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.
Phil Rice 00:35
You. Hello and welcome to And now for something completely machinima podcast about machinima, virtual production and related technologies. My name is Phil Rice. I'm here with my co hosts, Damian Valentine, hello and Tracy Harwood, hello. Ricky Grove is actually here, but he's invisible, and he will not be saying anything. So this, this episode, we are dealing with Damien's video pick for the month. It is World of Warcraft related. So Damien, why should tell us about it, right?
Damien Valentine 01:20
So this film, I was looking up different films, and this YouTube kept bringing this right to the top of my recommended video feed. And I thought, Okay, I'm getting the message here. You want me to watch this? So I picked on and watched it. And it's, it's not exactly a machinima itself, because it's this, the character. Her name is and Jenica katosh, I hope I pronounced that correctly. And she is obviously a big fan of World of Warcraft in the Skyrim and lots of other fantasy games. Looking at her channel, and she basically just talks about the games that she's fans of for this time, she is talking about World of Warcraft, machinima very specifically. And she has obviously been playing the game for a very long time, and she was around when these films were being made. And first of all, she makes the distinction of the difference between machinima as an art form and machinima.com and she wants to talk, she explains that she's talking about machine as the art form, which immediately got my interest, so I kept on watching. And then she talks about how World of Warcraft machinima is actually made. And sometimes it's made in the game catching the footage, and sometimes it's used in the model maker software, which is the name of it. I've forgotten.
Phil Rice 02:37
I think it's just world craft model tool or something like that. Yeah, right. She
Damien Valentine 02:42
explains that, which, again, got my address a bit more because she's not only just talking about she's explaining how these videos that she's going to talk about made. And then she goes on and talks about some of the her favorite machinima films that she's seen. And these are all fairly old films, and there are some I remember seeing back in the day when Walker, well, the walk after, was fairly new, and people were using it to make machinima. And there were some names that I recognized as well, like legs machinima came up. And so she shows clips from some of these films, and she talks about each one and why they were significant to the World of Warcraft community. And she talked about how games like World of Warcraft are good for creative people, because they create an environment that people can come together and make stories, either make fun of the game and its flaws, or they tell stories in the game world, or just give people a platform to make something. I thought, Okay, this isn't strictly machinima film, but she's kind of doing what we do, which is reviewing machinima films. Well, hers was very specifically focused on World of Warcraft. I thought, you know, I'm going to share this with you guys this month, because I liked what she did. And she talks about old machinima, she talks about more contemporary films, but the impression I get, she prefers the older stuff. And the community existed around the game back then, and the older version of the game, which is now coming back because does it have done the I forgot what they call it, but they've re released in its original formula, slowly adding the expansions. And my understanding is that's been so popular, they're doing it again. So they've, they've added the expansions to that classic, World of Warcraft classic. Well, that's what they call it. They've added the expansions. But people want just World of Warcraft in its original form. So they've released World of Warcraft classic, again without any expansion. I don't know if they're gonna slowly add them or not, but, and it seems like that's what she liked, because that's the and the films that are major in those versions in the game. So she talks about that. And I just thought this is interesting, and I thought I'd share it. So what do you guys think?
