Completely Machinima S2 Ep 43 Films (August 2022)

In this episode, Damien, Ricky and Tracy discuss four very different films. Damien reviews an interesting explainer on witches in The Folklore of Phasmophobia game, Ricky presents us with another of Jae Solina’s tutorials, this time on path tracing in Omniverse, Tracy selects Tiny Elden Ring – yep, its tiny! And Phil, absent due to sickness, ironically picked a satirical Zombie fest, which mixed Walking Dead ‘live action’ with machinima! The team then discuss that approach to creating films, highlighting some of the key challenges with some more fab examples of films that have used the techniques well.

SPEAKERS
Damien Valentine, Tracy Harwood, Ricky Grove

Damien Valentine 00:18
Hello and welcome to the next instalment of And Now For Something Completely Machinima. This week we're going to be discussing films. And I'm joined by Ricky Grove.

Ricky Grove 00:28
Hey there,

Damien Valentine 00:30
and Tracy Harwood. Hello. So unfortunately, Phil is still throwing up somewhere. We haven't heard anything.

Ricky Grove 00:41
Try. Didn't you try to call during our last episode?

Damien Valentine 00:44
I didn't know I had my phone on mute. So it was vibrating. But you know, I didn't check. So

Ricky Grove 00:48
yeah, I got, I thought I heard the recording in there. If again, it will play it for the next time. All right.

Damien Valentine 00:57
So he did choose a film, which you will talk about, obviously, he won't be talking about himself. But we'll get to that later in the show. And we're going to start off with my film selection. Which is the folklore of pasma phobia. Our first myth phobia is a game that has become very popular over the last few years, especially with lock downs and everything. Because it's good for streaming, you get lots of people streaming it, this was a really good community game. The idea is, the player is a ghost hunter, either playing by himself or with a group of people. And you go into a house or a school or various locations, and you have to search the building for clues to figure out what kind of ghost is in there. And you've got some various bits of equipment, you can only carry three items. So you have to be careful what you choose. And if you've got a team, you can combine resources, because you can figure out who's going to carry what. And it's very scary game. There's also a lot of fun. But the other side of it is there isn't much backstory to it other than there's always different kinds of ghosts, and you go in and figure out which one it is. So the video I've chosen is someone who's taken the list of ghosts names, and they've done the research to figure out how accurate is the game with these ghost descriptions to actual lore about these different mythical mythological creatures. And it's kind of like a documentary style video, using footage from the game. And I suppose there's something slightly different. So it's not really a Let's Play video. But it's not really a story video or anything else. It's kind of I don't know, what do you guys think?

Ricky Grove 02:44
I thought it was marvellous. It, I would sort of classify it as an explainer video. You know, the kind of thing where it shows you the information it's going to cover and then goes into detail. But it's done via machinima inside of a game, which I thought is extremely creative. Earlier, in the previous segment, we talked about the fact that people were doing recreating scenes from Hollywood blockbuster movies. Well, this is an example of somebody's imagination. And they said, Well, I know a lot about this, I'd like to share my knowledge and also show people how much fun the game is. And they did a great job. I think the information in it is fascinating. It's a great combination of game footage and graphics, she does a really good job with graphics in it. She's smart. It's a fun video to watch, it makes you smile, and laugh. Some a few small criticisms is it? It's a bit long, I think it could have been shortened a bit or done in a couple episodes, like maybe an episode for two ghosts, and then another episode for another one. Also, I was a little disappointed in the fact that the game footage tended to be the same kind of thing. People wandering around with her thing. And it didn't actually show the ghost that she's talking about. She used a graphic to depict it. Now I suspect that's another example of the problems of of the game engine itself. Trying to get footage of this. Maybe it's one of those things where if you encountered if you tried to get really good footage of it, you die, you know, that kind of thing. But I would have wished for a little more game footage in it. And a little little less commentary, but overall I just thought it was marvellous example of creative machinima. It's an interesting topic, and I'm really glad you picked it.

Damien Valentine 04:49
Just to answer you think they'll comment about the ghost, the visual appearance that ghost is not a clue to the type of ghost it is. So there's about six or seven different ghost 3d models but they don't it doesn't tie into the type of ghost is. So that's why she hasn't actually done that is because that's the way the game is designed because otherwise you can just look at the ghost. That kind of ghost and then leave. There's no, you're not looking for the clues. I see. Yeah, I just wanted to add something. Yeah, Tracy what do you think? Oh,

