John MacInnes talks to Tracy about his new real-time movie contest just launched - a competition with a very interesting difference and an ambitious goal for participants and the outcomes, using Unreal Engine 5. The contest takes place between 1-30 Sept, so get registered and start practising being moody with some strange and beautiful scenes and prompts!
Credits:
Speakers: Tracy Harwood, John MacInnes
Producer/Editor: Ricky Grove
Music: Snapper4298 Intro/Outro
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.
SPEAKERS
John MacInnes, Tracy Harwood
Tracy Harwood 00:14
Alright, well, we're here today again with with John MacInnis. And we are going to be talking about a new contest that John has launched. And he going to be telling us a little bit more about it. So John is great to have you on the show, as ever tell us what this is about. It sounds really exciting.
John MacInnes 00:34
Well, thank you, Tracy, for inviting me back. It's always good to talk to you. So I'm watching the real time movie challenge mood scene is basically another challenge. As you know, I did the real time shorts challenge back in 2022. And when the lockdown first happened, and that was a roaring success, produced 30 short films and 30 days, from assets that we provided for participants to sort of build a short film from, and I've launched this new challenge. Well, one, because we're making a full feature film in Unreal 5. And as you know, I kind of want to explore discover new ways of making stuff. And so, you know, harnessing the community, involving the community, I think is a really fun thing to do. That helps the community and it also helps us make our bigger movies. So the first challenge that we're doing related to making a movie is called Mood Scene. And I always thought that there's all these challenges in it, since since we did my challenge two years ago, there were so many challenges, you know, the Unreal Fellowships have been a roaring success. And they've produced so many of these great little short films. But I always sort of thought, well, if you put all these work into, and it doesn't necessarily go anywhere, I mean, it's like, maybe they're real, or shows as a piece of work that they did, and they might win a prize or something. But it doesn't sort of cohere or anything more than that. And it always struck me like, wow, there's there's like, you know, if you had like 70, short films, you strung them all together, you could make a whole feature film out of that. And I thought, well, what if everybody you know, was building their brick into this, this much bigger endeavour would not be more interesting and significant. And potentially, you know, monetizable and rewardable for the people who made it. Because if you make a short film, there's there's no money in short films, as we all know. But there's money in larger product. I mean, there's, there's, there's the desire for more content, tend to never at the moment. And, you know, that was our desire to make a feature film. So I thought, well, let's launch a challenge to see what we could get. How would you get the community involved in making that, that bigger movie and reward everybody for diving in and making making a mood scene what we're calling a mood scene.
Tracy Harwood 03:03
It's a really different concept. I think it sounds it does sound really interesting. I really like the way that you're talking about it that you've called it a meta movie. What exactly do you mean by that?
John MacInnes 03:14
Well, a meta movie is just another fancy buzzword. Everything's meta these days, right? Well, as you know, we, we've all been building metaverse for years, this is what we're sort of involved with. And, you know, the idea is basically, the core of what I've been trying to do for quite a while is to is to make a traditional movie. But if you make it within a game engine, which is, you know, a 3d interactive rendering tool, then that can be a meta movie, what is a meta movie, a meta movie is more than a movie or beyond a movie, so that, you know, you can render this out as a 2d, linear narrative story. But because it's made within a 3d interactive game engine, it can be so much more. So what that is, is really up to the creators, it's up to the audience, depending on your story, your IP. So, for example, if you made a Marvel movie, and it feels all made within Unreal 5, well, what if then you could then you know, use those same assets to that you made the movie for to make a video game or a VR experience or whatever. And, you know, really, you know, I mean, there wouldn't be exactly the same assets, because of course, you know, interpretability is, is an interesting dilemma. But it would essentially be the same same assets, you know, and if you were making a movie or a project, using assets, what then could you do from that? Now, obviously, not every movie or story is, you know, aligns itself with them becoming a game or becoming a VR experience or some other entity but there are a lot of IPs, a lot of stories that can be expanded upon into different forms and formats that audiences may like and enjoy. So that's the idea of it in a nutshell, I guess.
Tracy Harwood 05:04
what you're trying to do is create an a narrative film from the content folks submit.
