Completely Machinima Ep 53 February 2022 Machinima News & Discussion

SUMMARY KEYWORDS
machinima, game, people, animation, omniverse, creative, create, metaverse, nvidia, animators, life, money, films, platform, real, creators, minecraft, virtual, programme, interesting

SPEAKERS
Damien Valentine, Ricky Grove, Tracy Harwood, Phil Rice

Tracy Harwood 00:09
Welcome to the February 2022 News and discussion episode of The And Now For Something Completely Machinima podcast. Yes. I'm one of the podcasts regular hosts. I'm Tracy Harwood, and I'm joined today by Ricky Grove. Hello, Phil Rice, hi there, and Damian Valentine. Hello. Hi, great to see you guys. Now we've each got a bunch of news items for you this month. And we've also got some things that a few of you who have contacted us wanted us to talk about too, which we'll come on to as we go through today's updates. So thanks for that feedback and keep it coming in.

Ricky Grove 00:52
Thank you.

Tracy Harwood 00:54
Yeah, there's some really great points being made, actually. First of all, we've got some news items. So let's start with Damien's overview of Nvidia's special address at the Consumer Electronics Show, which took place on the fourth of January. So Damien, what's your update on that?

Damien Valentine 01:08
So Nvidia who we follow very closely, because obviously, the graphics cards are very important for people making machinima. And of course, Omniverse is a platform that we've been following quite closely over the last few months. So in January, they had this presentation where they're going to give an update on what's coming next. So the first thing that they announced was a 3050 graphics card. So there's some of the RTX one. So more a low budget one, it should be available, I say should be available. I don't know what the stock levels are actually going to be. But it's been released as you listen to this. It could be as hard to find, as all the others have been so far. And of course, there's the 3090 Ti, which was announced, but at the time of recording, they haven't given a release date or a price, I imagine the price is going to be astronomically high because the the 3090s already are massively expensive. So the TI ones going to be a lot more than that. But so far, no details have come for that. They've announced a whole new range of RTX powered laptops. And they showed some of those off. I don't know if there's only going to be any good firmest people making machinery because obviously a desktop computers is going to be a lot more powerful than a laptop. This is something I think Phil would be better off talking about The me that's more his area. But it's available, they've been reaching out with at least laptop manufacturers. And there's a lot out there to have a look at if that is the direction you want to go in. The big news for Omniverse is it's now out of beta. it's freely available to anyone to use. So if you want to check that out, you can go to the Omniverse website and download it and see what you can do with it. There's no you improve, there's no new features added since they released that as far as we're recording this, there's still a lot more that they're working on for the software, which is it's very powerful and what you can do with it now. So more features coming that that's going to be really good to see. But again, they didn't really elaborate on that. It's more about it's out of beta. And now available to everyone rather than having to sign up for it. Canvas has been updated. This is the piece of software that I talked about last month where you draw a little picture and then it comes up with this AI generated masterpiece. The face or appearance of that. So the images that you get at the end results are much more high resolution there's more templates styles to choose from. And there's more features there to play around with which unfortunately I haven't had time to to do just yet. And that kind of covered all of the everything related to machinima. They also I guess we mentioned this briefly, they also announced that they've going through AI driven cars so that they self driving cars. And the reason I mentioned this is they're using Omniverse to train the AI how to avoid objects. I was actually tuned out that the presentation this point I was cooking at the same time. So I missed the beginning of that. But it sounds like they're using it. That must be the physics and the way that objects handles so they put the AI to this process in their own virtual environment software to teach it how to avoid things. That's really impressive. And that's not something that you expect to get out of software designed for making machinima. Yeah, but unfortunately, it didn't really elaborate more beyond that. I just, it kind of took me by surprise and that's worth mentioning even if it's not directly related to machinima.

Ricky Grove 05:01
right? And there's hope for clumsy people in the future because they can actually figure out how to put it in clumsy people's brains, they can avoid many clumsy problems have dropped plates and you know, planters being knocked over that sort of thing.

Damien Valentine 05:18
Yeah. So that's my coverage of the NVIDIA presentation. Especially more graphic size in the 30 range laptops, and the Omniverse is out of beta.

Tracy Harwood 05:33
A couple of things struck me about it. I mean, firstly, the premise on which they made that presentation was really quite interesting, because one of the things that they commented on was the number of creators, which they indicated was 45 million and growing. Now, now, I wonder what they actually meant by that, because it was at least 10 years ago, I recall having a look at some of the figures, which suggested that about a third of the world were doing creative stuff at that point. So what do you think they're talking about? Is this kind of like, purely real time and machinima? They're talking about?

