SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, movie, screenwriting, machinima, game, stories, vr, unreal, thought, content, world, assets, engines, real, creators, technologies, pandemic, big, digital, interesting

SPEAKERS
John MacInnes, Tracy Harwood

Tracy Harwood 00:00
Hello everyone to todays And Now For Something Completely Machinima Podcast. Today I'm joined by John MacInnes, who is actually a screenwriter by profession, notably for the video game Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, which I think was published in 2014, I think. But John, John's gonna tell us all about that in a minute. He also has a few other claims to fame. Firstly, he's been awarded a fellowship in screenwriting from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his action thriller script Outside the Wire. He is the person behind one of the internet's biggest gaming memes 'press F to pay respects', which I think is hilarious. And also was the co-creator in 2017 of a fascinating interactive art installation for the Art of AR New York at Sotheby's exhibition called We The People, which puts you actually in the face of a couple of US presidents. Since his days on Call of Duty, John has launched his own virtual production studio called MacInnes Studios, which primarily uses Unreal Engine and has produced a television pilot for The Simpsons. And currently, he's working on a really interesting project about a virtual David Bowie, which maybe he'll tell us a little bit more about. John is also the creator of the very popular Facebook group called Real Time Filmmakers, which currently has around nine and a half 1000. Members, I think it only had about 9000 members the last time we spoke, so it's, it's growing exponentially, since it was launched just in 2020. The group focuses on Render Engines such as Unreal, and Unity. And as part of that community, John also created a machinima contest called the the real asked me to say the unreal, the Real Time Shorts Challenge in 2021, where creators had 30 days to submit their own work using character assets he provided, one being called virtual grace an avatar with a few dance moves, and another being some soldiers. Actually, I think that contest was one of the very few machinima and real time contests we we'd seen on the show at the time. So John, it's a real pleasure to welcome to you to the show. And thanks for for coming on again. Do you first of all want to tell us a bit about your background and how you came to be a screenwriter? for Call of Duty?

