Machinima, real-time filmmaking, virtual production and VR. Four veteran machinimators share news, new films & filmmakers, and discuss the past, present and future of machinima.
Damien Valentine 00:31
hello and welcome to another installment of And now for something completely machinima. I'm Damian Valentine, and I'm enjoyed by my co host, Tracy Harwood, hello and and Phil rice,
Phil Rice 00:54
hey there.
Damien Valentine 00:55
This week we'll be discussing two films. Well, Phil, yours is not exactly one film. It's a series, but we're going to cover the as much as of that as you want to. So you go first. What have you got for us? Yeah,
Phil Rice 01:11
so there's a filmmaker that I've been filmmaker slash animator, that I've been following for quite some time. I first, he first came to my notice when he released the first chapter of his film that he's produced in Blender, which was called Dynamo dream. I want to say that we must have, we did. I don't know if we ever covered it. Did we cover it as an actual film? Okay, we did. That's what I thought. So I didn't want to just, just review another chapter, if, I mean, we reviewed the first chapter. He's released a couple other videos in that universe. But the, the official part two of of episode one, I think, is how he's he's labeling it is out, and it continues to impress. I mean, it's just, there's a, you know, we've seen an awful lot of impressive stuff over the years, in Blender and in Unreal Engine that really kind of pushed the push the envelope in terms of, I don't know if realism is the right word, because this, This world that he's built in there is so fantastical. It's a very science fiction feel to this environment. But in terms of stylized realism, I don't know, I don't know what the right term is for this, but it's so crisp, the image is so believable, even though it's very clearly otherworldly. And the creator of this is a guy named Ian Hubert. I think I maybe I already mentioned his name, but, and, yeah, he works primarily in Blender. If you haven't seen Dynamo dream, find it on YouTube and go find it and just watch it. It's It's stunning. He's not a solo creator. Ian is the is the director and producer, but he has quite a few talented people that work with him on this, and when you see it, you'll you'll understand why it is a single creator. I don't know how long this would have taken. He certainly carries a lot of the load himself, but he knows how to delegate and and really has a just an extraordinary gift for Worldcraft. I'm not sure what his age is, but he looks young. He looks like maybe late 20s, early 30s, but I'm not certain. Maybe Tracy will have found out about that. But he's a young man from my from my point of view, and very talented, very highly respected in the virtual production slash blender universe. I've seen some videos where he's doing kind of a lecture type presentation that almost look like a TED talk, but I'm not sure if it was a TED Talk. It's something like that, you know, something where, you know, it's an audience of very smart people, and he's a very smart, smart guy and very charismatic to just a friendly guy. So I thought, well, what can I show because I don't want to just do Dynamo dream part two, although that might have been very appropriate pick for us, but I found this series of tutorials that he has a he has them compiled into a playlist on his YouTube channel, and they're called Ian Hubert's lazy tutorials. And it's this collection of, I don't know how many are in there, maybe a dozen or so. Okay, there's close to two dozen, and the average length of them is one minute, which I know you're thinking, how can you possibly learn something about about how to do something in blender in one minute? Well, he takes a very, a very different approach to to, I think the world tutorials should probably be in quotes. The the basic mo of these videos is it starts off with this kind of a as if it's going to be a step by step. It's pretty fast paced. But it is a step by step, but inevitably, at some point late in the minute, he vaults forward about 500 steps. Just summarizes it with a and then you just do this, and this, this, and then you're done, but like, all of a sudden, it's like this ridiculously advanced scene. It's really entertaining. There are you going to learn blender from watching these videos? No, this is not that type of tutorial. I put this type of tutorial in the same category, as strange as this might be to say, as a tutorial that I saw made by our friend Tom jantal At one point, and it