Tracy Harwood 05:21
yeah, well actually, you know, my points are very similar to Ricky's really, actually, I think we should have perhaps saved this one for Halloween because it kind of fits that that theme really nicely. And I, you know, I thought it was more of a Let's Play. But, you know, I also thought it was a very good explainer. And I think the narrator there does a pretty good job of explaining what the different types of ghostly creatures are in the game, and the kind of the mythos behind each of them. But I have to say it doesn't really cut it for me for a number of reasons. One is, the explainer is actually pretty academic, and kind of lacks a bit of emotion that I might have expected on the subject. I mean, it's very rationalising and quite monotonic. About kind of, sort of sets of cultural beliefs to do with folklore of ghosts from different cultural perspectives. Interesting, though, I have to say, I thought the Machinima itself was pretty jerky doesn't really reveal the characters. So it's been I'm glad you explained that because, you know, I might have been expecting for the type of ghost she was talking about to be revealed in the footage that we were seeing, and it wasn't it or at least ways my expectations weren't met through that. I actually thought, when I was watching that it was probably a missed opportunity to liven things up in the presentation if she'd have made more of an effort to explain why they're not the same. So what you see for me is a bit of, from my point of view, really, as it is a is a bit of poking around a building, which after about 20 minutes of monologue becomes really quite repetitive with the area's being explored for the different types of Phantasm being described, and being viewed again and again and again. But all of that said, there's clearly a lot of research that's gone into the narrative side of it, which has to be commended. And the video itself, I think, isn't actually targeting those that might play the game, but those that want to know more about the mythology. And then when you look at this, the streamers channel, that's all about what she's posting about, which is the general mythos in games, you know, rather than the gameplay itself. So overall, interesting, but, but I have some sort of reservations in terms of the entertainment side of it.

Ricky Grove 07:54
Excellent criticism, couldn't have put it better. I think it's another example of those things where we looking at a film and machinima film that was made on the rough and ready because obviously, it was, I mean, effort was gone into it. But it wasn't a carefully crafted piece. It fits into that sort, of coarse machinima. And then we look at the ideal, and we say, well, it could have been this, you know, I agree with you, especially about the narration. I don't think the person is used to doing a lot of narration, which is why they fall into patterns of speech that are repeated over and over again, like you say academic or monotonic. So a little coaching would have solved that problem easily. Also, factually, I don't know enough about ghosts to see whether it was all correct. My partner Lisa Morton has written several books on ghosts and revenants. And that sort of thing. It'd be interesting to run this by her to see whether it's true, but I suspect most of it probably is. Because she just says she looks like a person who would work really hard to to get things accurate. The potential of the film was fantastic, as you say, but I think you're right more craft work, more effort to try to make it easier for viewers to watch more game footage, trying to solve that problem of getting ghosts in it as opposed to using graphics. I think that would have made it a better film. Good pick though. Good thick, really good.

Damien Valentine 09:31
I'm glad you enjoyed it for for the good parts of it and I can understand your criticism of it as well. But yeah, I enjoyed it. I was looking at videos with the gang so played the game a lot and I thought I wonder if anyone's made any machinima with it and there was lots of Let's Play videos, but this one kind of stood out as saying a little bit different. Yeah.

Ricky Grove 09:51
Well, let me talk to you quickly about my pic it's not a fictional film. It's more of a kind of demonstration nonfiction film. It's an example of what you can achieve with path tracing rendering in Nvidia is omnivore machinima. The scene is absolutely gorgeous shows you the kind of rendering you can do. Of course, remember, the Omniverse requires a fairly high end graphics card from Nvidia to work for like two. So that's a caveat. The scene is really interesting. It's a robot, who is in the sort of upper class pseudo Victorian environment with paintings. And the robot accord. The contrast between the two is very amusing, because there's this very mechanical kind of thing. And yet, there's a curiosity in the robot, when he looks at the paintings, you can imagine him trying to figure out what what that's all about, then he ends up sitting down. But that's all incidental to the demonstration of how you can achieve the look. And so the first half is this scene with the robot. And then the second half, is showing inside of the omniverse machinima how how they're achieving it and what they're doing to make it real time. I wanted to share with everybody the fantastic look that you can get with Omniverse machinima. And that's why I chose this film. What did you guys think?

Tracy Harwood 11:29
I was wondering why you selected actually, Jae, we we reviewed one of his pieces last month as well, which is, which is really interesting that you pick this completely separately of that. Yeah, this path testing stuff is really quite interesting. And like, you know, that robot, the environment, the TV, and all the things he kind of brought together, none of them are things that he's created himself. They're all things by other artists. So it really is a kind of a tutorial focusing on light. And I have to say all of his tutorials are really impressive. And for me, what you can see here is how sophisticated that light source bounce this kind of what do they call it path tracing? Actually is I mean, it's really impressive overview of what I would say is a really advanced tool, which helps to create more realistic content and and what's more, it's demonstrating how you can kind of achieve it in real time, this real time path tracing really, really impressive. And that's obviously, what's going into things like the you know, the Strange New Worlds that you talked about. And the way that's that short kind of shot in real time. There's one bit where I thought, you know, what, I'm not sure that that actually worked, which was around 17 seconds when the when that robot stands there in front of some paintings on a wall. And the window light source appears to be sort of far off to the right of the robot. But the light on the robot itself seems to be a little more behind it than off to the side. Ah, now I don't I mean, I looked for that, because, you know, it's clear that what he's trying, he's trying to show here is this demo. And I looked for sort of, I don't know, I was trying to be nitpicky, I suppose. Yeah, yeah. And that to me, just, I don't know, whether it was, you know, that didn't work so well from for me, but maybe, maybe, maybe I've misunderstood where the original light source was kind of coming from Yeah, in that particular scene. But in the next shot, you definitely get a sense of the light and the colour bounce from that sort of orangey sofa that's in the room. Yeah. And then when you start, you know, I played it several times. So look at where that light is bouncing to see what I can see what's kind of going on, and you see that orangey light bouncing on lots of things like the vase like the you know, the robot skin and, and, you know, a few different you know, like almost on the books as well in that shot, so yeah, really, really fascinating. You know, video explainer, really, there's no talking at all, but a nice little video explainer of what path tracing is. But you need to do a little bit more background on what path tracing is, and the difference between that and rasterization and ray tracing in order to kind of really get to what he's what he's alluding to in that little video.