John MacInnes 02:53
Sure. Yeah, so where to go back? I mean, I did. I did study film at Goldsmiths College, University of London back in the early 90s. I was always into films and stuff. And so film was print was my focus. And then writing became the sort of the way forward because it was the least expensive thing to do. You know, you just needed to come up with idea and put on paper or making a movie and being a director involves a lot more expense. That eventually, I ended up doing a master's degree in screenwriting in London at University of London, Royal Holloway. And that brought me to Los Angeles, one person and then the I could do an exchange to UCLA to complete the master's degree at UCLA on the on MFA screenwriting programme. So that brought me here in 2003 2004. And I ended up actually moving to Los Angeles as a result of that, because I thought, well, if you're going to be making movies, maybe Los Angeles is the place to be. So then I was I was here, you know, doing stuff trying to get projects off the ground writing. And then eventually, I won something called the Nicholl, which is the Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting that's organised through the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, otherwise known as the Oscars, and happens to be the biggest screenwriting competition in the world. So I, I wrote a script of one one that back in 2011 2012 and so that then sort of launched to my screenwriting career in Hollywood, you know, I got repped by ICM and Brillstein to manager and agents, quite reputable. And then that also got me hired to write the a little video game called Call of Duty. And I wasn't I would say that my path is very much towards movies and screenwriting and live action movies. And so when, when a video game was offered to me, I was, like, sure sounds good. I wasn't much of a gamer at the time. But in hindsight, I'm extremely grateful to have taken this path will have the opportunity to work on that, as it was a real opening of a door for me, the experience of that it also happened to be the Call of Duty Advanced Warfare was the first call of duty there was going to be on the new Playstation four platforms and ex Xbox One. So there was a sort of increase in resolution. And so they were very interested in, in making these, you know, making the game very high fidelity very photorealistic. And therefore, they wanted to hire screenwriting talent, as opposed to, you know, game talent to sort of bring Hollywood cinematic storytelling to the game. And they hired Kevin Spacey to be to be the main bad guy. And so I was hired to basically bring bring bit of cinematic magic to Call of Duty. And, you know, from my experience working on Call of Duty it was, it was a real revelation, you know, it's it's in the way, you know, here I'm writing stories essentially, in my, my aspect of what what was my involvement the game was was stories and characters. But we're using game engines, obviously, in a game, and it's three dimensional, and it's interactive. And just the level of fidelity blew me away, when I first saw the first test come through, for, you know, one of the characters that I had written scene for, and just looking at it as a, you know, 2d scene on the screen. And thinking, well, this is a 3d avatar that looks like the actor that I, you know, had written for. And the scene looked amazing. And I've always, in my mind, I was like, but this is three dimensional, and it's interactive. And I was just thinking, well, this is obviously the future, it's the next iteration of storytelling, you know, moving forwards. Or at least, you know, the use of these tools were so as I sort of naive outside, I was like, Well, this is obviously the future like, like game engines, right? You know, this is this is what it is, you know, to make 2d content or 3d content, it seemed like the most exciting way to tell stories now. So I obviously learned a lot on Call of Duty. It was a very steep learning curve, and very exciting and interesting. You know, learn everything about game engines, photo real environments, immersive worlds, and interactivity, motion capture performance, capture digital avatars, you know, that works. And at the time, I didn't realise the level of education I was getting, I was like, oh, let's go work on this video game. And it just so happened to be the biggest game on the planet. And, you know, employing the most cutting edge techniques and technologies to achieve what it was. So I came up with that. I mean, that was published in 2014. I was super excited, I went and wrote another video game, actually, there was a action adventure in the sort of Telltale Games kind of mode of storytelling, which again, sort of expanded my understanding and experience of storytelling. As I said, I felt like I got a very good grounding as a screenwriter, and then to work on Call of Duty, and then to work on this other project really opened my horizons as a storyteller, using these technologies. And then, of course, VR was kicking off in a big way with the Oculus acquisition by Mark Zuckerberg. And so VR was was hot. And I thought, well, this is I'm the right point at the right time to be really sort of pushing forwards into this realm. I understood the technologies understood what was possible. And I was really excited to explore what what was what we could do, really, I thought this is this is super, super exciting. So I spent a good few years using primarily using digital humans because as a screenwriters as a storyteller, human characters sort of my, my jam, I guess, and you got very good at using digital avatars in the Unreal Engine, you know, a lot of people at that time, especially in VR, I mean, there was just not possible you're just not going to be able to do that. But I guess having worked on come off Call of Duty and seen what we were doing on that I thought that there's doesn't seem like that much of a difference, you know, in terms of, you know, if you understand what, what's going on. So we did quite a few projects around digital humans. I ended up self funding a couple of demos. One was the Grace project that you that you spoke of in the introduction. The other one was the soldiers, which was actually the Navy SEALs. That's the sort of project that I wanted to do about the bin Laden raid with the Navy Seals and 2011. I wanted to recreate that, you know, obviously having done Call of Duty I had a lot of high level exposure to military folks. You know, my technical advisor was Mitch Hahn who was the 20 year Navy SEAL Team Six veteran who advised Mike and Catherine on the on the on the movie Zero Dark 30, things like that. And, and Tom Bria who has now passed away, but he was the Delta Force commander who went into Tora Bora after bin Laden in 2010. He commanded that mission you and these people are my technical advisors. So, so I thought, you know, I didn't really want to do a sort of first person shooter experience, but I thought I really wanted to maybe explore what war was really like by exploring a documentary in VR, but I'm very, you know, photorealistic one. And I mentioned all this, because this has bearing on machinima, and then filmmaking, because though, I made those demos back in, what 2016 2015 2016, they were kind of evolving, because they were self funded. So you know, putting a lot of favours and a lot of people came on board to help out that. But those demos are those demos themselves, you know, they were shown around the world, companies like Nvidia, AMD HTC, used it to showcase what cutting edge VR can look like. But as with VR, it kind of stalled or high level VR stalled a bit, you know, it's sort of, you know, Facebook, obviously went to standalones. And then, you know, the sort of location based entertainment went in a certain direction that was very much IP based. So, you know, come the pandemic, I had those experiences those scene files on that, and they were really beautiful pieces of work. And I thought, well, what if, what if I give those scene files to anybody who, who wants to make a short film, you know, make a thing as I already given them to Matt Workman, some of you may know Matt workman as the sort of virtual reduction guru who's very much been sort of spearheading, you know, this sort of work in Unreal Engine. So as you know, connecting with Matt quite a bit and, and I asked if you wanted to use the scene fast to recreate something for himself as as a demo of what's possible. The success of that was great, what Matt did was, ah, this is awesome. You know, it looks great. And so the, you know, the idea spawned really quite rapidly and organically, which is like, well, what can anybody do with these with these assets, which you know, ties in with Machinima is like, well, what you take what already exists, and then sort of claim it as your own and build your own story with with, with what is there. And I think a lot of the sort of stalling of people getting into this, and using this is the lack of high level usable assets. And here I was, had these two great scenes, you know, come with its own animation with, you know, all that it came with, I said, here it is, as is you've got 30 days to make what you want, you know, make a short film. And it was remarkable the results that we had for that. So, so it's, you know, I always think, you know, VR game engines, machinima all sort of becomes one, you know, that's not sort of separated out. And so my, my career since Call of Duty has really, really spanned all of those different sort of aspects and touched so many different areas, but at the heart of it is game engines, because, you know, I think that's what's the heart of a lot all this creativity.

Tracy Harwood 13:25
Absolutely, and how some, how has all that influenced how you develop screenwriting these days? What's your view on that?