sparked, it sparked quite a bit of discussion between he and I, because his tutorial, Tom's as well, was very fast paced. It was not a sit down and you can write down the exact steps thing, and it got he and I talking about, well, what is this, then? Is this an actual tutorial? It's not a training course, that's for sure. But what it is is it's the type of tutorial that inspires you on possibilities and maybe gives you a little bit of a of a hint on technique. It doesn't teach you this all the steps involved. It's not intended to it's intended to inspire. And it was a great conversation that Tom and I had. We it was by a Facebook conversation, I believe. But basically, you know, trying to classify what it was that Tom had made, and this, this falls into that same category, except this one, I think, is there's a little bit more implicit humor to these because of the absurd leap that I described, that that's kind of the trademark of these. So I really value these. I use a lot of tutorials that are step by step. There's a there's a tutorial maker for iClone. I believe He's based in Malaysia, and goes by the name freedom 3d he's another one that I have no idea what his age is. He could be 50. I don't know he's got the knowledge of a 50 year old. I feel like, but he looks like he's about 17. He can't be 17, but young man, and he does extraordinarily good I clone and and character creator tutorials, but he even he has started doing where he's got his long form tutorial that might be a half hour, and it's a very detailed, step by step, he goes at just enough of a pace that if you're trying to follow along, you have to pause from time to time to keep up. But it's not too fast. But then what freedom 3d has done is he's created versions of some of those longer tutorials as time lapse videos that go through it very, very fast with no narration at all. And those are valuable in the same category as these tutorials of Ian's for inspiration, you know, as a way to expose you to some ideas about how to do things visually, or how to how to construct things. So they're little flashes of of inspiration. And it's a very valuable part of the educational video landscape that doesn't get a whole lot of attention, but it's for someone who is a creator. It's, I find it very valuable to have these in the arsenal, just because sometimes that's what you need. Maybe you don't have time to sit down and spend an hour learning how to do something in Blender, or I clone or whatever, but you just kind of want to get, you want to get some, you know, some ideas, or you just want to be inspired. And so who better to turn to than someone who is has clearly mastered many of the elements of making films, generally and specifically with the blender toolkit that it's nice to I love that he chose to share things in this way, and who knows what the thinking was behind them. Like, was this a deliberate, hey, this will be fun. People will like this. Or was it a I don't have time to do training courses, you know, I'm a busy guy. I've got this, that and the other going on, and I want to spend most of my time making the films, which are obviously very labor intensive, but this is something I could have time to do. So he's probably done some longer training stuff. Or maybe those are behind a paywall of some kind. It would be very worthwhile to pursue. If so. But anyway, I really enjoyed the humor of these, the idea behind them, the fact that they do actually, unlike my fake tutorials, these actually do convey useful information. They're not just satire, but it's, again, it's in little, digestible morsels. You know, it's a taste of the cooking, without necessarily showing you how to cook. But it can, it can kind of serve as a pointer right to, okay, I want to learn more about how, how that is done. Well, there's resources for that. So, yeah, I really, really enjoyed it. I think him titling the playlist lazy tutorials implies that he's, he's aware of what he's doing and and I appreciate that. So his Dynamo dream series. Is not by any stretch of the imagination, comedy, um, it's, it says science fiction, drama. It's very serious. It's a quality that surpasses some of what we see, of, you know, of, frankly, original content that's created on Disney plus, or, you know, some of the other networks. I mean, it is absolute top notch his finished products. And so it's nice to get a little taste of behind the scenes, of of how he works, and also a little bit of a taste of his sense of humor, which is, I think is great. So what did you guys think?