Tracy Harwood 04:54
Well, it's, it's, actually, I was gonna say it's a, well, it's a well made documentary, which covers, it's. Some of the early years of machinima and wow, of course. And you can clearly see her passion, I think, particularly for Wow music videos. Kind of interesting though. I think, I think she sort lets the cat out of the bag a little bit when she says, how, how? Way back then, or way back when, was about 2009 for her. So she's probably not fully on first wave, although she's picked, as you said, Damien, she's picked some of the classics up, people like Oxhorn, for example. And I think she mentioned snackies journal, and I think she mentioned Lagspike Films and Myndflame. Obviously she picked up as well. But I thought, You know what, I'm going to go back to Ben's tomb tome even, which was the document that Ben grouse, who was the sort of community manager for the the original machinima.com site, before it became Inc he kind of kept a daily record of all the films that were released by whomsoever between about Well, I want to say, Well, certainly between 2000 2000 and 456, but actually, it goes back a little bit earlier than that, because it talks about the quake movies era as well. Anyway, he's, sure enough, kept notes on some of those early Wow creators. And one she didn't mention, who you will, of course, know, is Tristan Pope. And one particular Wow machinima that stood out back then was something called I surrender, which was a Celine Dion song, which was released in about 2004 so popular was it that it made the main Blizzard homepage in 2005 and and then Tristan was all over various different kind of media and and very well embedded within the in the WoW community. And then there were others that she didn't mention that I thought, oh, you know, you can't talk about Wow without talking about Olibith, and we've covered some of his work, sadly, gone from us far too young, I'd say, as I said, Oxhorn. She did mention, in actual fact, ox horn was some of the first Wow machinima that I saw to and his, his his humor was kind of legendary for me. And Snakie's Journal stone Falcon productions. She's still working with machinima, and machinima inspired work,
Phil Rice 07:47
really, yes,
Tracy Harwood 07:51
but she's a professional animator, and she she she's not making work in machinima, but she's using that inspiration for her professional career, and she's doing a lot of animation, pitches really big project, pitches with the likes of Disney and so on. So she's quite come quite a well known creator, and we've talked about her before as well, so she's definitely one worth remembering in something like this, where we're talking about, wow, I think there's still some really great creators in Wow. But what's been particularly interesting, generally, and we've commented on this a few times, and she picks up on this as well, is that there doesn't really seem to be much going on with machinima making in WoW, anymore. And I was kind of interested to hear our observation on that. What she said is, is that it's hard for folks to bring something new to the table in terms of content. And if that's the case, I think that's a really, that's a shame. That's a great pity. Because over the years, I think we've seen nothing, if not some of the most creative mind devise and showcase some astonishing, astonishingly creative work. Surely, folks haven't run out of ideas for using Wow. Surely, that's not true. I think that would be super disappointing, and sadly, I think it is true, but I'd love folks to sort of prove us wrong, and that's what we've commented on before as well. It's interesting though, that she says it because she's far closer to this community than than than we are. So yeah, that's such a shame. I think, Well, I think what's kind of interesting is Microsoft bought Activision, did they not? Was it last year, closed the deal last year for what 69 million,
Phil Rice 09:57
million. It's gotta be billion, billion. 20
Damien Valentine 10:00
billion, because 69 million is hardly anything. Well, that's what I was just thinking when I was saying that 69 billion to us, it would be a lot, but, you know, right, right, yeah,
Tracy Harwood 10:07
well, 69 billion and they're not encouraging the community to be creative with it. What the hell is going on here? I say to Microsoft and to Activision, get your shit together on this one, because the Machinima community were some of the most inspirational. They are the ones that put this on the map globally, with a lot of folks, and it's a real shame that nothing else is is happening on it. Yeah, and again, I will mention this here, because these are separate episodes that we've talked about this on this month. And it's not strictly machinima, but it is. And then what I wanted to just remind you again is this documentary that includes machinima. It's kind of a reportage, documentary, sort of style, and it's a film that's been made by Benjamin ray or re which has made the 2025 Oscars shortlisting called the remarkable life of Evelyn. And by the time you sort of see this, we will, of course, know what the outcome of that, that Oscar's process, will be. I would love this to be the winner of that. You can see it already on Netflix. Actually, it's about the life of a young man called Matt Steen, who's Norwegian, who had this terrible, muscular, degenerating disease, but who basically lived his life in this game is really uplifting, quite, quite tragic and sad as well. So, you know, she didn't mention that either, and I just think that's worth mentioning because it's one of the very few machinima related films that have ever got to the Oscars, one of two that we're talking we've talked about in our News episode this month. I've got a few links I'll share with some other creators. We reviewed internet is for porn. A few months back, we reviewed Olivia, little white pony in which was remarkable piece of work. I'll share. I'll share fixers channel. Olivia's channel with you guys as well. And what else did I find? Tristan Pope still got a channel, and there's his old Machinima is on there as well. Donkey's years. It goes back to 2004 machinimas. And I think Baron Soosdon, I think was another creator that was quite well known as well. So yeah, there's, there's quite a few of the original pioneering folks that are missed out in this but, but I, but I love the fact that she's got the the heart of one of the original pioneering perspectives on the whole machinima and the tape, it's great.