John MacInnes 13:35
Well, it's interesting, it's kind of come full circle. So I spent many, many years you know, becoming, you know, pretty good at writing a narrative movie or, you know, 120 minutes, in a linear way. I was then employed to work on, you know, interactive mediums in gaming. And that's sort of expanded my thoughts on how to do that, and then went into VR, which was, you know, a sort of spatial storytelling. And then, it's kind of interesting that those, you know, there's, there's amazing things going on within those mediums in VR. But in some ways, they've sort of, you know, as they've expanded, it's sort of almost, you know, they sort of fell back on gaming in VR, you know, the sort of cinematic storytelling within VR was a harder kind of sell for audiences to latch on to. And so things like music experiences, you know, Beat Sabre, the sort of gamification things that were very, very readily accessible and easy to sort of jump into sort of took off where the sort of more you know, convoluted storytelling kind of, you know, took more time and resources and had a lot higher bar higher level of friction for audiences to sort of engage with that. So I think it's sort of its stewing, I think it's very much you know, stewing and something very, very good is going to come out of that, but at the same time, I always thought you know, when I was one Working on Call of Duty that, you know, I came from screenwriting, I was like, Well, why don't I, you know, came back to Hollywood, I was like, why aren't people making movies with game engines? It seemed obvious to me, you know, and I always thought the future of 3d and interactive is actually 2d non interactive, because like we are here now we are I mean, it's interactive, but it's it's 2d screens, and we, our whole lives are mediated through 2d screens, whether that's iPads screens, or whatever, it's screens. And also movies in this time, there's been an explosion of 2d content, you know, with the, with the Netflix explosion and streamers, and the desire for more and more and more content. So, you know, I think it's sort of two pillars of what audiences like I think, you know, gaming, you know, has massive appeal, and massive, you know, audiences and growth. But also movies, you know, people don't stop watching, they're not stopping watching movies, they're watching more movies than ever, you know, they're monitoring more forms of those content than ever. And so, it seemed to, it seemed like a sort of logical way of like, why, you know, you know, you're sort of going after budgets for VR, that, you know, for half a million dollars, a million dollars to do this thing. And it's been very, very hard to do. And for all, there's this huge market out there, where, you know, the likes of Netflix, or whoever, you know, dropping 10s, or hundreds of millions of dollars to make content, and, you know, apples coming out of their studios, and everybody's putting billions and billions of dollars into 2d content. So it seemed like, well, there's a massive desire for the content, there's the budgets out there that already exist. And now, we have this tool where we can just make a movie or a piece of content with a game engine. And we can do that more efficiently. We can tell stories that couldn't be told before or that it was prohibitively expensive to tell those stories before. And so I thought, well, this is this is my competitive edge. This is what's very interesting to me is like all those, you know, the sort of movie world had got very shoehorned into an idea that well, these big studio movies is $200 million, another $200 million plus on marketing has to make $1.5 billion, in order to be a viable thing, you know, to make a movie, you have to it has to have this whole equation attached to it, that obviously has a lot of sign off in terms of the financial side of it, and the you know, who's involved and the time and expense. And we sort of lost this idea of this sort of, let's go and make something let's play let's the fun of that. The joy of just creating, and, you know, finding new forms of expression, and also finding new audiences that identify with that stuff that came became very monolithic. I think so, you know, those two things really tied into why I sort of circle back to movies. And so, in terms of the screenwriting, it's, it's, you know, I turned my attention a few years ago to well, what, bear in mind that we're working in a game engine rather than live action, you know, what are the what are the parts? What are the what else the palette we have? And what are the tools that enable what type of storytelling? So it's not even a sense of, of how do we tell a story, because in a sense, you know, going back to movies, it's, you know, there's a sort of traditional way, but, you know, but the thing is, there's there's stories are enabled by the technology, you know, stories are enabled by the tools you deploy to tell those stories, and very much shaped by what those tools are. So what if we took game engines and CG assets, and motion capture performance capture as, as the starting point of what's possible? Now, obviously, games have used, you know, dimensions and motion capture for, you know, very effective storytelling for a while. So there's actually a lot to draw upon. But it's amazing how siloed these these content areas are from gaming to Hollywood to movies to game, incredibly, incredibly siloed. And that was sort of sort of a surprise to me. So I thought, well, there's so much we can learn from gaming. And there's so much gaming can learn from movies, too. But so I sort of predicted this real renaiscence that I think is happening with that has been enabled by the technologies. And again, it's interesting with machinima, machinima has been around you know, Tracy and your crew have been involved in machinima for many, many years that, you know, as I said, there's all these different roots of these things that have been around that I think are now all being put in, put into the soup. And I think you've got this really interesting mix of people that have come from these different areas that are now sort of, you know, making stuff so it's almost like there's this real fermentation going on within the culture. And I think there's gonna be a lot of interesting things that really come out of that in the next five to 10 years. So, in terms of storytelling is screenwriting, it's not even so much like, you know, it's more about like, well what stories can we tell now so I had a sort of checklist of the types of story we could tell with with CG game engines and performance capture. That sort of, you know, there in the traditional live action with xxx is very expensive kind of, you know, properties, but within this room, if you really lean into that, and understand that those stories become most obvious stories to tell. So, you know, set in the future set in the past set in an alien world set in some way that isn't right now, the hardest thing to do in in CG and game engines is to produce the here and the now you know, to reproduce the sort of, you know, the photorealism of that, if that's what you want. But, hey, I want movie set on in foreign worlds, and any planets and strange creatures, and, and, you know, past historical settings, and epic landscapes and characters that are weird, strange and diverse, and, you know, that come together. So, so I'm like, Well, this, this is, this is really, really exciting toolset to play with, and, and it's not even just in terms of the form of story, because, of course, you know, if you're making a movie, within a game engine, as I like to say, it's already more than just a movie, you know, it's, it's a, it's a 3d potentially interactive experience. So, you know, the tools, the the, the, the pipeline, can equally enable, you know, piece of VR, you know, piece of gaming. So, I'm very much interested in the ways in which those sort of traditional narrative stories can then propagate, you know, other forms of interaction with that, that IP with that intellectual property to kind of expand on that story world, in other areas. And so storytelling itself, you know, may start in one area, like, oh, it starts in the game, or it starts in the movie, or it starts in that experiential piece. But depending on the story, you can then take that story and expand it into, you know, using these, these, these other sort of technology platforms, to, you know, create a multifaceted intellectual property, which of course ties in with how people want to make money is, you know, you have one thing, you have one thing over here, and a story, which is, you know, which is going on, I mean, Disney, Disney is been doing this since, since Walt Disney, you know, you take an IP, you make a movie, you market that movie into products, you make a theme park out of that, and, you know, it's this, you know, way, Disney is the sort of business model for all this. But now, you know, we can do all of that virtually. And so, you know, all of this is all virgin territory for exploration, you know, commercially and so, again, I think it's extremely exciting, because because of exactly that, because creativity needs to be enabled by a sort of economy, you know, if something that is super creative and interesting can make money. Well, guess what, that's just rocket fall on the creativity there. So. So that's, that's super exciting. So

Tracy Harwood 23:07
absolutely. Now, one of the things that we talked about the last time we spoke was that basically you love character design. Can you explain a little bit about the work that you've been doing on character design, and how you're using that. And of course, you're also an Epic Megagrant award winner. So tell us a little bit more about that as well.

