So, a few days ago, I reminisced about how my friend Cheno and our merry little band of youthful movie buffs used to shoot our own movies on a VHS camcorder. Cheno was the writer-director on most of these efforts, while the rest of us pulled multiple duties as on-screen talent, camera operators, stunt performers, grips, prop masters, and caterers. Our finished films — the ones we did finish, that is — were always entertaining, and Cheno came up with a lot of creative solutions to deal with various problems, but I must be honest: they were pretty primitive stuff. They couldn’t be anything otherwise, given the equipment we had available at the time.

That’s why I am continually amazed at the amateur-made stuff I see on the web nowadays. As uncomfortable as I may be with many aspects of the digital revolution that’s swept our society in the past 20 years, I can’t deny that it’s made a lot of things possible for the average person that weren’t even worth dreaming about back in the day. Take, for example, the short animated film C.O.D.E. Guardian, which imagines a World War II battle fought with anime-style giant robots (it’s presented in two parts in the following YouTube clips):

Part 1

Part 2

According to Boing Boing, this was a do-it-yourself project made entirely by one guy, one Marco Spitoni. That’s astounding… while the storyline may be nonsensical (artificially intelligent robots in the ’40s? Why didn’t the big battleships in the background fire on the thing with their primary guns? And what happened between the American and Japanese ‘bots?) and the dialogue is, um, less than exceptional, the overall scope and realism of the project is on par with a lot of professional feature-film effects. Presumably this was accomplished with consumer-grade technology, although I haven’t been able to confirm that.

Cheno and I once discussed trying to put a flying car into one of our films. We were going to construct a filming miniature — well, a drugstore model kit of a Honda Civic — and attempt to bluescreen it into a shot. We abandoned the idea when it became obvious it was beyond our means. That was a mere 15 or so years ago. Now look what this Marco guy has accomplished. Like I said, astounding…

[Update: Cheno just IM’d me to point the way to a better quality version of C.O.D.E. Guardian, and it’s all in one complete clip, too…]