Valve, creator of best-selling game franchises (such as Counter-Strike, Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Portal, and Team Fortress) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced the Source Filmmaker (SFM) and the release of "Meet the Pyro."

The SFM is a storytelling tool Valve developed inside the Source Engine to create all its animated short films, including those in the "Meet the Team" series of Team Fortress 2 shorts. The SFM condenses the production pipeline of an animation studio down onto a single gaming PC.

To celebrate the announcement of the SFM, Valve also released the ninth and final short in the "Meet the Team" series today, "Meet the Pyro."

"The goal of the SFM was to develop a story telling tool that allowed us to create computer animated movies more efficiently, and with greater creative freedom," said Bay Raitt, designer at Valve. "Over the past five years, we’ve produced more than 50 animated shorts with the SFM. The Source Filmmaker will allow our community to create their own movies in Team Fortress 2 and in their own Source SDK-created mods."

The SFM is currently in closed beta and will be made available – free of charge – later this year via Steam. More information on the SFM may be found at www.sourcefilmmaker.com

The release of "Meet the Pyro" caps off a three-day "Pyromania" event over at http://www.teamfortress.com/pyromania/