John MacInnes 23:36
So let's talk about screenwriting. I mean, my interest was always in human beings, I guess, or, you know, human characters. You know, there's nothing more powerful to hit than the human face. So it's no, it's no coincidence that I got into making very realistic digital humans. So, you know, the stuff that we got the mega yachts was was the deck of boat projects. So you know, at the beginning of this, when we sort of set out like, well, how, what would be the best way to sort of create and communicate the power of a digital human? I thought, well, you could create somebody that is perhaps no longer with us that that has a big global following, and that people would be interested to see in some way, it seemed like an obvious thing of their historical figures, or somebody like David Bowie, was a massive David Bowie fan. Still am obviously. And of course, music music. This was this is when we were very much exploring VR. I thought, you know, music was a real way forwards for the creativity of VR, you know, narrative, linear entertainment would sort of come with it a lot more involved with there's something very very immediate in VR, a sense of presence with you know, the experience of music in VR. I think it's you couldn't be powerful. So I thought that was the sort of spearhead that we should be pursuing. So those two things kind of came together. As I made the music demo grace, which was a digital popstar, and in a way, I guess, the first kind of digital popstar in some ways, particularly in Unreal. And so it seemed like, well, let's, let's make David Bowie. So we started to make this we self funded making making Bowie off the back of another project that we did for Netflix, where we had to create paid digital avatars. So we were sort of, you know, making David alongside of that, and, and there are many, many different ways about named making a digital human, you know, you can use if you're making somebody from real life, you know, you might want to start with with the photogrammetry scan if you know, get a digital facsimile of that person, but in so you know, a historical figure or somebody like Bowie, you're, you're using whatever materials are available to create that person now with somebody as much visual reference over 40 50 years as Boeing. And we have a lot of visual references, but we also had two life masks that he made within his lifetime, one from 1974, and one from 93, from the movie, The Hunger. So I acquired those two life masks. So we had David Bowie, age 23, or 24, and David Bowie, aged 33. So, you know, between them, we made David Bowie, age 30, from 1977. First of all, because I wanted to make David Bowie with no and other sort of makeup and stuff make him as most sort of, to show that we could. So basically, that we want to, I wanted to prove that we could make in VR, a digital human, historical, digital human, in virtual reality that would really look like like that person. So that was the sort of goal of that is to is to basically prove to the industry because it's very hard to convince people, you know, for them to give you money or to greenlight your projects, if they don't believe it's possible. So a lot of what we did, and that sort of stuff is a lot of sort of evangelising about the technologies about what is possible, quite often in the face of people saying, No, you're just not gonna be able to do that. And I'm like, Well, I think we can so so we did it. And Epic, obviously, you know, believe us, you know, they're very much nobody understands that game engine more than than epic. So they were very supportive in in our endeavours. They gave us two mega grants for that project. And through my other contacts, I was able to connect with the Bowie estate, I already reached out to Carlos Alomar, who is both guitarist and you know, from from many, many, many years, and so I was already talking to people, you know, within the border state about this, and they were obviously very interested in again, what was possible. And Bowie himself in his lifetime was always at the cutting edge of everything, and ironically, had already appeared as a as a digital avatar. And that David gauge video game on, I'm gonna call him getting getting getting mixed up with Omicron, the Omicron variant, but you know, some 20 years ago, so, ironically, none of these things are new. It's just almost the level of technology of where it's out there. That is, that is new, I guess. So with those things, you know, we, you know, we had, you know, the sort of permission from the state to sort of explore this area of what we could do and build, build our bow and then we reskin the 77 bow to the Ziggy Stardust Bowie and we made that a live real time asset on our on an AK screen for the 2019 and Infinity festival to sort of just again, prove prove what's possible. And then the final mega grant that we got from them, I guess, about 18 months ago, but a year ago, we did a full full music performance test of Ziggy Stardust using motion capture, performance capture and animation. And we've we've got that again, to prove that it was possible to do a full a full performance recreation so. So yeah, you can say character design has been has been an interest of me but it's, you know, the technology is around characters have obviously evolved enormously, primarily through Epic through Meta Humans. You know, work with three lateral who's been bought by Epic and cubic motion and also been bought by Epic who are basically behind the meta human. So I kind of knew all this stuff was was in the works and was very excited to see what what would come of this because I think one of the most exciting aspects for me as a creator is the sort of things that are clearly about the democratisation of these technologies, and in a way that that, that is just picking up where machinima has been, has been doing that for a long time is is, is making this stuff available to people with a little bit of skill but an idea to go and make something for you know, for traditionally the VFX world even gaming, you know, you know, it's it's been the domain of, you know, experts with expert knowledge, highly skilled, you know, very intelligent people who work in a very high level on very expensive things and but I always think that culture and what's interesting kind of kind of comes from below, you know, it doesn't come from the top down, it comes from people getting it and making it you know, it's people picking up a guitar and not knowing how to play it, but learning three chords and then starting a band. You know, it's it's some, that's where we're culture happens, and I kind of are very interested in, you know, and I guess that's partly why, you know, I created the real time filmmakers, Facebook and did the real time shorts challenge was to really kind of encourage and cultivate this community of people that I saw, were making doing interesting things, and almost needed a sort of channel and a focus to sort of bring it together. And, and also, you know, I want to find good artists and good people who do good things that I can then put on projects and stuff that I'm that I'm that I'm making. But yeah, it's it's about the community. It's about community building. Because I think that's where the interesting things come from, essentially.