Damien Valentine 10:32
So I was, I have to admit, I have not watched all of them yet. I need to. So the first one is the making of flyers in Blender. I watched that one, I thought, well, the first thing is lazy tutorials. I was intrigued by that as a title, as what was going to do with it, and what's the first one about the flyers. Thought I see how this works. I could probably follow along this tutorial and do something with it. But then I started thinking about, well, how, how could that work in icon? So then I watched the next one, and I've got, yeah, okay, you can't actually learn how to do this. The next one was air conditioned, the air conditioner, and then the one was animate humans and so on. So you can't actually learn how to do those things. Just from that, maybe that first one, if you pause it and watch very carefully. But beyond that, you can't, but you're right. Phil, it does give ideas, the human one, and there's one later on, huge crowd. So I thought, you know, that would be really good for icon, because you could create huge crowds of people very quickly, although icon does have tools for that now, anyway, but yeah, and you're right. This is does offer inspiration, even if you're not using Blender, it if you know your other platform really well, it may give you ideas on you know, how to use it differently from what you're doing because, you know, new ideas like, like I said, I could, you could probably use this to if icon didn't have those huge crowd tools built in, you could probably start figuring out a way to do it from this. And I particularly like that flyers. One it's the first one he did. I thought, yeah, that that's so simple a way to create background details to your scenes. Now, if you would want to use that tutorial to create something you're going to look close at, but you know, just background details to make your environments look better and more detailed. That's great. And he does it so simply and so quickly that that's why I thought you could follow,
Phil Rice 12:25
yeah, and I love it. That first one is such a great example, because it's, it's okay. You've got all these individual flyers that he's made models for, and so you're thinking, well, the default approach to that would be okay, I'm gonna have to create an image and line it up as a UV map for each of these individual, individual pieces. And instead, he brings in this photograph of a whole bunch of flyers and then aligns the UV map so it's one UV map for the whole it's just brilliant, yeah, like, it's just really outside the box thinking. And I love the point in the video where he says, you know, these are for something that's going to be in the background, hardly noticeable if it was going to be in the foreground then. And his solution is, then try a little harder. I love that,
Damien Valentine 13:12
yeah. But he did it so quickly that if you're doing his that thing for real, even the background flyers, you'd probably spend a bit more than a minute, but, yeah, not much more than a minute the way he did it. It's such a simple way he presents what he's doing that maybe you do it in less than five. Maybe if you're if you know Belinda really well,
Phil Rice 13:32
yeah, I'll bet he can do it in less than five. Yeah? Me, I'd still be a three hour live stream, and at the end of it, it'd be all janky. Yeah? Me too. But again, it's
Damien Valentine 13:42
inspirational. Yeah, it's such a great idea. I kind of wish more people do this for other platform as well. I always says the lazy tutorials, icon, I'd be interested to see what someone could do with that big trek. If you're watching this, you know, icon, really well, maybe you could do something like this. So, yeah, these are great videos. I do need to watch more of them, because I really love the ones I did. I think I made about halfway through the series, and it did get me thinking, well, how can you do some of this in iClone? Yeah, the way he presents it as well is really funny, so I'm pretty sure he also knows exactly what he's doing. Yeah, is
Phil Rice 14:15
isn't it interesting? And this is why I think it succeeds on the level of inspiration. Because, okay, so these tutorials are specifically how he's doing it in Blender, but you're right. It's the techniques are are broader than that. Most of them are ones that get you thinking about how to do that. You know, there are principles that are beyond blender itself that underlie what what it is he's demonstrating in these. And I just think that's a really smart choice. Yeah,
Damien Valentine 14:47
so these are the great pick. Phil, thank you.
Tracy Harwood 14:50
Well, I haven't got too much to add to that, really. I like you guys. I I started watching it. I mean, obviously I don't make films, so, you know, you. That sort of side of it passed me by. But what caught my attention here was the the sense of humor. And, you know, we we have known of this guy in in the world of filmmaking, particularly with his Dynamo dream salad mug. You know, we reviewed that in season one. Okay, it was that long ago. It was that long ago. And I'm pretty sure that we've also talked about the two other episodes to that series that he's made subsequently over the last sort of couple three years. I'm fairly certain that we've commented on it as well. But this is the first time I've seen these tutorial type things, and I was really very interested in the wit that he brings to it, because it's not the same wit that you see in the films, just kind of kind of curious. So there's, you know, there's this, it's humor really that carries this off. And you're absolutely right. Phil, when I was looking at this, I was thinking, was thinking, well, these are not really tutorials that you can I mean, the little that I know about some of these tools, there's no way that I could follow any of that. However, what I did follow was that there's, what would you say? There's more than one way to skin a cat. Yeah,
Phil Rice 16:20
no, that's a great Absolutely. And that's
Tracy Harwood 16:24