Ricky Grove 14:34
The pamphlet that we talked about earlier, the Animation Field Guide to real time production, they may cover some of that in it. Yeah.

Tracy Harwood 14:42
Yeah. Well, I just mentioned that because, you know, I thought that was a really interesting demo of it.

Ricky Grove 14:49
Well, you know, I I agree with you. And I think nitpicking is exactly what you should do in these sorts of demos if they're bragging about their technology. If you see inconsistency, as he pointed out, I suspect that this tool will be more beneficial to professional producers of real time production than it will be to the everyday kind of machinima filmmaker. However, you know, there are those people who really love the look of things, and they want it to look great. You if you wanted to create a professional grade, and you want to sell it, this would be the direction to go. Using in Nvidia's Omniverse. It's free right now, they still haven't released an official version of it yet, I don't think. Yeah, believe it. Yeah, it's yeah, that's still free. So it's worth experimenting with, you know, taking a look at because they give you lots of assets. There isn't quite as large a community as I thought there would be when it came out. But there are some livestream tutorials and regular tutorials, it's a bit cumbersome the way they've designed it. I suspect, if it stays around, they'll fix that in the future. But anyway, I hope you I'm glad you guys liked the choice, I thought it was an interesting one.

Damien Valentine 16:11
I enjoyed it as well. I mean, JSFilmz, I've been following his channel for a while because I've been learning how to use Omniverse. And he's, he covers lots of different engines. But his Omniverse tutorials are really helpful at learning how to use the basics of the software. And they're not very long. So if you're learning Omniverse, go and check out his tutorials. And he covers a lot. And it's worth taking the time to do that. So little tests like this, again, it's very helpful just to get an idea of how it looks. And you've got that sort of the behind the scenes bit as the second half of the video. So you can see how he used iClone and Omniverse together to animate the robot. Tracy, when you're talking about the light, I went back and had a look at it. The answer is there's two light sources. Yeah. Because when the robot walks away, yeah, two shadows on the wall. Yeah. Ah,

Tracy Harwood 17:03
yeah. So there's another window that you don't see in any of any that what you're saying.

Damien Valentine 17:09
Yeah, yeah. Well, it could just be a light source that's behind the robot behind the camera, so you can't see it. But just to light it up.

Tracy Harwood 17:17
That's not well explained in there, though, is it?

Damien Valentine 17:21
That's a criticism. Thank you.

Ricky Grove 17:25
Good job choice. Damien. Can you tell us about Phil's choice for?

Damien Valentine 17:31
I think she talked about Tracy's film first.

Tracy Harwood 17:33
Yeah, let's do mine. And then and then Phil's because we got a nice little discussion topic. Related, to Phil. All right. So you know. With you having had last month, dedicating your time to Elden Ring, I thought this was a perfect choice. This is Tiny Elden Ring, this is made using tilt shift. It's by an artist called Flurdeh, a Dutch artist, released in April, it's a three minutes long taster of Elden Ring, but it puts it in a in a really interesting light. And using this kind of tilt, shift time lapse, turning characters into these miniatures to give a kind of stop mo type feel to it. And also turns you, you, yourself the viewer into this kind of godlike person, sort of overloading the lives of these tiny creatures in this kind of fantasy world. Now Flurdeh, or Kevin Henson's name is, has a whole channel dedicated to these, you know, tiny, tiny views, these tilt shift views of game worlds. And it gives you this, you know, it really gives you a different view of the games themselves. And he's clearly somebody that loves the beauty of these video games. So he says his goal is to focus on the environment and also the life and characters living in this in these worlds. I think what's interesting with this one though, is the soundscape for it is is you know it's so obviously complimentary. It isn't tampered with in any way in the same way that the visuals are. What's interesting is it's kind of slow and soulful, whether what you're seeing is kind of speeded up and you know bubbling about and it kind of puts you into the mood of being this voyeur rather than being somebody that's sort of in the game viewing the game from inside the game. And I think you know what's interesting here is that folks have described it as kind of nostalgic, familiar yet distant, adorable, magical, spectacular, dioramic, tabletop, and even poetic. I think I found it all of those. All of those things. What did you guys think to Uh