Tracy Harwood 31:29
I mean, the Machinima community was always, absolutely key to the development of the, you know, the whole kind of machinima movement. In many ways, we kind of, I suppose, really is one of my biggest complaints, really, but one of my biggest things these days is that where is that community? So? So really, when I saw your Facebook group, I was really interested to see how, how that was evolving? I can't believe how many members you've got in such a short period of time. What's what's kind of behind the success of it from your perspective of it?

John MacInnes 32:07
Its a good question. I mean, I kind of try things because I'm interested in it. And, you know, I want to find people that are interested in what I'm interested in it, it springs from no greater desire than that, really, I hope that people are interested in what I'm interested in. Because I think it's pretty cool. And it's about you know, and again, we live in a world where we have the potential to connect to all these other people who kind of think the same way or interested in same thing. So, you know, there was obviously, I think, a combination of things, really, I mean, I started that just before the pandemic, but already, there was a lot of moves, you know, a lot of torque, I guess, you know, I've been pushing to be making content with game engines, I mean, 2d, you know, film content with game engines for a while. And you know, Matt Workman was doing some interesting sort of stuff and getting a following and Epic, we're obviously releasing, you know, better and better versions of the engine and demos that were like, well, this is this is really cool. You know, there was, you know, in movies, you know, the the Lion King, and you know, other other mo other movies that were using game engines as part of their their creation process, the growth, expansion and development of previz, as you know, paid on third floor, all those folks, you know, doing great work. You know, also we're deploying game engines. And so it was like the industry at one and was sort of using game engines and sort of coming this way. And then there was people on the grass roots who are getting using game engines are coming this way. And it seemed like the sort of things were kind of going to kind of sort of meet in the middle at some ways. And then, you know, the pandemic hit. And, and I think there was just a lot of like, well, hey, like, literally, it's kind of crazy. When you think back, it seems so crazy now, like the whole of Film Production Production just closed down overnight. And there was a lot of sort of, you know, is this the end of things has how we know it? Is it the end? And, you know, not all those predictions are true. It's amazing how resilient and robust you know, and entertainment is, which I'm glad to see. But they're really helped. And people starting to think, well, how can we do things differently? I mean, even now, we're on Zoom. Right? Absolutely. Yeah, we wouldn't have been doing that. I mean, it's, you know, how can people work remotely? What are the tools available to work remotely? And they were already there, you know, what I mean, it just, it just needed, you know, a greater reason for adoption, I think. So suddenly, there was a lot more interest in these tools and these ways of making some how can we make stuff and, and again, you know, I, I started the Facebook group, and then I was thinking about doing this short film challenge, and this will happen very, very quickly. And then it just seems like a massive interest in this. I mean, you know, people just just, you know, the numbers got off quite quickly, there's a very active community. And then I think me doing the short real time shows challenge was was a big help, because suddenly, I had all this energy of people. And I thought, well, I've got these assets, why don't I just give it? Why don't we just do this, let's just see what happens. And this was before all the unreal fellowships, this was before all of the other short film initiatives that anybody had ever made, I just thought, well, you know, it just seemed logical to do it. And I had no idea how to do it. And I spoke to my friends at Epic, and they're like, great we'll give you some money for prizes. And, you know, they were sort of behind it. And, you know, other folks, my friends at face wear and glass box, you know, they got everybody was interested to sort of accelerate what what can be done and see what could be done. So it just happened to sort of coincide at that point, I think. And, and it was a little daunting when I launched it. So I basically had the idea. Two weeks later, I launched it, I built the website and launched it. And, and a week later, I had something like 170,000 people know, yeah, yeah. 100 and 170 people 170,000.

Tracy Harwood 36:08
Phenomenal.

John MacInnes 36:10
170 individuals or teams that had inquired about inquire, you know, about their participation rates. And I thought, Oh, God, you know, had these judges like Kim Libreri, and people, you know, like, lined up. And so there's no way I could, I could manage 100 170 shortfilms, to sort of even watch all of them, you know, so but that got whittled down because they had to sign an agreement as to how they could use these assets. And then there was something like 101 individuals or teams that downloaded the actual scene files on assets. And even that was like, Okay, I gotta, you know, what, if I have 100, shortfilms, in 30 days, how are we going to get through that get through that? But, you know, obviously, it's, you know, when you see the assets, you see what you can do, this is during the pandemic, I mean, everybody was in, some people wanted to do it, but wasn't able to, for whatever reason, you know, it was a tall order, here's some assets has 30 days, poor, whatever resources, you have come back 30 days time with some that you've made. But out of that we had 30 short films completed. And I thought, Well, that's good. I mean, I initially when I launched, I thought maybe I'd be lucky if I had 10, you know, and we had 30, which is a manageable amount. And it was, it was amazing. It was it was amazing to see two scenes that I had obviously worked in a few years before on these, these very, you know, great VR scenes. So I was very, very familiar with them. And then to see what people have done with them to either, you know, create their own story within them, repurpose reuse, you know, to create something completely different, or something within that genre, or it was wonderful. I mean, I don't I don't know if anybody's done that before. I mean, that, again, it's enabled by the technology, it's like, okay, well, these are the assets for the movie. Now everybody else go and do it. And then again, like Machinima is the sort of precedent for that is like, well, here are the assets of the of the game, now, you can just go and use them. And that sort of came out organically from from those becoming available, and people sort of modding and stuff. But it was very much seemingly in the in the sort of fringes of things. It wasn't like, that wasn't built into the business model. And yet now, that's kind of the way I now think about the future of content is like, well, how can we enable a community to be creative with this? You know, where does the the the filmmakers and creators who are sort of top down authors of their work? Where did they meet with the user generated creators, who were also part of the audience to sort of, you know, expand and enhance on the story, the IPs in whatever way that it happens, you know, so, you know, all of these things happened very organically and as a response to what was happening. And and again, I think that's, that's one of the exciting things is, is these technologies allow is the sort of responsiveness to it, you know, you can iterate you can make a short film within 30 days, given these assets, you know, and not only just short films, but really good short films, you know, like, they look amazing. I mean, that, you know, the problem then was, you know, we had 30 short films, but how do we decide how to judge these, I mean, judging wasn't necessarily the goal, although, you know, that sort of brings people together, because I think they were all fantastic, you know, there was sort of 10 that sort of won prizes, but all of them are worth watching for their, for their own reasons. And, and so it was it was, it was just an interesting experiment. And I said that the quality of the work from those assets was was amazing. And I thought, well, you know, what, if we then put that up until like, a feature film level, you know, what if what if we design our sort of workflows and our thought processes and our business model around a similar kind of concept? And so that's what I've been after that out i after the you know that I very much put my thoughts into, you know, I mean, I'm a Nicholl, fellow screenwriter, so I know a lot of screenwriters, and there are a lot of scripts out there that, that haven't been made with live action that maybe we could refit for, for making with the game engine. And so and then, so I tried to get one, we're off the ground. And then I wrote another movie just over over the winter, which was the first movie that I ran as a as a purpose built for the game engine equation to make on a low budget, which I'm pretty excited about. And then just out of the blue, and very recently, in the last month, which I think, since we spoke, maybe I don't know. So I've been I've been working with a very well known filmmaker who's done big studio movies and indie movies, who is super, super cool filmmaker. And he wants to make his next movie in Unreal. You know, and so I'm, I'm working with him to see how we can do that, and they've got a decent budget. And it's, it's kind of like the perfect storm for me. Everything that I've been working towards, you know, get somebody who's a really good filmmaker, who's actually got a really, really good script. It does have a pre established IP that has an audience, which is also really cool. And I, we have the the means and the ability to make this movie, you know, in a way that you just couldn't, you know, before