John MacInnes 05:10
Yeah, it's, you know, it's, it's, I don't want to reinvent the wheel. You know, I think, you know, VR was sort of, in a way, lumbered by that. It's like, oh, it's a new form, which people are very excited about, I'm very excited about, but there's, there's high friction in terms of getting audiences participating in that. So you know, making a meta movie, it's really, you know, we're making a movie that can be more than a movie. So you know, it's like, if you start, you know, you can equally make a video game that could then be a movie, you know, it, you can basically tackle the meta equation from any one of these established content forms. But the fact of the matter is using a game engine, it can just, you know, transmute into something more, or something other depending on what the story or the property is?
Tracy Harwood 06:07
Yeah, seems like there's lots of folks coming at this from all different angles at the moment, I think,
John MacInnes 06:11
well, that's what I found. I think that's great. You know, I mean, it's interesting that we've had a history of, you know, movies being made from video games, you know, every, you know, Resident Evil, Silent Hills, or, you know, every successful video game has been tried to sort of be put into a movie. And I think, you know, they're making a Fortnight movie for exactly the same reason. But it'll be interesting to see, you know, what the Fortnight movie is, because one presumes is going to be really Unreal as well. So you're taking Unreal assets directly into making a movie out of that, which is what we're doing as well, and what other folks are doing. Whereas, traditionally, you have like the video game over here, and they were just basically trying to grab that kind of video game audience by making a traditional live action Hollywood movie. Sometimes it's successful, sometimes not successful, but that point, they're completely different entertainment products, almost using very, very different pipelines and workflows and methodologies to create both of those. So whereas what we're trying to do is cohere it all into one area, you know, taking narrative as one, one spoke of this wheel, and sort of leading without, I guess, and then exploring, you know, making that sort of starting point of what a story can be.
Tracy Harwood 07:31
I see. So what you're going to end up with, then is actually a game like experience that you interact with on your computer, you're not going to see this in a cinema?
John MacInnes 07:44
Yeah, no, you're gonna see it in some so. So you know, you could start with a fully rendered, you know, linear movie, and see that in the cinema, but then we might, we might well have a, a, an experience that is launched at the same time as that, or as a consequence of that, that would then be something more than that, I think, I think one of the, you know, the most interesting and attractive things about where we're at the cutting edge of anything is you don't quite know where it's going to go. You just have a sort of potentiality that is within the technology, and within audiences. And what we want to do is really tap into that potentiality, to see where it goes. So we don't know. So we're going to start with a movie, and then, you know, hopefully, the movie can be a success in its own terms, you know, whether whether it does anything else, you know, that would be that would be phenomenal. But then if it's the success was like, Well, okay, well, this also can exist in some other form. I'm kind of interested to see what you know, there, the Epic have released the Unreal Editor in Fortnight. And there's all sorts of possibilities. I know that they're spearheading an opening up through Fortnight as a platform. So it'll be kind of interesting how, you know, companies like Epic kind of develop their platform, and what types of content are then available to audiences through that platform? And this could well be, you know, the start of where we then go after making the movie with this.
Tracy Harwood 09:11
Yeah, I mean, it's, I think, really, it's what keeps it's what keeps people interested in, in the content beyond the format that they first access it. Yeah. And then how, how do you kind of make that compelling other in other forms? That'd be really interesting to see how that observes. Sounds like a really interesting experimentation was the thing.
Tracy Harwood 09:31
Yeah. Fascinating. And why mood scenes? What is it you're looking for in moods, specifically?