what he's demonstrating here. It's like, you know, it's the stuff that you want to put in the background. How can you do it that's effective, that that looks good, because that's all you want it to do in in the context of a scene that you're creating where the focus is on some other aspect, and, you know, the humor that went into that snappy, it was fun, but it's also informative and interesting in what he was doing. So these aren't, these are kind of like these are. These are tips and hints on general approaches, not on the specifics of whatever that engine is that he's using to to demonstrate it. But the advice is hilarious. You know, things like just drag it into place where you don't think it looks stupid. I mean, that's a great comment. I love that. And then another one he made, where he sort of said, Imagine, imagine doing all this and actually putting some effort into it. Yeah, that's a good point. And then there's another, there's another bit where he was talking about, well, I just took my mate out into the garden and did a bit of a, you know, a capture of him, and then just put that skin on this, and it looks alright, doesn't it? You wouldn't want it in the front. But, you know, I thought they were brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Um, super quick cheats, of course, but actually really helpful because, because of the way that it helps you think about your general approach to creating the assets that you that you might need. But it also made me think about something else, which is that, you know, we've reviewed, I think certainly over the last year or so, a lot more tutorials than we had in the early seasons that we we talk about machinima, and it's pretty evident that there are numbers of of ways of creating tutorials that get points across In in ways that are not simply how tos. And this is another example of doing just that a couple of weeks ago. If you remember, we, we talked about Ricky's, you know, building a computer guy, what the guy's name was now, but he had a real fun way of, you know, creating a how to tutorial without a single word being spoken. And it was beautifully filmed and edited with a with a an obvious sense of humor to it as well. And you've just mentioned another guy, this freedom 3d guy. And I think, you know, there was the Elden ring stuff that we looked at some months back as well. I mean, there's just quite a few different approaches to do you remember we did one? We did a Tiktok video with a rat in the head. Do you remember that one? Yeah, yes. Whatever that one was about, I can't remember now, but there was so many novel ways of looking at tutorials that we just have not really considered, but I think these are getting more interesting, and stand up on their on their own, and yours, Phil your master, toots. I mean, if anybody wanted to, sort of, you know, have the, what was it? I was gonna say the Two Ronnies, but it's not the Ronnies. It was Morecambe and Wise kind of approach to, you know, creating machinima watch master toots. It's brilliant. It's everything you shouldn't do.
Phil Rice 19:48
Yeah, that's, that's a good way to summarize it.
Tracy Harwood 19:50
It's great, though. It's really, it's a real fun way of putting something across in such a, you know, an interesting style. And I think that this is emerging as a you. An anti tutorial movement in some ways, because there's so many you do. Yeah,
Phil Rice 20:06
it's really saturated, really
Tracy Harwood 20:09
boring, but, but this is quite a few years old, isn't it? This stuff, this context. I
Phil Rice 20:14
think he started, he started this five years ago, and the most recent one two years ago, or something, there's four years ago he did all these within the course of a year.
Tracy Harwood 20:23
Yeah, so he must have been one of the earlier guys doing these more novel approaches to doing tutorials. And good on him, really. Because I think it's, I think it's an, it's an excellent way to inspire you to think a little differently. And the huge
Phil Rice 20:38
a there's an early, early example that has long been an inspiration for me, and probably was in mind to at least some degree when I did Master toots. But it was called, this is going to be mid, like, 2005 2006 maybe 2007 the series of tutorials was called, you suck at Photoshop.
Damien Valentine 20:59
I think I remember that, and
Phil Rice 21:03
it's under the guise of a tutorial, but the guy doing the tutorial, his personal life, keeps intruding into the content of the tutorial, so he's he's today we're going to see how to Photoshop a cat. But then it or No, no, it wasn't a cat. It was a garbage bag. And as he starts talking about it, and he's photoshopping this garbage bag to be in like the back of an old van, and basically it ends up being that it's, he's pretending that it's the body of the man who's his wife is cheating on him with or something. It's just absurd. And so it's got this very dark humor to it. And yet, the funny thing is, is that the Photoshop techniques that he demonstrates in the videos are legit, like they're real, they're really, genuinely useful. But the whole context is this absurd. You picture like some guy that's cooped up in his basement and is just bitter and and, oh, it's he's in this character. And this the series of tutorials closes with this, this played out scene, this acted out scene where a SWAT team comes in for him, and there's like some gun battle, and the and the presumption is, is that the police come in and take him down like the screen goes dark and you hear him not you know you're never take me alive coppers, and it's just just crazy, Crazy tutorials. So, yeah, that was, that's the earliest example of that that I can see. And what was noteworthy about it is that the actual techniques that he taught you in Photoshop were actually really, legitimately useful, but it was this absurd context. So that occurred right around the same time as there was, there's a company, a group of guys called Red Letter Media, who are best known for this really long review, very critical review that they did of Star Wars, The Phantom Menace. The view the review is longer than the film. It's broken up into like 10 episodes. It's over. It's close to two hours, and he's basically criticizing everything that he feels like is wrong with that film, and he's doing it in character of this character that's named, I can't remember the character's name, but it's real. There's voice rockers and others like this guy, but it's like a master class in what makes good storytelling, but it's doing it in this inverse way, you know, like, what makes memorable characters and, oh, it's just hilarious. It's very it's rated R like, it's, it's, it's quite adult level humor. But the interesting thing is, it really is a tutorial. It never calls itself that, but it's a tutorial on what makes a good story, what makes good characters. It's, it's, it'll change the way you look at that film forever, that's for sure. But it's really funny, if you've got a dark sense of humor.
