alphabet. Naturally, I was resistant to all of this stuff for a while -- I'm sort of a quasi-technophobe in my day-to-day life -- but I also recognize that all of these additions and upgrades would be necessary to sustain any interest in this program, since computer programmers can have some fun, and the spirit of creativity hasn't really left the program.

When I first discovered that there was an online community of 3dmm movie makers, it was on a Geocities website called "Jeremy's 3D Movie Maker Page," because I hadn't thought to Hotbot (or was it Yahoo?) search the abbreviation '3dmm.' This mysterious Jeremy guy's page featured a bunch of hate movies by NicKevin's Undertaker -- who basically deserves the credit for creating the "hate movie" genre, which eventually culminated into the Sniper films -- some genuinely perverse and poorly directed films by Marc Sola, some stuff by a strange character known as Mr. Cumstain (now known as Jeff Ching), the incredible Litterbug 1 but not 2 by Jimmy Pozin, Action Joe 1 and 2 by Ruiz, and two great movies by Robert Domke: Stryker and Drugheads. Drugheads was my favorite. Among other things, the site also had a bunch of the Redneck movies, which Ben Williams turned into Rednecks in New York (I'm not sure if he directed the original redneck series; perhaps if he's around he could explain more). The page also featured The Watchtower, which was genuinely disturbing to my 12-year-old mind, and the 3D Bomberman series. This was all before Y2K.

Later on, I realized that the now-defunct Geocities website was the tip of the iceberg, and that there was an actual online community of people who made these things. There was Goat's "McZee's Nuclear Bungalow" site, Tuna's website, and later on, 3dmm.co.uk entered the picture. But even before all that, I was genuinely amazed with the movies themselves. Somehow, a program designed for 8-year-olds had been co-opted by screwy 13-year-old shut-ins to produce shocking and disturbing films featuring gratuitous sex, violence, and other fascinating subjects for any testosterone-filled youngster with all sorts of evil thoughts raging around in his little head. My mind was pretty blown. Suddenly, the letter L was no longer just a letter: it was a gun! The cylinder wasn't just a cylinder -- you could use it to make a bong, if you just add a little sphere! And if you squashed the sphere and colored it red, you could make it into a pool of blood! The whole thing was genuinely anarchic.

3dmm was and still is a great program for any youngster who needs an outlet with which to exercise his creative impulses. What seemed like a harmless and benign, G-rated throwaway program with little-to-no market success was hijacked and turned into a vessel for creating all sorts of degenerate filth that young people love. For me, the main lesson to learn was one of resourcefulness, and the great pleasure that I had was in watching a community of kids push the program's boundaries to create more and more impressive feats of the imagination.

So I have to give some props to Aaron Haynes for working on this 3dmm Preservation Project, and I hope that he's doing a good job saving all the classics -- and hopefully dredging up some of the lost movies that are nowhere to be found on the internet. My only hope is that there are still young people getting into 3dmm, and that when their movie fails to be a classic, it can still be appreciated on its own merits. Even the most bare-bones of 3dmm movies still have their charms. I like to think that when Jimmy Pozin returned after Litterbug 2 to make a bunch of joke movies (before Ragtag Group of Rebels was released), he was trying to make that point -- or maybe when Jason Ruiz threw in the one pre-made city scene into Sergeant Steve. I'm looking around here and seeing some movies that still use the pre-recorded dialogue such as, "Yeah, where's Charlie?" and am glad to see that there's still some appreciation for the form of the program itself.

Here's a brief list of some of my favorites, although I'm sure I'm forgetting about a ton:

Men of Seattle, Dustin Guest and Anthony Boyle (this one was HUGELY innovative -- if I'm not mistaken it was the first one to do the thing where you take three asteriks, put them in a circle and do the motion where they all unite, and make a gore splatter out of it)
Dead Heart in a Dead World, Andres de la Hoz
Enriched Enlightenment, Diabolical Delightment, Will Maltby (also hugely innovative)
Drugheads, Rob Domke
Porno Flick, Rob Domke
NUTS 1 and 2, Redwampa (ditto for innovative)
The Spice Girls Series, Greg Niecestro
The Pokegay Series, Greg Niecestro
Child Killer Series, John Sapone
Rednecks in New York, the whole Rednecks series
Bodily Functions, Pikios
Litterbug 1 and 2, Pozin
Ragtag Group of Rebelz, Pozin
Action Joe 1 and 2, Ruiz
The Jason Ruiz Show, Ruiz
Sergeant Steve, Ruiz
Le Freak (and pretty much everything else he did), Bjorn Petersson (?)
Ghetto in Afroca 3, Midbackman
All of Thierry Lacombe's stuff
The one that I think Tuna made where that weird prop-made character dances to "It's Tricky" by Run DMC, fuck I can't remember the name
The one by Pikios where it's the apocalypse or whatever
And some others that I've forgotten in the last ten years.

Take care now!

[Jt Copper]

Whoa. Izak.

[Phil Williamson]

haha cool, good to see you. you should stick around for a while!

[Aaron Haynes]

Originally Posted by Izak MD

So I have to give some props to Aaron Haynes for working on this 3dmm Preservation Project, and I hope that he's doing a good job saving all the classics -- and hopefully dredging up some of the lost movies that are nowhere to be found on the internet.

I've fallen off the wagon on this since I installed Windows 7, but we still have all the movie files saved in various places. I'm sure I'll pick it up again sometime later this year.

Thanks for coming back and commenting, and glad you appreciated the encode! That was an interesting read, there's a lot of history to the movies this community made and it's great having it preserved for the future.