John MacInnes 09:31
So you know, I've specifically written this, as you know, my backgrounds as a screenwriter, but a background, you know, in screenwriter that wrote Call of Duty, so I have a sort of a foot in each camp. So when I conceived of this story, this movie, I thought, well, this needs to work as a movie, if it was only a movie, it needs to work on that. And it also needs to be able to work with some I hate the word gamification, but it needs to work as a game in itself. It could work as a game in its own right, or has the potential to do that. And that's what I've designed. You won't know, just, you know, you'll you'll find out soon enough what the what the movie is, but the game elements will, you know, once you've seen that you'll understand how that would lend itself to being a video game. So, you know, yeah,
John MacInnes 10:31
On a movie, you know, it's, it's interesting set, you know, it's kind of all these challenges and midterms, that amount of real time shorts challenge is actually extremely hard, I think, to make a successful short film that has a real story with real characters camera, like there's so many elements that have to kind of work in order for it to be a really successful short film. And there are lots of lots of short films. But there, there are very few short films that are actually really good that really tick every single, every single box. So I think it's a really high bar to hit. And I think there's a lot of fun to be had doing something that's a little more approachable, that's a little more tightly framed in terms of you know, what the goals are, and this, but also I have a, you know, well, a, you know, we want to use this Mood Scene challenge to sort of lay out our movie effectively. So there's six moods within this challenge. Now, each one of those moods relates to a scene in in my movie, so you could see that as the sort of these the Lego bricks of the movie, have, you know, there's six key environments within that movie. So I'm sort of using this to sort of lay out what that could look like, looking for people to come up with cool ideas that we could then maybe put into that movie as well. It's a sort of Scratch board, sort of, you know, sandbox, a play box for everybody to come in, play in. And then we're almost like, well then see how, what will come of it. But why it's a mood scene is I think we've sort of gotten away sometimes as this emphasis on as a huge emphasis on digital human avatars, and digital human avatar performance, and the uncanny valley. And whether this is plausible does this work? It's almost like this obsession, that I think almost detracts from what people should be more focused on, which was basically doing something making something compelling. And I thought, well, if you take out the human avatar component, and performance component, you still have this amazing environment and scene, that what we used to call mis en scene in moviemaking, which is basically sort of telling a story, or using the elements available to the filmmakers to tell the story that are generally outside the the human performance, you know, scenery, lighting, props, camera work, you know, music, sound, all of that sort of stuff, there's so much you can do with all of that, and especially in a game engine, because that's what game engines are really good at that, you know, environments can look amazing. In, in, in, in a game genre, it always sort of, I always smile when I see like a sort of meta human shot, that's just too many humans talking to each other. And it's like, shot, reverse shot, you know, back and forth. And I'm like, well, but the best, you know, UE shorts, tend to really incorporate their environment and tell the story through environment, as well as characters that might be in that that scene. And because I said, there's amazing assets out there that, you know, we can create amazing, fantastical environments, very, very richly textured, and they can look really good. So there's so much you can already do that, if there's a live action, then you'd have to build that you'd have to build that set, you have to get an art director, you'd have to build all those stuff, it costs a huge amount of money, huge amount of time, and then it would just be stuck at the end of the shoot and sort of burned probably, but this, you know, sort of we've got an environment, we can use it for all sorts of things. It's it's recyclable in many, many ways. And I'd say that, I think as a filmmakers, as storytellers, it's a really, really, really good exercise to tell the story or capture of mood that is suggested from the environment, the assets that we've given, and the sort of the written prompt. So it's basically like give a sort of written prompt, in the scene that sort of says, gives a tone to the to the to that scene. And the skill the challenge is to actually reproduce a tone or a feeling and effect in the audience. So that is looking at the stuff to capture that that mood and I think there's something really challenging I think there's something really valuable in that there's an exercise in itself.
Tracy Harwood 14:45
And all six of those seem seems that you've got there seem to me to have something in common, which is something terrible had kind of happened. There was blood on the carpet or, you know, something that you kind of alluded to that you think, oh, no, this is going to be very creepy. And not only that all of the themes seem to represent different periods in time, which kind of suggests you're creating this mysterious time travelling, maybe paranormal type story. Is that is that maybe?
John MacInnes 15:24
Yeah, I mean, that's, that's exactly know what, you know, a, of course, I that's exactly what I want people to do is to take those assets, take the written prompt, and interpret it, you know, I know exactly what how I'm using those scenes, you know, I know what my script is, you know, you know, you guys don't, but I really want to see what people come up with and how they interpret that. And, you know, you've interpreted it in a certain way, which is, which is which, you know, maybe could be right, could not be right. But, you know, as part of that, you know, I kind of want to keep the the movie under wraps exactly what it is. It's a bit of a mystery box, you know, time we'll reveal or, but, but yeah, I think that that's right now, the the assets, the environments should suggest something, and maybe that's something that participants can then build upon, in this challenge... that's my son walking around. So So So yeah, that's exactly what I want them to do. And, you know, really put their imagination into this. You know, that's what I want to see. I'd love to see that. So yeah.