Ricky Grove 20:00
oh, Tracy, what a wonderful choice. Especially considering I've been nonstop Elden Ring for months, months since March, you know. And by the way, I noticed your background is Elden ring. That's pretty cool. Let me answer I'm going to respond to this in two parts. The first part is what is tilt shift. Tilt Shift is a combination of time lapse photography, with a very special way of using blur filters. You you, you create a thin band at the centre of the image, which is crystal clear. And then everything from that above and below are gradiated blurred images. And what that does is it creates a photographic effect that takes the sort of realism of the scene and turns them into tiny little models. So the say for example, you take a beach scene, a wide angle beach scene, and you put the tilt, shift effect on it, and you do time lapse, and it makes them all seem like little toys, little toy models. So that's the effect that tilt shift photography, I can't imagine how he actually did it inside of Elden Ring. But it is just magnificent. And having played golden rings, so much I knew every scene and every character that he was depicting, and his choices of scenes were just fantastic. In fact, I'm surprised that he didn't make it longer because there's even more crazy and weird places in there. But what it did was exactly as you describe a creative kind of detached, poetic observation, because I think, tilt shift tutorials talk about how you need to have a sort of elevated angle, you need to be up and looking down a bit in order to get the best tilt shift effect. So I think that naturally occurred and doing tilt shift his efforts to do tilt shift. And it created a way of looking at the game that was completely different from being down inside of it, and playing it on the inside. And it just was enchanting to me. And as you say you point out the wonderful music that was worked with it, I immediately loved it so much, I started watching all the others, and they're all equally as fascinating. But the second part I wanted to mention was the mod that he used to be able to photograph Elden Ring. It is it's a photo mod by an artist who does mods. And it's terrific. It allows you to be able to polish the camera, path, a path, the camera, change the lenses, do slomo record and then go back and redo stuff again. The problem is, is that he's got it on a Patreon channel. And if you want to get it, you have to pay six euros a month, that's the lowest you can get. So I suppose you could get it and end up paying for a year, which is what 72 euros for the year. That's a bit high priced for this. I don't know whether he's got a block if you get the mod, and use it for just a month and then keep it whether it just stops. You know what I mean? Like he's got a built in thing. And I suspect if you're a machinima filmmaker and you want to try out this thing to create something, you could rent it for two months, and it would cost you 12 euros to do it. I really wished he would have created a Buy It Now package for like 49.95 or something. Although I think this sort of thing should be given free to the community. I understand why people may be making a living out of it. And I can understand why he put it on his Patreon channel. But just a warning for anybody who wants to use this photo mod for Elden Ring you'll have to pay some money for it. But I would very much like to talk to this filmmaker, Kevin Hansen and find out how he did this tilt shift photography so I'm gonna take that under my a goal is to talk to him get an interview with him. But thank you for choosing this is just delightful. It made me so happy.

Damien Valentine 24:34
I I have to say this is one of the best films I've seen that we've chosen for quite some time and there's just something about the way it looks. And Tracy mentioned that nostalgia and it kind of it's kind of like a stop motion feel to it the way the characters move. And you know, it kind of like reminds me of things like Dark Crystal and stuff like that with just the way the characters move and the visual style of it, and it's really stunning. I don't know what else I can say. But I don't know the game. I figured when I was watching it, Ricky's gonna know every single character and he's gonna know all these different locations.

Ricky Grove 25:13
I've been through the game twice. I just finished the second time yesterday.

Damien Valentine 25:18
Obviously, you really enjoy it. And oh, I do I was going to ask you about, if you recognise me, you already beat me to it was a

Ricky Grove 25:26
very strange experience. Because in the game, there are certain characters that are so huge, that the scale of being able to perceive them is it's meant to be intimidating, right. But when you see it in that tilt shift thing, it reduces them to little toys, and then your characters even smaller than that, which makes them sort of cute. Strange, but cute. It was fun.

Damien Valentine 25:53
I don't know, it looks like from the player's perspective in the video, is that four legged creature with a sort of a bell thing hanging down? I imagine that must be massive in the game.

Ricky Grove 26:02
Those are the mausoleums. Right? Yeah, they, they. There's about seven of them in the world, and they walk around. And what you do is you you figure out a method to be able to get them to stop moving. And then inside, they allow you to duplicate remembrances of bosses that you've killed. Because when you kill the boss, you get their weapon. Right. So oftentimes you get two weapons. So you can only choose one well, if you go to the mausoleums, you can go in and get duplicate the remembrance to get both weapons. So that's why they're in the game.

Damien Valentine 26:37
That's a nice trick. Yeah. So yeah, take

Ricky Grove 26:41
away all the Elden Ring is just marvellous. If you haven't played it, I can't. I can't urge you more. He says it's a marvellous game. Very difficult, though, I have to say. Very difficult.

Tracy Harwood 26:52
Yeah, we've hit we've been hearing you talk about it for months. To try it.

Ricky Grove 26:58
Yeah. Yeah. I haven't been struck by a game like this for a couple of decades. You know, it's so much fun. I think my roommates and my partner Lisa are getting sick of me playing Elden Ring, you know, so I have to turn the volume down and sort of surreptitiously go into play. Okay, let's talk about Phil's film. Yeah.

