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This week we have two great films to share with you courtesy of Damien. Our main film is The Remnants by @StanPetruk, a disturbing tale of the aftermath of some global disaster, created as part of @Reallusion's Pitch and Produce programme. Our bonus film is a Mobile Short treat, So Palpatine Needs Padme Dead...[LEGO Edition] by @CinematicSeriesGaming. Its astonishing what can be packed into 60 seconds!
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.
Ricky Grove 00:05
Hello, my name is Ricky Grove and I am leading Completelymachinima.com for the month of November 2022. I'm here with my pals Tracy Harwood and Damian Valentine. Hey guys. We're missing Phil. He got in a fight with a hurricane, unfortunately, and he has very limited internet access. We miss you. And we hope you'll be back with us in December Phil. All right. I'd like to make the point the news is moved to the blog. Tracy, thank you for your hard work on putting together the blog notes and all of that it's not an easy thing to do. But you'll find interesting news there the stories that we would have done a full episode on our part of the blog. We'll be putting links on our Facebook page, so you can find out more about it. Now we're going through a new films. I've done my pick, Tracy's done hers now we're going to see what Damien came up with. Damien, you have two choices, sort of a major one, and then sort of a special recommendation. Why don't we do the major one first, what's your choice?
Damien Valentine 01:13
This is I wasn't actually looking for a pick when I came across this and it was a put your shirt on Twitter of all places. It's called The Remnants payments made with a combination of character Reallusion's character creator, for obvious reasons what that was used for. And Unreal Engine five for the actual animation and rendering. This is an unusual pick because there's no dialogue in the entire film. But it still tells a very effective story. You don't need the dialogue to understand exactly what's going on. It's kind of like this, there's almost like some kind of post apocalyptic events happened. And it deals with someone who's survived whatever that is because the film doesn't elaborate on it. And she runs into someone else who's obviously survived and is trying to make the most of the situation and it's kind of split into three parts. But it's the kind of a bleakness bit there's a hope. And then there's a what happens at the end, which I'm not going to elaborate on because I don't want any spoilers, no spoilers at all at the end. No, no. But three section I think works quite nicely for that the story that was being told there. It was stunningly animated and rendered. And the characters look great. It's obviously with Character Creater that's quite easy to do. And I believe there's some motion capture was done for the actual animation. I just watched, this is going to be my pick of the day even though I wasn't even looking for it. And I came across it. So you know, it was a happy accident there. So what do you guys think?
Ricky Grove 02:59
Oh, boy, was it good. I just loved that I was unex. I'm a sucker. First off, I'm a sucker for anything that's post apocalyptic. I've loved that ever since that. I was old enough to watch movies based on that. Alas, Babylon, On the Beach by Neville Shute just endless amount, The Last Man on Earth at great Vincent Price movie. I just loved the whole idea of everything. Of all of this, that were a part of all this organised culture gone. And what how people will respond to that. Now, there have been some really terrific stories told about this. And not a lot of them have been incredibly creative. Because the stories are so traditional, you see the same kinds of things, and kinds of reactions. But there are new ways to make them fresh. And that's what I thought, Stan Patruk, the director did is he made even though the situation and how it turns out is familiar. He was able to make it new enough so that you put that aside, and you got involved in the world. And the people especially with the empathy with no dialogue. It puts the focus on the character's facial expressions and body motions and the acting basically the puppeteering of the thing. And I thought that was absolutely phenomenal. All of the elements came together to create a compelling story that moved me and made me sad, in many ways, and excited. And again, I'm a veteran of this kind of stuff. So it was that's a hard thing to do. But the the the look of the place the changing quality of lighting in it the the expressions on the faces in particular when this woman who's starving encounters this person in the forest at a forest fire on a forest campfire, the person is looking at a photo. And if you look closely, you can see that's a photo of a woman. And you get the feeling that there's this sense of loss, that maybe this person lost them in this holocaust. This this apocalyptic event that occurred in his moody about it in this first is very defensive, but then relents. And in that relent, you see this sort of smile, come across the person's faces, if it's nice to meet somebody else, those sorts of little touches really made the difference in the movie. And the, again, it was motion capture by Xsens. And the combination of the two just was so effective. I was really taken by this, this film, and I'm so glad you picked it. It was quite moving.