Tracy Harwood 41:30
a whole bunch of people that have now developed the skill set in order to work on it, too, I would imagine.

John MacInnes 41:36
Yeah, absolutely. No, the, you know, I've got a small team, led by my my technical director, Richard Harada, he's been, he's been moved for a long time, he's basically the the spine of the whole operation. But in order to make a feature film, we obviously have to expand upon that. And it's been great. So I've been reaching out to a bunch of a bunch of folks within the community that I obviously become friends with, who are just, you know, all the, all the folks that you see that doing amazing work, they're all really, really excited to be working on this. And so suddenly, I've got the best the team to sort of do this. So in a way that the last couple of years has really sort of found those people, and they're all over the world as well. And they're all super excited, because they all share the same, the same vision that we have over this. And so I'm hoping that, you know, touch wood, you know, you know, we, we could very well, and I think it's just gonna take one, like if one feature film, made completely in, in a game engine that has been made in this way. It will, it will break the mould. And I think it will really, really open things up to, you know, investors, studios being a lot more receptive to then putting money into smaller creators with ideas that can sort of, you know, execute. I'm hoping I'm hoping, you know, we'll see, I think that the, the, the need and desire for more content and good content, as well can only help that process because we want new voices, new stories, and a really cool visual medium and say, well, tick, tick, tick, you know, so, so but it just, it just takes, you know, I think one good movie to prove that it can be done and sort of reveal how we made it. And I think that will help really help advance things and get it to a level of conversation within the wider culture rather than just in the sort of, you know, machinima, you know, unreal dev community, you know where it exists right now.

Tracy Harwood 43:41
Yeah, I mean, from my point of view, I mean, this is one of my pet things as well, really, I think one of the biggest challenges that we've faced during this sort of pandemic time is the fact that people aren't, you know, that, I guess I haven't really had time to develop great stories, although we have on certainly on this show, I think, picked up more and more stories that are coming through towards the back end of the pandemic, but the bulk of folks are actually making tutorials about the tech. And I kind of really want to sort of say, get on, make some content, make some, make some moves, make some film, make some something creative, not just the tutorials. And my guess is that's the period that we're going into now from, from what you're saying, as well.