Damien Valentine 27:27
So Phil chose a film called What a Typical Project Zomboid Run Looks Like. I've never played Zomboid Run. So I've never heard of it before. But the video he chose it is basically a guy running out of his house and getting surrounded by zombies and killed, which I know just bought the whole film, but it's only a minute long. But it's mixed in live action footage, which I believe is from The Walking Dead. The very essence of the character looks kind of familiar, but it's been so long since I've watched those early episodes. If anyone knows it's from something else, please correct me in the feedback. And we'll correct ourselves next week. And next month. But that is the trigger for the video. And I thought was interesting way to combine the position. The zombie TV show was on the game. And it's gonna have humour to it because some of the comments so this is what typically happens when you first play it. So what do you think?

Tracy Harwood 28:32
Yeah, well, I thought it did very well, in an incredibly short machinima to I think fairly accurately put over the challenge of the game. I mean, with very, very few sound, very few sounds really muffled speaking. And, and kind of these pop cultural references through the through the live action stuff. And with references to the soundscape, you kind of get the frustration and the humour associated with it. And the scenes cut in show how your character kind of quickly gets overrun, and then the scenes from some real life movie, which I didn't know which it was, wouldn't be something that I'd probably seen or taken note of and or if I saw it, it'd be like in the 80s or something. And then these news channel sections, I thought was kind of an interesting intersection, although actually I thought the news channels section was too long. Given that the other scenes was so short, so short, right. But overall, I thought the comedic timing was great. The humour and the editing was pretty well done.

Ricky Grove 29:43
Yeah, I could see Phil choosing this. Yeah, me too, because he has such a great sense of humour for absurd and situations that just come out of nowhere. You know, I think this is a great example of the kind of machinima that the mood of the Machinima which is funny and sort of course and satire, it's a satiric video, very much like early machinima creations where they would put it together. It's delightful to see that that spirit is still alive today, in 2022, machinima. Obviously was made fast. It's a bit sloppy. But that's part of the appeal to it. It's sloppy. I thought that the now as far as far as the legal issues of them, using clips from Walking Dead, it qualifies for fair use, because it's satire. And it's also short enough that they're not taking. They're not. I mean, Tracy, you didn't even know is from The Walking Dead. So they're not taking profits away from Walking Dead because of it, but their use of it. And the timing in which they edited it was just very, very amusing and witty. And the combination of the two I thought were the sort of real clips and then the game being so silly and simple. It made a stray, you wouldn't think that they would mix together, you know, but they did. Yeah. And that was quite funny. I enjoyed it very much. I enjoyed the sloppiness and, and the fun and made it even better. And I'm glad to see that the Machinima like this is still being made.

Damien Valentine 31:26
I agree with you, Ricky about the contrast because the Walking Dead is obviously a very stark, serious show. So to use clips from that, in a way that's funny, by combining with this game, as makes it even funnier, because it's not what.

Ricky Grove 31:41
Yeah, especially if you know, The Walking Dead, it makes it even funnier.

Damien Valentine 31:45
Yeah. So obviously, Phil can't comment on his film choice this month. But his it does lead into our discussion topic, which is combining live action video with real people with machinima footage. And we've kind of been sort of discussing this in various ways for a while now, including last month's pick, which had the Top Gun parody, which had the real actors flying the planes, but the plane footage was from a flight simulator. And we've seen that some other examples of it, but we decided to dedicate an actual discussion to this. So who would like to go first?

Ricky Grove 32:29
Well, I think you should, because you actually made a machinima film that combined live action with machinima. So you know what it's like from a production standpoint, why don't you tell us a little bit about that film and how you made it and your thoughts about live action combined with machinima.

Damien Valentine 32:45
So it was about 10 years ago. And it's an annual project I work on with a friend of mine, Kim, who lives in Portland, Oregon. And she runs a social media site for role playing games. So you can create your character and have a profile for that. And you can find other people to play with, and is for the anniversary events, starts to like a big, special thing for the every year since the sites birthday and opening. So we've been making some sort of promotional videos using movie storm. And we thought, well, let's do this, but in a bigger way for epic week, which is the anniversary. So what we did was we crafted a story. And it was going to use people's characters who submitted the site, then we'd have little contest, people could submit their characters. So we actually had permission to use them. So we're just grabbing people without asking, and then we're gonna use some live action footage to represent the real world. So what I did is I went to visit her in Portland, and I was staying in hotel. And we did some footage. Some of the filming was in the hotel room, we got some green card, and we stuck it all across the wall. We were really hoping and no one from housekeeping. Were coming in, see what we've done. We had to move all the furniture out of the way so we had some space because you didn't want your chairs in the back in the green screen thing. So she came to hotel room, she got into her ballgown dress. And we filmed her in front of the green screen with the idea that we could put her into the world of imagination. And then other parts of it were actually in her house at her desk with the idea that because she created the sights, you'd be trying to fight these software bugs that were popping up in the world to the imagination, so we had to have a computer tapping away. So you know, we filmed that over about three days. I think it took us to do that. And then just add a little extra bonus is we wanted a castle for to look like her house because she doesn't really live in what so I went to come Cardiff and got some footage of Cardiff castle. And, you know, we chose a clip to put in there to establish that's where she lived. So that's all the live action footage and then the machinima part of it, we had about 40 characters submitted. So then we had two modern movies storm was very difficult. So we had to create 40 characters that people submitted. I think we ended up we had more, but we narrowed it down to 40. So we had one per person. It took us ages to create these custom textures on different outfits. And we put all that together. And we had a huge battle sequence, which is not something that Moviestorm was designed for. So here's some trickery there to make it look like the 1000s of people when they were just, you know, a handful. And there's some other challenges, like there was no swordfighting animations. So how to those sores, but you couldn't do animations to make them look like the people were swinging around. So had to use pointing them square box and set this box to be invisible, and then point it to another one and hoped I've positioned it. So look like