Damien Valentine 13:07
Of the film she left out. I hope she makes another video. Yeah, cover them as well. Well, I'm sure
Tracy Harwood 13:12
there's 1000s that she's left out. Of course, that's the whole point, isn't it? Of of doing that kind of a film, but some of the classics I think she should perhaps take a look at,
Phil Rice 13:23
I don't know if, I don't remember if she mentioned Baron Soosdon, but that's another one that she didn't he caught my eye very early on. It wouldn't surprise me if he had gone on to be involved in VFX or something along those because he had just really had a talent for, you know, the Warcraft has the starting point, but he would use a lot of Adobe After Effects. And what was the other tool that was big amongst those VFX guys back then, combustion? Oh, I can't remember who makes combustion, but you know, After Effects type tools, yeah, you know, it makes you wonder, when she talking about the the question you raised about, is it possible for, you know, people to run out of ideas with it?
Tracy Harwood 14:14
Yeah, isn't it? It's lame. Well, I'm
Phil Rice 14:17
gonna do it. I'm gonna play a little bit of the devil's advocate hearing a little bit, or try to understand where that's coming from a little bit. If you think about some of the platforms over the years that where the most machinima videos were made, you think of games like Halo in the wake of red versus blue, or Grand Theft Auto Five in particular, just a plethora of videos. You know, there's there's others. It's hard to hard to think of any though, that would compare in terms of volume of videos, machinima, videos that were made than World of Warcraft, yeah, like when they were at it, when. It was at its peak. They had, they didn't even really have to have any awareness of any of the rest of the mission of a community, like some of them did. But their community was so huge and thriving. And the Warcraft movies, I think Warcraft movies.com I think, was the site at the time, titles in the hundreds of 1000s, yeah, of videos. Now that, in itself, is is impressive, but add on to it this, this is a game that's a multi, you know, MMO RPG. Yeah, that means Damien. You'll correct me if I'm wrong here, but doesn't that. That essentially means there's no mods. You can't really do mods, right?
Damien Valentine 15:48
The extent the mods are. You can do things to change the layout, the interface and stuff like that, but that's about
Phil Rice 15:54
but you can't do mods in the same way that you would Source Engine game or something like that, or GTA, for that matter, yeah. So that's gonna, that's gonna create some kind of a boundary in terms of where you can take your creativity with it, the the Warcraft model editor or viewer, Warcraft model viewer helped with with some of that, in terms of portraying things, but you were still, you were kind of restricted a little bit because of the nature of of the game. And you would think that that's offset to some degree by the the multiplayer aspect of it, the fact that that these this server infrastructure was there to get together large groups of people, and we saw many videos that took full advantage of that right and not all games have that, and it's actually quite hard for the right elements to come together to support that kind of machinima. Not many games nowadays even, Is that really possible on the on the kind of scale, that you could do it with this game? So but, but still, you're essentially, everyone's working with the vanilla game. And while it's, I'm sure that there's a there's a lot of world building that went into it, and there's a lot of lore and and a lot of creative minds, but you, I don't know, at some point, do you come to a point where it's just it becomes harder to come up with something original to do? Yeah. I mean, who knows where that boundary is, but, yeah, it's, it's not shocking. I think part of what could be a renaissance, there would be a new group of players with fresh takes, which is often the case in machinima, that that someone new will come to an old game and see something the rest of us missed right, and do something new with it, or or just have a completely different type of commentary to to communicate, or their own style of comedy to do, or that kind of thing. So, yeah, yeah, there's, there's, there's some amazing stuff. Well, World of Warcraft, I never played the game. It was, it was never among my favorite machinima engines, like even going back in the day, just didn't appeal to me too much. I don't know how much of that, if I'm honest, was genuine, genuinely being unimpressed with the esthetics of the game. Or if it was just, you know, I don't think the esthetics of the game are what excited people about it? I think it was the community. It was the interacting with others. It