Tracy Harwood 06:00
I agree with you Ricky, actually. First of all, I think this film was part of Reallusion's Pitch and Produce programme. Oh, that you may recall we talked about a few months ago. So it's really great to see actually some of the work that's come out of that. And great that Reallusion are supporting creators to see that, yeah, good one. Now, this film, for me had all the hallmarks of an Eastern European style that we've talked about. Do you remember Irradiation? That we reviewed, ironically, we reviewed it as part of last year's Halloween pick. And also at the same time, we we I think we talked about do you remember The Ship by Mednios Oh, yeah, it has shades that there both of those sorts of films for me. Now, as he sort of said, It portrays the aftermath of some sort of terrible, you kind of get the sense of a global disaster. And it says, in the film, 2000 days after it happened 2000 days, and apparently, the central character is called Victor. And he's wandering aimlessly around the forest seemingly waiting to die, starving, hallucinating, at one point falls, unconscious, and wakes up to see something he seems to have been dreaming about. And it's fire and someone sitting by, by the fire. And now, interestingly, I think is actually the fire that's really the central and outstanding imagery in this whole film for me. Through it, you get the sense of disaster, how this person came to be where he is, and, and it seems he was probably already in some kind of remote place, when perhaps, an atomic bomb went off nearby, perhaps. And then you view the interaction between Victor and this other character, through a heat haze, and sparks of the fire, right down to the detail of how the characters respond to the fire, you know, its warmth and comfort, for example, you know, stretching out their arms and whatnot. I mean, the detail of these effects is absolutely extraordinary. And I know and mesmerising, and that combined with the fact that there is absolutely no talking and this, you know, this very sort of tinny soundscape and the crackling of the fire, you actually you get really immersed in it really quickly. I think anyone that's ever sat and watched Bush TV, as we call it, will immediately get a sense of the immersiveness that comes over, over, over you when you are watching fire. It kind of feels believable, and from, from the the characters, the character reactions, you definitely get the sense of being near that fire too. But there are a few things that are mentioned. When I went through the film first time, and without really reading anything around it, I wasn't really sure whether the character was male or female. It's interesting. Well, you said it was a woman as well on my first thoughts were that the person was actually female. Yeah, and you as well, it's really interesting. So, you know, quite thin you know, obviously, given the scenario that would be accepted, you know, skin quite scarred and grey. Also, really, you know, that was all quite appropriate to the story but I think perhaps some of the features on that might have been what what led us astray and you know, the skin was, was a little bit shiny. The eyes were quite large and bright and the hair was a little bit Vagabond ish. You know, think? What's the name Francis McDormand. Nomadland And type thing. And it's kind of large jumper and, you know, bearing in mind 2000 days the clothes were really quite clean, being super picky here. And I feel this kind of post or apocalyptic sort of then the hair and lack of it. Is that what you would expect for somebody 2000 days into a disaster, you know, maybe too short to tidy perhaps I don't know, again being very picky. But overall, I think it was the eyes that made me think about the gender of the character. And so when I was when I was, you know, going going through it, it's that kind of genderisation that actually made me quite curious about the ending, in particular, and reflective of that sort of scenario and how the circumstances could or might drive anybody to do anything. But I think I was really shocked by the outcome. And I guess, mainly because I don't relate so much to women being the ones to do those kinds of things. I don't know, that was, maybe that's my inherent sort of bias showing anyway, I still didn't really question the gender choice, even at the outcome, because I thought what I saw in the face of that character at the end was was shock at their own choice. And certainly, when I read the description, the name of the character made me realise I probably read more into it than perhaps there had been intended to be, or maybe, or, you know, or maybe, you know, maybe maybe I was, maybe I was right all along. I don't know. But I certainly, you know, when I went back and thought maybe that wasn't, wasn't female, male, maybe, maybe I would have thought about that in a slightly different way. I don't know. And now I've noticed, when I think about it, those those very bright eyes, kind of in a way that I've picked up on the teeth a few months ago, maybe they are too bright and a little too glistening somehow not really reflecting age that well, perhaps. And I think it's something that I will probably revisit when we talk about another film later this month as well ALONE, which I think suffers from a similar kind of challenge. Right. Now, there's a really nice description of Stan's pipeline to create the film, and the tools he's used, which I'll put a link to, and is he's also given quite a lot of comments about his use of Character Creator, which is on Reallusion's website. And obviously, it's the Pitch and Produce link as well. So yeah, I mean, I was really intrigued by this one. Really great pick. Lovely film. Yeah. Just with a few little things that I kind of little things, little things. Yeah. And they already little things.