Ricky Grove 36:15
oh, wow, what a work around. Yeah, yeah.

Damien Valentine 36:19
So that was sort of machinima side of it. I built some of the sets, in Moviestorm, before I went to do the film thing, because at the end of the film, when Kim appears to the character, they survived the battle, and it's all the big party going on. And she actually has to appear as herself in this virtual world, as well. It's easy to just film her and then put something in. But now I wanted to make sure that she knew what the environment was going to look like. So she comes out, the crowd is going to be over there, there's a fountain behind her. There's more people over there. And this creature comes in it comes out of the sky. So we use it to figure out it's going to come from this direction, and it's going to come and land here. And I kind of hung something up on one of the I don't know what my hands overlay can't sit on the curtain railing. So as the point where Kim looks up, and then I said, you know, wait five seconds, and then bring your gaze down to here. And I think I had my handout as the second spot. So her gaze would meet as the creature would fit. Yeah. You kind of to think about that. Kim was very pleased that I built the environment first, which if you're going to combine live action with machinima, it's something that you should think about. So as you act as as much as possible about the virtual environment, they're going to be in as many places as you can, it makes their performance better. So

Ricky Grove 38:00
combining the footage together, what was that, like?

Damien Valentine 38:04
I was just basically, green screen compositing using Sony Vegas. We had to light the room with every single light we could get. At one point we were setting up, there were not enough lights in the room to get it properly because her shadow was on the green screen behind, which obviously causes problems. So she went back to her house, which is about a quarter an hour drive away, came back with a armfuls of lights that she take from different rooms. And we set them up, plug them in and set them all up around that gave us the lighting we needed. Oh, good. Yeah. So obviously, lighting is important. And space is as well. Because if you stand, even if you got really good lighting, if you stand right in front of the green screen, you're gonna get shadows behind you. So you need the actor to be away from the green screen. But you also need more space on the other side so that they're not right up against the camera, because you can get this like this. So the hotel room was just about big enough for what we needed. Ideally, probably wasn't even bigger space. But you know, we had to make do with what we had available. Right?

Ricky Grove 39:11
So yeah, the name of the film was called what the Great Insect War was that it? The Great Bug War, the great bug war?

Damien Valentine 39:19
Yeah, we released it in five instalments. And then afterwards, I edited them all together into sort of a 15 minute long film, which is less now we show people.

Ricky Grove 39:29
Were you happy with how it turned out? The combination of the two?

Damien Valentine 39:32
Yeah, I mean, I've never done anything like that before. I know if I didn't know I'd use icon to create the virtual environment. So it probably looked better. But I'm really pleased with how it turned out and the combination and just pure machine was the art of it. I'm really happy with that as well. It's kind of we watched all the battle scenes from Lord of the Rings many times to get a feel for what we wanted. We weren't you know, recreating I think specific, but we also do people. So what do you think? Oh, that was like that. So yeah, it was a huge challenge. But it's worth it. And I remember

Ricky Grove 40:12
when it came out, I enjoyed it very much. I was very impressed with I had no idea you were creating it in such rough and ready methods, you know, sort of scrambling to try to get the right lighting, you know, as it certainly looked great. And nowadays, as you, as you say, iClone you can recreate character creator can recreate the characters just like that. And you can order pretty much any size green screen that's collapsible, collapsible. And you can just assemble it and put it up anywhere, and you can buy the lights that you or you can buy a kit for that nowadays. So if you wanted to use that method that you're using, which I think is a more traditional method, it's pretty easy to do, I would imagine two or $300 outlay for lights in that to get the right photography for Yeah,

Damien Valentine 41:05
we didn't have access to anything that we the green screen was just big sheets of green cards that we got from a nearby supermarket. We use sellotape to tape them all together. And, and it kind of went all across the room. There's there's some behind the scenes pictures, which I will include in this video,

Ricky Grove 41:21
please. Yeah. Yeah. How about you, Tracy? What are your thoughts on combining machinima with live action performance?