Tracy Harwood 24:20
Well, dig the links out. I think because, yeah,
Phil Rice 24:23
Red Letter Media, they're still active today. I follow them, actually. I support them on Patreon as well. I've just, I've been a fan of theirs ever since. They don't do that type of thing anymore, but their their content is still very entertaining, and they're like guys my age, so a bunch of old dudes. It's funny,
Tracy Harwood 24:43
yeah, well, I've got no other comments on it, really. I just really enjoyed it. Yeah, definitely a whole series to watch there. Yeah, worth. Got
Phil Rice 24:52
about 20 minutes you can get through the whole batch. Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
Damien Valentine 24:56
That's a great pick. Phil, I do. I do. Need to sit down and watch the the other half of the because I was watching all the films yesterday, I was just so tired I couldn't make it through all the ends. I've watched all of them. I will not watch.
Phil Rice 25:08
These are dense. They're like, it's like a box of chocolates. You know? You really should not sit down and eat the whole box at once. They're very dense
Damien Valentine 25:15
with info, yeah, you're not supposed to eat a whole box of chocolates in one go. I've been doing that's correct. That is hard to keep that in mind next time I have a box of chocolate. Yes, all right, so we'll move on to the next film, which was my pick for the month. This was made with cyberpunk 2077 which is a game I'm a huge fan of, and it's released by zero sum story. Normally, I have an elaborate story about how I found the film. This time, I just loaded up YouTube and it was on my
Phil Rice 25:44
feed. Thank you. Algorithm, huh? Yeah,
Damien Valentine 25:47
I watched it out of curiosity, and I really loved it. It was so when you start the game, you'd have to choose the background, origin story of your character, and there's three different choices. There's the no magic character, which is what this is about. There's the street kid. So you basically grew up on the streets of Night City or the core Pro. So you're basically a corporate working for this huge corporation. And the beginning of the game is different depending on what your origin is. So I haven't actually played the Nomad beginning story yet. So the idea is outside the city, it's a desert wasteland, but people live out there, and that's basically where you came from. And they try, they tend not to go into the city if they can avoid it. So I don't know the origin of how the Nomad character gets into the city. I feel like maybe I should just play the beginning as a nomad, just to get a feel for that. But what this does is gives you an idea of that kind of character. So it's using dialog and cutscenes from the game and stuff specifically made films specifically for this particular video to give you a feel for that character type, I did look to see if he'd done the other two, but unfortunately, he hasn't. He's done some other cyber pack videos, but he hasn't done the the other character background. So I hope he does, because this, I thought this was done really well, but I thought I'd share that background of what this is about and see what you guys thought, yeah, well,
Tracy Harwood 27:16
I picked up that it was one of this. I mean, it's described as one of the life paths in in cyber funk. And I, I was quite curious then to contrast it with the other two life paths. And I didn't find anything on that either. So I was kind of intrigued. What can I say about it? I you know, I get, I get where this has come from, and that, in your description of it is really, it's kind of helpful. I think, I think it's evidently a cinematic of the game. Because to me, when I'm looking at this, the story of it is disjointed. So I got, I got the sense of, well, in fact, when I was kind of thinking about it, I mean, you're not really introduced to the character. So unless that description there was there of who this guy is, this is V so to speak, unless that that description was there, you wouldn't necessarily know who this person was, because he's not introduced in a particularly clear way, certainly not at the outset. There's also a lot of characters in there, which which means you got to kind of figure out what his relationship is to those other characters. And it's only really towards the end where it kind of comes together a little more. And my guess would be that's really what happens in the game. You kind of start out in this sort of little, you know, disjointed way, and then towards the end, maybe the whole thing kind of makes more sense. It feels like it's a circular story. Because, you know, from what you've you said, and how it was portrayed, you're starting out in the wilderness, you're kind of going on some kind of quest, and then you're ending back out in the wilderness. And if that, to me, felt like a Mad Max plot. We've talked a bit about Mad Max this month, but this is what it's out it felt