Tracy Harwood 16:40
And these scenes are scenes that you are including in the movie. So you've already got a lot of effort into creating these scenes.
John MacInnes 16:49
Yeah, well, it's, if it's almost like I'm looking using this as a scratch board to see what, how we could put this together. scenes. So we have prizes for you know, we have prizes from a sponsor, we've got a whole bunch of sponsors on board with this that have, you know, graciously given us a bunch of prizes. So this is like cash, software, hardware, all sorts of stuff. So people can can win those. And then if we actually use one of the scenes, you know, all their work in the movie, then we'll give people a fee for for using their their work in the movie or work or their music, we might even employ them because we like their work. And we think, okay, can you now build this for it? So, so as I said, it's an ongoing sort of thing that we want to sort of really reach out to the community and sort of weaponize their skill and talent and reward that skill and talent as well. weaponized, interesting. Crowdsourcing. Yeah, basically, yeah.
Tracy Harwood 17:54
And now, you also mentioned something about soundscape, and that the artists that they submit can also include soundscape in this, and tell us a little bit more about what you're expecting on soundcape.
John MacInnes 18:07
Sound it mean, it's it's it's sound is obviously part of it. People can employ sound for their scenes, I think it's very interesting. There might be audio cues that come from assets that we give people that might not, but I don't want to sort of make that the sort of high bar which people then hang themselves on, because, you know, they can't achieve that. Or they think it's about like, you know, creating an audio design to make this work. As I said, sometimes the simplest idea is, is is the most effective one, you know, maybe this is completely silent. Maybe they just capture this feeling this scene in complete silence, or maybe there's just a tone running underneath it, you know, I want to leave it completely open to people's interpretation. Or if you're a really good sound designer and want to kind of sound design this whole thing and make your own audio cues within that. Go to town, I'd love to see that. I mean, you know, it'd be really fascinating to see what people actually can do with it. I would love to see whatever people bring that it's, it's basically bring your imagination, you know, bring your skills, but bring your imagination to it, and you're not going to be necessarily rewarded or penalised either way. It's just purely based on on what we see and how we kind of feel about that.
Tracy Harwood 19:26
And your ability to Yeah, film and capture it in 90 seconds.
John MacInnes 19:31
Yeah, or less. You know, it's, you know, you can make a 10 second scene, you know, whatever, whatever you feel is effective in terms of communicating what you feel that mood is.
Tracy Harwood 19:42
Yeah, I mean, one of your judges, we reviewed one of the films that Jae Selena did a couple of weeks ago. We're where j is going to be one of the judges actually on this. Yes, I saw that. But his film where, you know, this person was walking in this really dark corridor where there's a loss of raptor in, yeah, in the depths of it, and I mean, I'm incredibly short, but wow, what a power? Yep. Yeah.
John MacInnes 20:11
That's a really good example. And that's why I asked Jae to be a judge.
Tracy Harwood 20:16
Absolutely. Exactly. Yeah. So tell us more about the judges, because I see you've got some really interesting folks on this contest as well.
John MacInnes 20:24
Well, I think these are my people that I know that I've met in, you know, my networking community, a lot of people that I really, really respect. A lot of people that I think have got really interesting voices within this space, and all of them are sort of committed to real time storytelling. And they come from a very, very diverse field, some of them are sort of industry, you know, CG industry pros, some of them are there was a couple of, of people who either won or what contestants were finalists on the Real Time Shorts Challenge. They're really interesting voices, and, you know, the cutting edge of the storytelling. I've got, you know, Randal Kleiser, who's our friend of mine, who directed Greece and the Blue Lagoon, back in the 1970s and early 80s. And he's, he's a really interesting guy, because he's also been at the forefront of technology throughout his career, you know, he's known for these movies that he made in his in his younger part of his career, but he's really very much, you know, connected to the cutting edge. And regarding, you know, technology of storytelling, so, I tried to bring in a real mix of different people, and there's other people like, you know, Jae Selena, or, you know, Jonathan Winbush, that sort of who have been really, you know, you know, dominating the sort of YouTuber, kind of, you know, YUI, five kind of world and promoting that. So, everybody comes at it with a certain skill set a certain experience, and a certain way of looking at it, but they're all committed to the same sort of goals. So, yeah, I'm excited to see what what they think of the Mood Scenes as well.