Tracy Harwood 41:30
Yeah, I mean, I think we're seeing a lot more of this than we than we used to. Because I think I mean, that sounds a massively complex and endeavour, Damian. But I think, you know, I think the tool sets are changing, and making it kind of much more accessible way of, of creating, you know, interesting stories, and, and artworks, really. I mean, you know, I'm just sort of thinking, you know, and Phil's film, The Zomboid run thing, where he was kind of cutting between the two things in it, you know, it's a pretty obvious way to use machinima with real life, isn't it, you know, sort of cuts, cuts, cuts, the, you know, cuts the, the games into fantastical parts of the story way, you know, you can't use real real life to sort of tell a story, and vice versa, to sort of connect the two things together. But I actually think now with with, with new, you know, new types of production studio emerging along the lines of, you know, what we've seen with mando. But at considerably smaller scale. I think, before long, we're going to see a lot more folks using these kinds of production techniques to integrate kind of real life action with the sort sort of CG effects using these 3d environments, as backdrops because I just think it's getting easier to do it. And, you know, I'll give you an example here. We're increasingly looking at these kinds of studios at universities, as part of filmmaking courses, and, you know, virtual production types of courses. And alongside that, of course, you know, we were seeing a lot more use of motion capture technologies, some of its pretty cheap to use, we've seen lots of that on on this show. And it's, you know, it's it's live puppeteering with with 3d assets, which, you know, I can remember Hugh talking about this donkey's years ago, where, you know, he was using, I don't know what, whether it was World of Warcraft, characters that he was puppeteering live. And I don't know if you guys can remember also the RoosterTeeth guys doing similar sort of thing in live shows that they were doing. So it's not, it's not new techniques, that the tools make it so much easier to much easier to do it. And that was what I was gonna say the other thing that we've seen, of course, is this V tubing stuff. That again, Damian, you talked about that last month, where you're basically using your movement with an animated character, just using a webcam. And I think, you know, you'll see that at a more sophisticated level, too. I mean, we've just been testing out iPisoft as markerless motion capture, which you can hook up to animations really quickly, really easily. So this kind of these combinations of technologies, I think, are going to be so much easier for people to use. And then the other thing that I was going to say is, you know, we're now into the next gen of augmented reality tools also, and that, and that's a, you know, kind of, you know, where we're seeing advances in spatial computing. And people, you know, now demanding better content through these augmented reality kind of tools, where you've got this combination of virtual and real meshed together and being captured through these, these head mounted tool sets and whatnot. I think we're on the cusp of something that makes this technology you know, it, I think demand has kind of exceeded the capability of what it's what it's been about. But I actually think that's now beginning to turn tide. And I think these new kinds of things synthesised experiences are definitely going to become something that's realisable, beyond the purely entertainment, things that it is, at the moment into something that's much more meaningful. So I think we're on the cusp of something really interesting, which demonstrate, that's my view on it. Yeah,

Ricky Grove 46:12
that's great. I agree with you. 100%, I'd like to point out a couple of things. One is, is there's there's essentially two ways to do live action, you take a 3d or a 2d character, and you put them in a real live situation, live background, or you have an artificial background. And you have 3d real, you know, real people in the front. So as foreground background difference, there was a series that I saw, and I'm sorry, I can't remember it. I will research and make sure that I put that down in our notes. But it was a series I saw last year that I just found by searching through YouTube and what the guy did. He created the UK sort of compelling Charles Borkowsky Like story of a sort of street bum guy and his friend in Los Angeles. And the characters were 2d. And he used a 2d animation programme to, you know, mark them and get them to do all the stuff you want. But he actually went to real locations in Los Angeles, and did videotape and then composited them together. And what that did is it made because they in the dialogue, they talk about LA and they talk about what they're doing and how they're going to do this and that. And it made, the trick is is to getting making sure that the the foreground and the background blend together, they work together. So the way that he created the 2d characters, he coloured them in such a way that they fit with the backgrounds that he chose, you know what I mean? If he used a super high contrast cartoon look to it, the contrast would have been too great. And you wouldn't have believed it. But he coloured that and shaped him and then I'm also did realistic, you know, gestures and dialogue so that they blended together just right, and vice versa, your work and The Great Bug War, you were at pains to get their live actors to respond correctly to the scenic elements, and they blended well together. So that's the trick. The tools are there to make it. The trick is figuring how to blend them in terms of your compositing. Now lastly, I wanted to point out that many months ago, we talked about special effects filmmaker named Phil Tippett easy one many Academy Awards for just dozens of films. Well, he spent 30 years working on a private Stop Motion project for 30 years. That is incredible. That's a challenge and the fact that he completed well, he completed it. And we reported on some of the trailers that were out well, I finally got a chance to see the entire film. Just recently, I think it's on one of the Hulu maybe or Netflix, one of the only things you can find out and I it's just it's like my partner Lisa described it as a visual visual poem. Because there's really no dialogue in it. There's some grunting and animal sounds, but there's no dialogue or subtitles. So the entire story is told visually. But what surprised me because it wasn't included in any of the trailers was that he combined live action as some of the important parts. I would say maybe 10, 15 minutes of live action, interacting with the stop motion people and what and now you have to remember it's a very strange film and the look the colours the textures, the shapes are all very, very unique, grungy, dark gothic. So when he shot his real footage, he had to make sure that the characters have that same look. And we're coloured and render and, and composited in such a way that they fit into the world. And they certainly did. They most certainly did. And, in fact, in many ways, they were stranger than the, the, the crazy 3d characters that he was doing stop motion with. There were so strange, but his blend of those two was masterful. So you're looking for a modern example of how to do that. Phil Tippett's film Mad God is a good one to watch for seeing what the modern tools you can with that, but overall, I think it's an underused aspects of machinima filmmaking, I recall second life having a lot of interesting experiences with combining live action footage. Who is the fellow of he's an Indian filmmaker starts with a B.