like to me a little bit Mad Max, like I didn't really get a set. I mean, there were some key references made in here to some particular community groups that I didn't know what what their role was. One was the Alva cardum. And then there's this reference to family, and that clearly meant different things at different points in time, which I also didn't fully understand. Certainly, you know, there's a, there's a in the description of it, there's, there's talk of family. I assumed familial is what it meant by that. But obviously, when you're watching it, no family means people you are connected to in a community. So it's not really family, but it's a, you know, it's a, it's a term. Terminology that's used in this, in this game, I don't know it's it kind of it needed more story. For me, I think we've, you know, it's the sort of thing that we've commented on quite a few times. I think in terms of, you know, when you've got something that's this rich, like Cyberpunk is such a rich game. And you know, the richness of this comes through in the quality of the animation, the richness of the voice acting and the and the detail of the characters, the quality of those animations is, is just stunning. I mean, the the, you know, the skin of them, the detail of their enhancements, if you like, the what they're wearing, the costumes, the way the animation is so smooth. I mean, the the quality of it is just beautiful. It's just that that you know, unless you're actually deeply involved in this story yourself, or you've played this game, it's, you know, what's being told here does not really hang together as a story, because it's, there's too many disjointed bits to it for it to make full sense. And maybe that's just my take on it, but I think you've got to know the gameplay to make sense of a film like this. It's not to say it's not beautiful, because it really is stunning. But I needed more story for me to connect to it. Okay,
Phil Rice 31:27
yeah, I felt like it. It does lean on the the main story and lore of the game, which I'm less familiar with, too. I've never, never fully played it. I've captured some footage from the game for some of the music video stuff that I've done on my channel, but haven't played through the full narrative of the game I have watched most of somebody put together like a full length movie. Yeah, cinematics, right? And even even that was a little bit a little bit disjointed. And I think that's just the nature of when you're leaning on the in game cinematics in a game like this, some of the action that unfolds is you actually doing something in the game. And it's not a pretty cinematic. It's, you know, from your heads up display, and you're doing something. And so, you know, accounting for those is challenging. You remember the old anachronox movie? Yes, yeah, there it was. It was less of an issue there, but there were still gaps in that story that, if you had played the game, you know, were filled in by quite a bit of story unfolding, you know, through the first person interface of you interacting. And it's only the cut scenes that were used for the most part. So that's that's a challenge, I think that always comes with with stuff stitched together from the from the cinematics. So it's certainly a gorgeous game. I assumed that it must be basically consisting of those cutscenes, simply because the gameplay doesn't look like that, like it takes place in the same environment, for sure, but it's not quite as neat and tidy on the camera angles and stuff like that, and we haven't really ever seen. I don't know what the right term is, but I'm gonna use, I'm gonna say proper machinima with this game, like one where you actually take control of the action. And I think from, from what Damien had shared with us, and from what, what little you know that I do know of the game, it's because it's just really, it's just not built for that. It certainly doesn't have any of the tools that like GTA has for recaming and that sort of thing, or a director mode, which is a shame, by the way, it seems like such a cinematic game. What an oversight to not include that. I'm going to assume that that's because it's a lot harder to implement those tools than than Rockstar may make it look well, frankly, the fact that Rockstar left it out of RDR two, red, red, Dead Redemption two speaks to that as well, that it's not simple that those tools were specifically crafted for GTA and they were able to adapt it from GTA four to GTA five, but Red Dead Redemption two is a completely different game. It may rely on a similar engine, but the mechanics of the game are very different, and those tools are not trivial to make. And this, of course, is a completely different developer. So
Damien Valentine 34:39
there's a photo mode, and you can do some pretty stunning things, but that's, yes, I've
Phil Rice 34:42
seen amazing stuff with the photo mode on this not the
Damien Valentine 34:45
same as a video mode,