Ricky Grove 13:00
As you were talking, two ideas occurred to me, you always have interesting things to say. And it makes me think you oftentimes see details that are so obvious, like slap my head and go, Why didn't they see that. But two things occurred to me one is, the director chose not to put this in an urban setting, but rather odd, natural setting in a forest, which I think actually made the intimacy between the two, even better, but it also had an implication for the story that perhaps the cities had been destroyed. Yeah, the urban environment has been destroyed, and they've all gone to survive in the country. The other point that I'd like to make is that there's no real music in this. And traditional professional company may have added all sorts of swelling orchestral tones, or, or a chamber thing or an oboe or a cello or something like that. And I think they would have ruined the movie. So I applaud the director for choosing to just make the natural sounds. And you know, the feet stepping on leaves the crackling of the, as you say, it created that focus on flame, and its sound and I thought that was just a marvellous idea. Perhaps a little more sound could be added to it just a bit more. Maybe wind could have been interesting. There's there was also missing an ambient tone, which is always a good thing to put in a film, which is the sounds that are there that you don't recognise, but are part of the scene going on in the middle of a forest and getting an evening and taking ambient sounds I think may have added a bit more verisimilitude to the to the stain but I'd niggling niggling, that niggling fantastic choice. Thank you Damien for picking this.
Damien Valentine 15:12
I'm glad you both enjoyed it. I thought you probably would watch this. Oh, yeah, this
Ricky Grove 15:16
isn't the right Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Xsens was used to do the motion capture now. Xsens, I've done articles on them and met with them and everything. They're a fantastic company, but they're expensive to be able to do their mocap. And it appeared, it occurred to me that wonder what the mocap would have been like, if you went with a cheaper mocap or gasp, did it as traditional animation inside of Reallusions, I clones, what do you think it would have affected the believability of the animation?
Damien Valentine 16:01
Well, I've got Perception Neuron motion capture suit, which is one that is on the cheaper side of things. And if you're not careful with it, you can get some very messy results. So you have to when you're using it, you have to perform the actions very carefully to get a smooth result. And you can do the cleanup and everything afterwards. So it depends on how much effort you really want to go into, in acting out the scenes something like this, where the characters aren't moving that quickly, I think it'd be right. But I think the Xsens suit, it shows that even though it's more expensive, there's you're paying for it something better. Yeah, I don't want to dis Perception Neuron because I really like my suit. And I've got a lot of use out of it. And I know that this mine's are first generation when they've evolved since then. But I think most characteristics they take, you can't just put it on and come up with an elaborate scene and expect to do perfect straightaway, you have to take time to to learn what the suits capable of, and what you're capable of when you're wearing it as well, because that's another thing. So I don't know, it'd be interesting to see, but I think the Xsens was probably the right way to go.
Ricky Grove 17:13
Majority of the machinima filmmakers are not going to have the money to be able to buy an Xsens suit, wanted to do a film like this, would the results be severely hindered by not having such a sort of high end motion capture?
Damien Valentine 17:30
I think the choice of a lower end suit or doing it as hands on innovation or using stock animations, I would go with the lower end suits if that was my choice. I realise some people listening might not even might not be able to afford that as well, either. But if you have the option, a lower end suit gives you a lot of potential because you're not using stock animations or having to spend a lot of time hand animating the scenes because the way those characters move the you have, there's a lot of detail in what they're actually doing. So trying to do that by hand would be a huge undertaking. Yeah, trying to do the same level.
