iLife let’s you be composer and editor with production capabilities that required an entire studio 15 years ago. The next logical step in consumer production is full-on film direction, a combination of simulation and multimedia that completes the DIY promise. An example of what amateurs are hacking together is Mike Fraser’s 100 years (Windows Media), made using The Sims 2 and set to Five for Fighting’s 100 years (iTunes). It’s rough but wonderful. Wait for the ending.

Update: Brett writes in to compare this to machinima, which it is, and which I should have thought of after discovering the hilarious Red vs. Blue last year. But what if Apple comes at it from the other direction – building a complete production studio on your mac, instead hacking together a movie using a game engine — it could suddenly own the commercial machinima market before others realized there was a market.