Tracy Harwood 51:12
O M. Si, si, si, te Vana. Yeah.

Ricky Grove 51:20
So anyway, he is he's a person touchy combines. Second, he does a lot, in a way. And he sometimes he colourizes The scenes in such a way that contrast as opposed to blends, which is intuitively not intuitive. But he does it for a style look. Like for example, riding on an Indian train, or riding around on a scooter in India. He puts that together with these sort of soulful, and mournful monologues about places and things.

Tracy Harwood 51:56
Never.

Ricky Grove 52:00
He never I apologise for not remembering your, your name and your last name. But anyway, he's another great example of combining live action footage from Second Life. And he's been doing that for over a decade. And it's fantastic. But it's underused, if you're a machinima filmmaker today. And you're interested in doing something that's different and unusual. Combining live action with Machinima is a great time, great technique. And this is the real good time to do it. Because as Tracy pointed out, the tools to be able to do it are much better and easier to use today.

Damien Valentine 52:39
So I think we had an excellent discussion there about different aspects of combining live action with machinima and some examples. It's always it's been used. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes in the future. Obviously. I know we've talked about the Mandalorian and Star Trek before. And these are quite well, I look forward to seeing what people at home do to combine the two. For me, myself, one of the things that I'm doing moment, it's not exactly live action footage. But I've been going outside and taking 360 photos of different environments, and then using them in virtual environments in iClone and Omniverse. Because you get the realistic environment. Because these are real environments, just as picture of it as an environment because you get things like the sunsets and there's your background. Yeah, yeah. So I've been learning that. And I think that works. Well. I mean,

Ricky Grove 53:40
it's a great technique.

Damien Valentine 53:42
And if you get the like, if you set it to be a texture, you've got the lighting is lighting up your entire scene realistically.

Tracy Harwood 53:52
I mean, another thing I've got running at the moment is a photogrammetry competition with the Art AI festival that I run, but what we're trying to do here is get folks to capture using point cloud technology, parts of a street in the city that I work at, in. And what I'm hoping for is that people create some interesting renders from the footage that they capture. And that's another way of mixing. You know, different types of data set to you know, create real and virtual assets. I think there's lots of different techniques and tools that you can use these days. Some more easy to use and others.

Ricky Grove 54:37
Yep. But now's a good time to get into it if you're interested in combining live action, which is it's, it's less challenging than it used to be, but it does take some work, and a little bit of money to get it right. But if you're interested in that, it's a great time to do it. You know, I'll link the fellow that, that I talked about his series because it's so compelling using real locations, and Video, Video of streets and alleys and rooms and bars and places like that, I just think that's a great way to combine live action and, and video, and animation,

Damien Valentine 55:17
I think you're right is and the tools like, if you're going to combine some live action footage, we need all the green screens covered it is a phone, because this is these kind of phones did not exist when I made the buck war. But they did make the project a lot easier. Because I could have just, you know, had that I had to find a camera that I could record on. And one of the problems we had was, it had about 15 minutes of battery life, it would just take you the batteries. And so we went through a whole load of batteries that we can and must have damaged the environment quite considerably. Now you could just fill on your phone, and you know, everyone's got phone now or pretty much everyone has. So you could you've got the tool right there, and you've got the software on your computer. So you know, see we can do with it.

Ricky Grove 56:07
You can actually with a phone, you could do all aspects of combining live action with footage because you could do a stop motion with your phone for a set and then film the actors and then composite them. Davinci Resolve BlackMagic software puts out a great compositor. It's included with DaVinci Resolve, which is a video editor. That's a good way to get a free package to do compositing, compositing, meaning you're you're composing a scene which several layers of objects. So you'd have the live action in one layer, and then the background and another layer and you composite it. And the tools allow you to blend those two together in a way that they work together. So great advice.

Damien Valentine 56:58
Yeah. So I think that's pretty much it for this week. It's been great talking to both of you. Hopefully, Phil will be feeling better. Next time.

Ricky Grove 57:08
I'll be I'll be better and back with his with his usual abeliant comments.

Damien Valentine 57:16
So thank you everyone for listening. If you have any comments about the films or combining live action and machinima footage, please send us, we do read the feedback you send and we respond to it.

Ricky Grove 57:29
Right talk at completely machinima.com and that's the email you can send us.

Damien Valentine 57:34
Thank you. So thank you, Tracy. You're welcome.

Ricky Grove 57:40
And Ricky, glad to be back and talking with you both.

Damien Valentine 57:43
Good to have you back. And we will see you all next time. Bye bye

© 2022 And Now For Something Completely Machinima