Depth of Options
While there are many things Moviestorm does right, some strange inconsistencies mar it. Overall, it allows you to do so many things. You can easily build walls for sets, add carpeting and wallpaper, or create characters and adjust facial traits, accessories and more. You can select the lighting and put it wherever you want, you can have as many cameras as you would ever need and even utilize specific focal lengths for shots.
While presented with a myriad of props and locations, the organization is poor and options that should be included (like having different colored wallpaper other than white stucco and a carpet that is not green) are horribly absent.
My biggest disappointment with the options was the surprising limitations in the character design section. One would think that, as this is a program designed to create movies, and one of the most important parts of movies are...well...the actors, you would be able to customize them at least as much as you can in The Sims. This is sadly not true, not even allowing a beard. As a man, the first thing I ever do in programs is create doppelgangers, and it did not allow me to create someone (bearded) who looked anything like me.
The options are tremendous, but for everything left in, it seems two or three obvious options were left out. I hope a future version of this program will get some more ideas from animation programs like iClone 2.5 and Poser 7.
The extensive gesture window section does allow for a lot of interesting character movement.
Performance
I cannot really fault Moviestorm. It is the first program created entirely for producing Machinima and it seems to make that process much easier than taking video files from games, that are being somewhat hacked in order to create footage, which must then be edited together later. It is a success at that and despite my problems, it does work. However, it presents the user with issues at nearly every turn, and crashed several times on my computer (so save frequently), but it is simpler than hand-coding or hacking video games the old-fashioned way.
The props window. Again, very Sims-like, but completely unorganized.