was, you know, what, what? Today's younger gaming audience is satisfying with squad based multiplayer games like what we've talked about in some prior episodes. You know, hell divers. And, I mean, yeah, there's some larger scale games like Star Citizen and, oh, what was, what was the game that just a few months, a couple months ago, Damien, that you filmed, you submitted the three picks of this big, galactic, oh, elite, dangerous, yeah. So there are still big games like that, but I don't think, I don't think coordinating large scale events from what we've learned from filmmakers who we've encountered in those engines, it's significantly harder to to coordinate. Then World of Warcraft, it's like it was, it's persistent. It's always there. And you can just jump in, and there you are, and there's your avatar, and there's your friend's avatar
Damien Valentine 19:50
and and I think it also helps that there's a design World of Warcraft to not be very hardware intensive, so
Phil Rice 19:58
it makes the Lord run well. And with. Lots of people. That's right, and that's
Damien Valentine 20:01
right, you could run it on your desktop, but if you need a second character, you could have a laptop, which isn't necessary, but it was still it'll still run, whereas something like Star Citizen, even powerful computers struggle with that. But of course, it's still in development, so hopefully they'll iron that out, but it's because of the graphic intensity of that game, it's not going to also the complexity of the game as well. Star Citizen is a space flight simulator, and they're going really hardcore with the flight physics, all the
Phil Rice 20:31
details, yeah, games like that, and Eve and all that that the complexity is. And for people who want that complexity of a game, I'm sure it's just heavenly, you know, Yeah, but you're right. It's not as conducive to the simpler, simpler game mechanics that made Warcraft just such a World of Warcraft such a fertile ground for just improvisation, and I'm sure, but there's countless ideas for machinima comedy, for example, that emerged from just you were together, playing with with your online friends, and something funny happened, and or you, you had a funny conversation with them, or whatever. And then that evolves into, hey, let's, let's, let's encode that, you know, as a as a film. So, yeah, it was a pretty unique game, and the popularity of it was just, was really stunning. And I remember, in the in the in those early days of post machinima.com It was very challenging to to kind of attract them to be involved, because our, our community of all the Machinima engines, was like a dwarf star compared to, yeah, world craft, you know. So there's this sense of, why would I want to go over there, you know. Yeah. So there are some wonderful Well, let me comment on the the film. First it is, yeah, it's a, it's a really nice, soft hearted documentary from someone who clearly loved the game and their memories from it. And it's nice to have content delivered by, you know, you can throw a rock and hit somebody that likes to be cynical about games on the internet. It's nice to find somebody who is just, just a nice seems like a really nice person and is just a fan, you know, so they're not out to to criticize blizzard or, you know, it's they just loved the game, and they love their memories of it, and they're just sharing. I don't know there's something about the purity of that that really comes through nicely in this video. And even though the subject matter isn't one that like, it's not something I have personal experiences to connect with it. But I enjoyed watching. I had no trouble finishing it. It was, it's a, not a short video, but I had no trouble watching it just because it was, there was a sincerity there that was, that was appealing. Yeah, there are a lot of really solid World of Warcraft machinima films in the Machiniplex archive, which will include a link to or if you search our channel, you'll find, I made a trailer for that a couple years back, but it's a collection we've got over on Vimeo that is these films, and I'll just name some of them. So if you wanted to search for them, you could Daniel wasilic made a film called The demise, which is arguably the most beautiful thing that was ever made with World of Warcraft. Let's be honest. It's incredibly gorgeous. It's kind of this. It's this mostly wordless, almost Shakespearian tragedy of a love story compressed into a few minutes. It's just beautiful. He made use of the Warcraft model viewer a lot with this and wonderful use of silhouette in strategic points in that film. It's just gorgeous. So that's one worth looking at. What else we got here? I Jason, Jason Choi, yes, Riot films, edge of remorse, which he made pretty much exclusively in the Warcraft model editor.