Ricky Grove 18:11
Right, the difficulty would be in the facial animation, I think, which was what the standout for the same for me. You could edit it in such a way to disguise the fact that you don't have a high end suit by doing simple animations and using darkness and light to cover some of that stuff. But I don't think you could do that facially that that would be that might be hard to do without having something a little more expensive. I don't know, if you're some listening and you know a lot about motion capture, let us know, contact us and tell us whether it's possible to do this on a less expensive suit. Did you have some thoughts on this Tracy?
Tracy Harwood 18:51
Well, we have put some information about different mocab systems on the blog, including using mobile phones to do body mocap. There's something called Move AI, which has recently come out Monday I was as we were talking I was just trying to find if that's free or whether you you have to pay for it. I haven't in my head but it's free, Move AI and it's it's markerless motion capture. Right and by all accounts is really good and links in well to Unreal Engine five. I think we've got some really interesting options from mocap on the blog, which I would look at. And I think you know, as we get down the path of you know, a lot of folks trying to think about how they tap into the Unreal model, free freemium sort of model. I think we're gonna find more and more of these kinds of traditionally there as expensive and accessible, inaccessible tools becoming very low cost to use and very much more sophisticated than they were a few years ago, and I think is a, you know, as an example of a suit, that's pretty expensive. You know, I bought the iPiSoftware, to be honest, that's quite expensive to you've got the Rococo suits, and all of those kinds of things, which are, you know, you talking several 1000 pounds to do that access stuff for free or very low cost or, you know, sort of, by, you know, by, you know, short period of animation or type of animation, using a mobile phone, for example. I mean, that makes using mo cap so much more accessible to a much wider range of creators. And I agree with Damien, you know, if anything by by, you don't have to spend time doing all the details and the animation yourself by including mocap, then, you know, my guess is it makes it just a much easier thing to do. And it's more than about the acting than it is about the tech side. Yeah.
Damien Valentine 21:16
Yeah, go ahead. I just finished off the motion capture why, once I got the synch, I learned how to use it, I adopted the idea of using it to animate every character in every scene to give each film I'm working on a very unique feel. So if I was to use a stock animation of someone talking, that's going to be in other people's films as well, which is nothing wrong with that, right. But you can, with the motion capture, you can give each character their own real unique twists. And that motion is going to be completely unique to your own film. I do like that as an option. The only thing I don't do is stunt work, because I don't damage the suit being thrown across the room or in the air.
Ricky Grove 22:05
Right. Not to mention you injure yourself as well.
Damien Valentine 22:11
I guess that's important to not to injure yourself.
Ricky Grove 22:14
Well. Well, we'll think a little bit more about mocap. And maybe Phil can add something when he when he comes back. So Damien, you've got just a little extra that you'd like to share with us. What is it?
Damien Valentine 22:26
This is one to reminisce, I wasn't looking for a film. But when I was looking before I found Remnants, this is one of the films I came across. And it's not something I expected to see it's so earlier this year, there was a Star Wars Lego video game release. And the game recreates all nine films. But with Lego characters instead of like, you know who each character is not, you know, the Darth Vader thing. But they're all little Lego figures. And it's kind of got a cartoony style to it, because obviously, the style of the toys. And I did not expect to find machinima made with that game. And of course I was wrong. So someone has kind of taken a kind of a complex and needlessly complex plot point from Attack of the Clones, and decided to poke fun at it by just pointing out how ridiculous it is. And the title of the film, Attack of the Clones. Now this this particular film is So Palpatine Needs Padme Dead. And he's, it's basically the assassination plot for Padme at the beginning of Attack of the Clones, just like it's the first 10 minutes of it. And it just shows how completely ridiculous and overtop the plot was. And this is the resulting for you made with Lego, which just makes it even funnier to me, right. What do you guys think?