John MacInnes 44:29
I certainly hope so. I think, you know, there's a lot of, you know, good work being done to, you know, propagate the use of engines for, you know, tutorials, you know, that that's obviously a part of it. I mean, it's also the sort of Gold Rush thing that you know, there are people out there mining, mining for gold and putting physical, but the people making the money other other people selling them picks and shovels, you know, yeah. And that's kind of kind of where it's at now. so I don't know, it's kind of interesting, you know, the unreal fellowships, you know, required, you know, people to make something, I think which is really, really good and healthy. I also wonder, to the degree in which we've, you know, as a sort of, you know, my generation when I came up, you know, I went to film school, I was all about telling a story making making a movie, I think there's perhaps less of that in the culture strangely, in terms of the desire to tell a story, partly because I think the channels for telling story has been limited, you know, it's the, the range of content that is available has become slightly monolithic, and sort of, there are people who make content that cost a lot of money in studios. And there isn't a sort of more grassroots kind of culture of making stuff. And I think that's partly been because it's been, you know, filmmaking has got more and more expensive, you know, and, and the channels for low budget stuff, I've narrowed as the sort of indie sector has been squeezed out, you know, for all sorts of reasons. So I don't know. And also, yeah, as with machinima, it's kind of interesting, because it's a sort of blessing and a curse. Because I think the reason why people got into machinima in the first place was because they loved that game. And they loved that look. And they loved that feel. And they wanted to play with the very things that it was. And it's almost like this sort of idea that, you know, we see a lot of Unreal demos of people making, oh, here's a scene from Star Wars, or here's my Mandalorian. Here's my Bobba Fett. And I think that that's, you know, on the one hand, completely legitimate, and if that's their passion to kind of, they want to recreate what was previously only possible with millions of dollars of budgets, and the huge thing like me, there's, there's a huge thrill, and, oh, my God, there's my end, you know, in a way, I've done it with David Bowie, you know, I mean, I've taken what existed before and I read recreated it, there's a huge thrill and excitement about being able to do that within within your own hands and your own grasp. So I get that that's the sort of passion for it. But then you see a little sort of like, Star Wars, recreations, you know, fan work, which, you know, can look good, because they want to, they want to hit the bar of it looking like it could be in Star Wars, which is, which is generally the goal. But it's sort of misses the point of like, well, Star Wars is amazing, because George Lucas is an amazing storyteller who created this world and these characters that we want it to follow and explore. And, you know, it was it was just beautiful. And that's what spawned, you know, an IP that's lasted nearly half a century and continuing, you know, and is, you know, I came up in the generation now, you know, I was born in 1969. So, I grew up in the 70s and 80s. And you have folks like Ridley Scott, you know, making Alien, Ridley Scott making Blade Runner. Even, you know, Spielberg and Lucas, you know, these were all at the time, completely original movies. Because they were storytellers. I mean, we're gonna make this original movie, and it's going to be amazing. And it was from that that spawned into the sequels, the remakes, the reboots, the whatever. And so the culture has shifted, I think from from younger generations, perhaps they're much more surrounded by reboots and redos than original content. So the sort of mindset is more about how do I engage with that world? With the Marvel Universe? How do I engage with that world, rather than have the desire, I'm gonna go and make my Star Wars, so I'm gonna go make my my thing. Because when I grew up, it was all original, it was all original and new content. And that was what was so exciting about it, you hadn't seen when alien came out, you hadn't seen that you just literally hadn't hadn't seen anything like at all, when you originally did Blade Runner. You hadn't seen that before. And it's funny, because, you know, post stuff, there's a demo that was out the scene the other day that, you know, people were commenting well, and looks just like Blade Runner, you know, and it's like, great. We've now we can now you know, 40 years later, we can now build Blade Runner for ourselves. And, and there's a thriller in that. But, again, where are the new Blade Runners? You know, where are they? Where are the new Ridley's, you know, and I think they're there. I think there's a massive amount of talent and creativity. And I think, you know, we're in that, that, that sort of process of the technologies becoming available to people. And then people actually taking it and actually making stuff themselves. And again, I think it kind of does come down to a few leading examples to show that it's possible. Again, that's why I've always pushed for like, let's make a feature film, let's make a feature film that exists on on the landing page of a streamer alongside any other movie, and you don't even think oh, this is made an Unreal or whatever, or it's made for a 10th of the budget that you think it cost, you know, it just is there. And I think you know, a few of those and then we're gonna go a lot more people coming out and doing really, really cool things. So it's just a matter of time, I think but I think it's I think that's happening, but I, you know, share your it's sort of like, oh, we can do all this now. But where's it all going? I think the world is changing and very interesting, interesting ways. And I'm certainly pushing for, for what happens next within within filmmaking in this sort of creative environment.

Tracy Harwood 50:17
And what advice would you have for machinima creators these days, if they want to make a career out of being an indie creator, you got any thoughts about, you know, how the, how the workflow is evolving, and how they might actually make a living?

John MacInnes 50:34
I think it's interest, I think it's hard because we've, the world has become way more corporatized than it was that you couldn't sort of, it's harder to be an indie freelancer to some to some degree. So people's ambitions have been, you know, channelled in that direction, so they want to work, you know, I do a lot of, you know, talking to colleges and stuff. And students, I'm very interested in encouraging and, you know, people to, to explore this world. And a lot of people are like, well, how can I get a job in this? And I'm like, Well, what if the, the industry is changing, so that you actually don't want to go to a bricks and mortar job, you know, and have that same structure. So it's interesting, the pandemic, again, accelerated this, everybody's got used to this idea is where you just get a job, you work for this company, and you're working on this big production, this big video game, or this big movie, and the visual effects team, and you'll be just this, one part of that, and you're just like, learn what that thing is. And that's your career. And in some ways, I think that's that level of specialisation is going to be a hindrance. Because that level of production may not be what it isn't, you're not going to need that level of specialisation. I mean, certainly on my productions, what we're looking at is, is hiring sort of like a handful of heads of departments, and then having a lot of 3d generalists, who don't necessarily have to be very specialised or especially still have the desire to learn and to create, okay, now we're gonna do this so that we can actually take more than one thing, putting on something else. And in terms of our workflow and efficiencies, it's actually really important for all of the sort of team members to really understand where they exist on the on the on the workflow. Either it's, you know, rather than before, like you the visual arts, when it comes to specialised, it's like, there's this person that does this really, really well. And then there's this person, there's this thing really, really well. And the thing is, when I think working with a game engine, is you kind of have to understand the whole workflow, or at least have an idea as to how the person next to you or, you know, if you're handing off assets to somebody as to what what are they going to do with those assets? What do they need from you, in order to be be the be the link in the chain. And so, you know, being a generalist at this point, I think is, is is really key. Again, it's hard to tell because there's so much expansion, everybody's wanting kind of UE people, but they what they want is really good UE people. So there's a lot of a lot of people learning Unreal, but still the the people who are really good at unreal, like hen's teeth, you know, that's obviously going to change because we want, but the healthy thing is, there's a lot of productions going on that are now using Unreal, you know, talk to a lot of the big animation companies, and they're switching a lot of their workflows over to real time, real time, real time, real time. So, so I think that there's a you know, and again, like I said, there's more stuff being made. So, in terms of a career, I don't know, dive in and get a job with one of these companies, perhaps, you know, learn on that, but I've always been super encouraging of being your own business, your own creator. And I think that will open up that, you know, the sort of creator economy around making stuff, if you can kind of be an indie creator that, then make something that's pretty cool, that has a following that then, you know, get sold to a studio. I don't know, that's always been what I wanted to do, I don't necessarily want to work for somebody else on somebody else's thing. I'd much rather than sort of, you know, it's, it's more about a means of artistic, creative expression, you know, to tell a story that hasn't been told before or something.