Damien Valentine 24:35
That one's just, I think that's one of my favorite Warcraft Yes, Ricky's
Phil Rice 24:41
favorite I would, I would guess, is one called uh among fables and men, which was made by a guy named Tobias Lundmark cool that used to world, world craft model editor, but he did a lot of post production on that that gave it a really unique, almost a living storybook kind of feel. Real gorgeous, gorgeously done. That everything. Yeah, that's them. The only other one that I'll give is kind of an honor roll mention is you brought up stone Falcon productions. And what I remember her work the most for is a film that she made in something that's not world Warcraft. It was in, I don't even know what the engine is, but some game that's superheroes, and it's called the revenge of Dr mechanico. And it's wonderful that that one's a that's a talkie. It's got some voice acting. It's nice and witty and and it also looks really great. So anyway, those are ones to look out for in in the collection. I guess that's all I had to say, other than Baron Soosdon, if you can find anything by him or Olivia, yeah, they there was a lot of people making some really interesting stuff with that engine. And you know, when we've covered documentaries on machinima in the past, with it, always what's comes up is that not everything was included, but it's like hard to do. So right back in the video, I'm sure you ran into that with your book, Tracy, it's like everything.
Damien Valentine 26:16
This is a half an hour video, and if you include everything, it'd be hours and hours long, but I do hope that she makes a second video covering more films, including some of the ones that
Phil Rice 26:29
you just mentioned. Phil, yeah, so she's a very she's a very pleasant on screen personality. Her voice is it's just a timbre that's easy to listen to for longer videos. So yeah, I would I would enjoy that too.
Damien Valentine 26:42
The other thing I noticed she said at one point is, English is not her native language, yeah. But she mentioned briefly that watching these World Warcraft machinima videos is what helped her learn to speak English.
Tracy Harwood 26:56
She's Russian, yeah. So
Damien Valentine 26:59
that is something unique. As far as machine goes. How many
Tracy Harwood 27:03
people you can't pick that accent up at all? Yeah,
Damien Valentine 27:08
I thought that's just, I've never heard anyone say they learned incredible Steve machinima. So I wanted to mention that as well, because that's different, but very impressive. So yeah, angelic katosh, sorry, I just butcher name there. If you're listening to this, please do make a second machine video, because we'd like to see, and I saw from your channel, you're a fan of other fantasy games, so if you want to make a caption a video about machine made in those games as well, that'd be interesting to see what you can find.
Phil Rice 27:39
Yeah, you figure there's, there's actually some games that she covers on her channel that we don't see much from. I don't think we've ever had anything from Skyrim or Elder Scrolls or anything along those lines. And there's got, they've got to be out there, yeah, something other than than just let's plays. So, yeah, interesting.
Tracy Harwood 27:56
You do stuff in Elder Scrolls, did he?
Phil Rice 28:01
I don't know if you ever like officially, did? I know he experimented in a lot of different things.
Damien Valentine 28:06
They're hard games because they're single player only. I know they sell these goals online, but like Skyrim and oblivion, they're single player only, so it's hard to you can't really control
Phil Rice 28:18
very challenging, right? But it'd be interesting to see
Damien Valentine 28:21
if there is maybe next month I'm going to look up Skyrim machinima and see what I can find.
Phil Rice 28:26
Well, I think that's that if you have any comments on what we talked about, feel free to drop us some feedback at talk, at completely machinima.com or leave us a comment wherever you've heard or seen this episode, so on behalf of my co hosts, Tracy and Damian and invisible, Ricky, have a great afternoon or evening or morning. We'll see you next time. Bye.