Ricky Grove 23:57
Well, it's got that that TikTok vertical framing, which I think is very amusing already. Right off the bat. It's excellent voice acting, I thought that voice actor was terrific. The humour is a style that doesn't particularly grab me, but I can see how it would be very, very funny to other people. It's a quick and short and effective project. An idea that somebody put together on the side so perfect for machinima. I would like to see more work done. In this vein, this sort of parody vein of popular news or popular films. We need to have parody in order to laugh at things that we think are overly serious, you know, and this guy really caught it perfectly. It also the idea that plotting, traditional plotting by pros can oftentimes be labyrinthine, and silly, you know, and I love the way they poked fun at that is a perfect little film. That was terrific. Great choice.
Tracy Harwood 25:04
I have to agree. It was really good fun. Actually made as a YouTube mobile short, not a TikTok. Oh, yeah. And the reason for that is it's 60 seconds. But what was quite fun about it was it's looped so you kind of got this thing. You know, viewed on ad infinitum really, it's kind of like a recursive expression of all these characters involved in this plot. So, you know, kind of a fun little Lego explainer some really quick and dirty acting, I thought some, you know, quite demonic humour in places. Yeah. And it was speeded up. Um, my guess is it was speeded up to hit the 60 second marker. Oh, I see. I see. Baby. I don't know. But that's my my guess. So yes, it was fun. Almost too quick, to see much. Because isn't there some overlay of text on it as well? So you're kind of, or do I miss remember that anyway? So it's kind
Damien Valentine 26:13
of like, it's almost it's not exact subtitles? But it's kind of a bit a bit of same? Sub subtitle ish?
Tracy Harwood 26:21
Yes. Well, that was kind of detracted from me looking at the, you know, that what the characters were doing, because I was trying to keep up with, with what it was, what it was doing what it was.
Ricky Grove 26:33
So you can see stuff that you missed the first time, I've
Tracy Harwood 26:37
watched it about 10 times. And of course, Lego is perfect. But it's there's obviously no real features to look at on the characters. So yeah, great, a great choice of a, of a form for for doing what, what was done with it. That was really interesting. But the other thing is, I guess what's what I think is really quite interesting is how this medium is being used. And in this case, it's kind of clearly a taster of the material on this creators YouTube channel. Cinematic Series Gaming is the channel. And basically, therefore what it is, is an ad, although it's not clear if he's being paid out of YouTube's creator fund for this, because instead of paying folks from a share of ad revenue shorts, as they are called, don't currently use the same model. YouTube says what they want to do is build the future of the short form video first. So I guess it's competing with TikTok on this, as you kind of suggested. Now, it's obviously a growing medium, but only really something you see where folks have content already, presumably. Or short form skits is basically the thing. And what was what intrigued me was this guy's wracked up or you had when I looked at it, 5.7 million views? Oh, holy moly, I have to say 10, of which for mine. And it was only released on the 29th of September. And you know that 5.7 million was that was when I was looking at it in the week. So I'm I guess it's, I don't know, six, 7 million by now. I don't know, I was kind of intrigued by the format as much as it wasn't the content and the guy was using it. And I was wondering, you know, maybe we should do one of those to beef up our channel a bit. But then again, I thought, You know what, we can't do anything in 60 seconds. So that isn't really going to help us much, isn't it?
Ricky Grove 28:50
Yeah. So what was the director's name of who did this?
Tracy Harwood 28:54
Well, then called Cinematic Series Gaming. Okay. I don't know. A name beyond that. I didn't look it
Damien Valentine 29:04
up. Yeah, that's the name of the channel. I don't know the name of the actual director or the voice actor.
Ricky Grove 29:09
Right. Got it. terrific choice and, and a wonderful contrast to The Remnants. I was very impressed with that Damien. And really, the best choices of the month, I think. Thank you. Yep. All right. Well, that's our show. Thank you very much for watching or listening. You can see links to The Remnants by Stan Patruk and So Palpatine Needs Padme Dead on our blog, and our show notes. Thank you, Tracy for doing that. And other than that, let us know contact us Talk at Completelymachinima.com We'd love to hear from you. About mocap about these films. If you're the directors contact us. We'd love to talk to you about them. We think these are excellent films. So that's it. For this week, we'll be back next week for with our last film for November. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. Bye bye bye bye