HowardC wrote:
Filming is also extremely hard to do if you want it to look right. It's easier than doing animation, but not much. Just as an example it would be fairly impossibly to do a martial arts game like you are saying unless you want to do a fairly uninteresting one as you have to film the base animation,
Another possibility, depending on the look desired, is to do it in CGI. There are several relatively low-cost CGI tools out there optimized for various things - Bryce, Vue, Carrera, Poser, etc. Poser is particularly useful for this purpose as it is a figure-modelling program, and includes the ability to do animations. IIRC, the animations are output as .AVI files, but it shouldn't be too hard to convert them to M2V.
In fact, given that sound would also be desired, I would suggest a movie-editing program. Import the various .AVIs, import the sound, output the results as M2V and .OGG files.
The biggest hang-up with Poser is that it is a memory hawg. Be prepared to lose your computer for 24 to 48 hours for render times, particularly if you go for hi-res textures, bump maps, lots of props and scenery, etc. You'd better have lots of hard drive space, too. However, for those of us who can't draw for beans and who don't have digicams and friends with a modicum of acting ability, it might be a route to go.