Tracy Harwood 22:00
And are these folks also part of your moviemaking team?
John MacInnes 22:06
Um, they're not, um, as I said, I'm, you know, my movie making team is pretty small, it's basically, you know, McKinna studios team at the moment, we will be bringing on more people to be at different stages of production. I may use some of the some of the people it depends, you know, it's a, again, I really like involving the community. And people, you know, can often Oh, I'm free this week, you know, maybe we could come in and do this, or I could come and do some vocab or whatever, you know, I talk with these people all the time. And it's, it would love to be able to greater involve them, but some at the moment is sort of unsure what that what that actually means.
Tracy Harwood 22:45
But it's also great to know that they're, you know, some of them are independent in the sense of, you know, the judging and the prizes and all that sort of thing.
John MacInnes 22:54
Yeah, absolutely.
Tracy Harwood 22:56
Now, what's your timeline, then, once you've, you know, once the contest is run, and it runs from the first to the 30th of September, once you've registered, so it's not, you know, not got long to work on this, once you've signed up. What's your timeline after that?
John MacInnes 23:14
So after that, so that'll be beginning of October. We are, you know, going to look at what we've got here, again, we've got a plan of what we want to do in terms of building this movie, we'll see what this challenge produces. It can produce significant, you know, gains for the movie, it could produce small gains for the movie, were not quite sure what they were building that the movie has six or seven principal characters, which were already in the process of building. So that's another sort of part of putting this movie together. So in the next couple of months, I said it'd be good to see what what what comes from the mood scene challenge, and then we'll be at a certain stage of like characters, and then maybe I don't know, maybe we'll do a sort of, you know, an avatar challenge, or we'll do like a mocap challenge, or some other some other challenge that can help push our production further along. Or we'll just fund that ourselves and do it if it isn't appropriate for a challenge. I don't know. It'd be interesting to see what comes out of the woodwork. I'm, as I said, I'm very open to what happens next. And, you know, one of the great things about mounting challenges like this is that it brings people together, and it gets people talking about what they're doing, but what they want to do what they want to achieve. And often when that I'm like, Oh, that's great. We'll come and do that on my movie. And I'll pay you to do that in this scene to do this. So many, many kind of cool and interesting things can result from this, you know, in terms of timeline. You know, it's interesting, like one of the biggest hurdles and problems I think, in traditional movie making is the, you have to plan you know, like production is like, oh, it's it's 26 days from this date to this day and everything has to happen within that. I think the beauty of working in a sort of in a way, nonlinear way as well, in a way that doesn't have a deadline is that you can actually get a lot more done quicker, a lot more efficiently. Rather than having to shove everything within a specific timeline. And then the costs go up, people have deadlines. Everybody who works on the visual effects industry will know exactly what this is about having to deliver on a deadline on something that is imposed, because the movie is going to be released at X date. And the whole marketing is, well, I want to take all that away, and say, Okay, let's just get down to the pure creativity. What do we need to do in order to make this movie, let's not worry too much about the release. And in a way like, well, we don't know what we're going to end up with. So this will be like an indie movie that we make. And if it's any good, we'll end up selling it getting it released. Do you know we don't know where that will go. So there isn't a specific release plan. We have, you know, release ambitions, but imagined is what you're saying. It's it's emergent, but I think it's gonna be pretty fantastic. But I think having a specific deadline for ourselves is unnecessary. And for this project, counter-productive.
Tracy Harwood 26:08
That sounds really interesting. So I'm looking forward to when you come back on the show, and you tell us more about where this has got to in in due course. I think at the moment it sounds like it's a really fantastic opportunity for creators to get involved with. And obviously wish you all the best with the next stage of it and look forward to catching up with you. Again, in due course many thanks John really appreciate you.
John MacInnes 26:40
Talking with you.
Tracy Harwood 26:42
Thank you. Alright, let me just stop