Tracy Harwood 54:26
What's your view of the platforms that we've got at the moment like, you know, the I don't know the Prime the Netflix that you know, the channels through which this content is streamed? How do you see that evolving?

John MacInnes 54:40
What is very interesting, so, you know, Netflix has obviously, you know, hopped on the apple cart 10 years ago, well so and really changed things around then of course, now Netflix in the last month or two have seen a reduction in their profits and then that's, you know, as, as the sort of, you know, copycat competitors, you know, in, in Prime and Apple and Paramount, and HBO, you know, all these other companies, Disney, you know, well, that works, you know, we've got all this stuff. And so it's going to be very interesting. I mean, again, I think it can only benefit in that they all are competing for content, they all need good content. So at the moment, the sort of content that they're going off to is the sort of traditional business model of like, well, who are the stars, you know, so Ryan Murphy can get half a billion dollars, because he's the star of making, you know, TV. So Netflix can consign him or whatever Shonda Rhimes or somebody for, you know, they've proven themselves to be, you know, money earners and audience generators. So that, you know, the studios then are vying to write as big a check as possible for those folks. But, you know, who's coming behind them? You know, they're there, there's, you know, a, they're expensive and not necessarily provable, you know, things change, audiences change. So, I don't know, again, I think if you're able to make content that is good. And again, I kind of like what we need to be making feature films or more long form content, because there's a market for that. There isn't really a market for short films. You know, Love Death and Robots have this wonderful compendium of short films, but it's kind of unique. That's that's almost it, I guess, you know, in terms of, like, where it exists. So I'm, my whole thing is like, well, let's, let's make some low budget feature films in this method, and let's let you know, you make some good ones, and then that's going to really accelerate that. And then, because there seems to be, you know, as I said, the studios are always going to be wanting to make content, you just we just have to prove that this is a viable and money making exercise, and that we can make good movies.

Tracy Harwood 57:05
So there's audience for short form content, but not market is what you're saying.

John MacInnes 57:11
I don't know. Again, I think love death and robots has been very successful. I don't know where it sits within Netflix's equation, you know, how they how they view that sort of Compendium? Yeah, I would love to see more of that. It's, um, I think it's great. It's interesting that because, you know, the love death and robot budgets are kind of, you know, expensive, you know, that's not cheap animation. You know, it's not really what we're talking about with, you know, machinima. And, you know, I think I think that's a way to make it a lot more efficienct. You know, it's still, you know, David Fincher and Tim Miller, you know, brilliant as they are, but this is still a list Hollywood, sort of, you know, top down sort of, like, it's all a sort of a list animation companies like access, and, you know, people like that, and blur, you know, and Sony, you know, make making this stuff. I think there's a huge opportunity for people who make stuff and that's why I'm just like, go and make something, do you know, what I mean? Like, make make whatever it is make it. And if you make something good, I think that will that will be noticed, and I think that the climate for you know, interest for something new, different and cost effective is, is really, really ripe. So, if it takes way longer than you think, like, even the fact that I'm talking to this filmmaker now, and, like, I'm super excited, because I'm okay, now, like, legitimate established talent really is getting the equation. But again, that's the kind of, maybe it's, it's interesting, because because they tried to get this movie off the ground for like, and they couldn't get the budget below $50 million. And I'm like, Oh, we can we can totally do this. So they're, like, super excited. They're, like, very established filmmaker. now super excited, because they've kind of been, you know, like, what, how do we how do we make movies anymore? You know, how does anybody make an interesting movie, because nobody wants to take the risk, or nobody has the cost the the budget to do it. And the amount of you know, financial kind of sign offs, you need to make a movie now is just, you know, ridiculous of the sort of the creators out there established creators, once we can prove to them that this is a really viable pipeline, and a means of making stuff. I think there's you just gonna have a lot of people because people in this industry are super creative, they're in it for the creativity, you know, they want to it's a lot of very creative people out there who can't, you know, established filmmakers who can't get their movies off the ground, because it takes years and years and years to put these different financing together. And then they've got all these constraints of who they put in the movie. You know, what the movie is, all this sort of stuff. And it all stems from the fact that they've got, you know, so expensive. It's all risk mitigation. So you know, once you take that risk out, if it doesn't cost 50 million, it costs 5 million. Then you can suddenly cast who you want, you can make all the decisions yourself. You can have Final Cut it If you can own it, you know, the films can own that. And that's just the beginning of what you then do with that, that IP in terms of, you know, as I said, like a movie made in a game engine is already more than a movie. So the ones that are getting that are like, you know, getting on board. So I think it's just a matter of time, I think we're going to have a very interesting next next five years, hopefully, and I'm hoping that we get to do this in a feature film, I think it will really change the game. And so I'm really excited about doing that. But you know,

Tracy Harwood 1:00:29
we'll say, Wow, well, that sounds like a really good place to stop. And then next time we speak, you can tell us exactly what the project is, and then we can look forward to look, viewing it when it comes through the distribution channels. So appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today. John, thank you very much, and we'll look forward to seeing you again soon. Thank you.

John MacInnes 1:00:53
Wonderful. Thank you, Tracy. It's been a pleasure.