Phil Rice 34:46
right, right? Fallout four and maybe Starfield both, I think, have the same, they're going to have the same challenge for machinima. And that is, there's, there's great photo mode tools in in those. Games, but not machinima tools as we would as we would understand them, and that that doesn't mean that it's not possible, but it sure makes it harder. We have seen some work in this game that wasn't pre rendered cinematics. There's the one that was kind of like all scenes of city life, you know, different groups of pedestrians moving and stuff like that. That was cleverly done, you know, but that's about as complex as I've ever seen of machinima, where you've you've got some any control over the the camera or action at all. So I think a camera
Damien Valentine 35:35
mod. I can't remember the name of it, but it
Phil Rice 35:38
was a mod for to kind of give a free cam, yeah, but yeah, it doesn't
Damien Valentine 35:41
give you control of the characters, so you can't actually control the action that you're recording. You just have to right, hope you get what you want, right? So, yeah, I
Phil Rice 35:50
think, I mean this, this, this film, then really is mainly about an editing exercise. And I think it, it succeeds in that regard. I mean it the Edit holds together the story, not quite as much because there's there's gaps, but I would think that it's very likely that the audience for this game is intended to be largely people who have experienced the game, and this is so this then functions as like a remix of the original song, right? You know this. This is a this is a song that listeners are familiar with in the form of a game, and someone has done a very clever remix of it. And so for those viewers, those gaps are going to be filled in, even unconsciously. So, you know, they're just going to be and so references to you said there were references to V, which, that's the character that that ended up getting acted that that's Keanu Reeves' character, right? No,
Damien Valentine 36:55
V is the player's character. Oh, V is the player's character. Okay, yeah.
Phil Rice 36:58
So, yeah, anyone who's done the game is going to know that, and someone like me who has only dabbled wouldn't remember that. So, yeah, this is, I think this is one of those machinima pieces that that the experience of the person coming to it matters maybe more than most.
Damien Valentine 37:16
Makes sense. I'm thinking about now, because when I watched it, you're right. There are gaps. I didn't think about them because I played the game. Sure.
Phil Rice 37:23
Yeah, yeah. It's, it's a challenge, like, if you're setting out, you know, let's look at this as something to learn from thing if you're, if you're setting out to make a movie with a wider audience that's rooted in the game world, it's something to really be conscious of in your decision, because you've got two decisions there. You've got one, which is, like the Warhammer film. I know I was just thinking about, yeah, that that people who have a knowledge of that world, all the Warhammer machinima we've seen is that way, absolutely, you're greatly benefited by that knowledge. And if you don't have it, yeah, then you make wild guesses, like I did about, well, the morality of the world, or whatever. And you know, people who know it just laugh that I used the word Morality with regard to the game. You know. So if you know, if it's a conscious decision to lean into the game audience, then by all means, do that, right? But if you're wanting to make it for a broader audience, you're going to have to bear that in mind, that that people aren't going to necessarily know those things. So yeah,
Damien Valentine 38:28
advice, a bit of advice I could give if you're doing it, if you want to make it appeal to people that haven't played the game, think about going to the idea of what would make them want to play the game and experience the story, so you can use it like a fan trailer, but maybe like if make it intriguing, so that it makes someone watching it think I want to play this to learn more about this world and this story. Sure, we've
Phil Rice 38:55
seen some Star Citizen machinima that we feel like was succeeding on that level that I remember, yeah, where we've even commented out openly that if this isn't the advertisement for the game, it should be, yes, absolutely.
Damien Valentine 39:10
Yeah, right. I think we've covered both films this week. So thank you, Tracy and Phil for joining me this week. For those of you listening or watching, if you got any comments about these two films, or the film series and this film, or cyberpunk, if you've got any more lazy tutorial, type videos to share with us. Please send them to talk at complete machinima.com and check out our website, completely machinima.com so that's it for from the three of us, and thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time. Take care. Yeah. Bye, bye,
39:41
bye, bye.