Ricky Grove 06:07
No, I think they're talking about people who are collaborating and using the platform,

Tracy Harwood 06:13
Just purely that platform. Yeah, that's really interesting, then. Then the other thing that they said, which I also thought was quite interesting, what, which to me? Well, this was the rationale that I thought they gave for the development of the kit in the way that they had was, was the development in eSports. And the reason they said that they were focusing on that was because of the competitive environment, where speed of gameplay is the difference between winning and losing. But of course, a microsecond is much less of a concern to creatives, such as machinima makers. And, quite frankly, there were relatively few folks in the world that are actually doing competitive gaming, lots viewing it, but not that many teams participating, although I understand we all know, there's a huge amount of money floating about in that space. So beyond improving the game experience, this emphasis on kit, I think is is nothing to do really, with creatives as such, and much more to do with AI developments that we've heard them talk about, which kind of they're gonna go ahead? Well, I was gonna say it kind of raises an interesting matter, which is really how creative and this is where I think it's going. So I think it's important to machinimators, it kind of links together more of the creative and the industrial processes, which I think kind of now beginning to align. And I don't know if you guys remember, but I've always said that there are many, many more applications of real time and machinima than purely entertainment and filmmaking, such as for visualising just no problem, just about any service scenario. And I did some work. I don't know, seven, eight years ago now. Which I've published in papers in with the help of Chantal Harvey, who did all the machinima work for me, where we kind of visualise new service environments. So I think I, you know, I think that's quite an interesting development that they they're creating this kit, giving one rationale for its development. And yet, probably there's a different story, too. It's, you know, it's real application to do what you're to do with machinima creators.

Ricky Grove 08:36
Yeah you covered exactly what I was gonna add to that. They, when I, the very first time I got involved with Omniverse, I had a meeting with a couple people. And because they were trying to help me get Omniverse to work on my system - I was having trouble. And they were talking about it being originally was an in-house collaboration, collaborative application. And they thought that they could bring this to professionals, they could do several things at once. They could provide an easy way for people to collaborate in real time on projects like designing a car, engineering product, working on a on a 3d model for small team games. And in addition to that, they could promote their own applications inside of it. So you would have the cross platform promotion at the same time, which I was very happy that when they brought up the number, the first public version of it, the one O version was out of the beta. They didn't charge for it. I was really happy about that, because that means that they are serious about making that a collaborative platform. And you see the trend in many other different companies where you have to download a single application and auto organise all of your assets and everything. Will Nvidia has that idea, but it's much larger. And I think that's what they're talking about when they're talking about creative, people doing creative projects, it's that collaboration inside using ray trace materials and all of that inside of the NVIDIA Omniverse environment.

Tracy Harwood 10:29
Yeah, well, and then the other thing, which I thought was incredibly interesting, too, is this idea of focusing on cloud based gaming support infrastructure, which really meant that even if you've got a laggy old computer, you could still participate in this world. And I think that's also you know, that that to me was was a very interesting set of developments. Because it really does put the tools in everybody's hands, irrespective of whether you can afford the kit or not.

Ricky Grove 10:58
Yeah I agree. I think one, one thing I like about the the game world, and the graphics technology world is that they're not wholeheartedly embracing open source technology, but they're moving in that direction. You see Epic Games, creating grants for creators, making free technology available, Unreal, is still free. NVIDIA moving in that direction, and an idea of giving back to the community while still promoting their project, because they've made so much money. I mean, Epic has made so much money, NVIDIA has made so much money, they want to give some of it back. And I think that's a true thing. And I mean, if you know, Nvidia join the Blender group, to donate to Blender, Epic has done the same thing Reallusion did that just recently joined the Blender Foundation. So that trend is also ongoing, and I'm really happy to see it.

Tracy Harwood 11:57
Yeah, all of that sounds great. I from my point of view, I think the only thing we really lack now, with with all of this infrastructure, you know, developing at a pace which which it clearly is, is a good means to find and access those kinds of indie studios because let's face it, none of those current sharing platforms, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, Patreon, none of them are a good way to share your creative work, not least because that discovery element that that, you know, that need to sort of find the stuff is still a function of an algorithm that is prioritising ad revenue for that platform. Oh, no, no, you're right. And, and it's, you know, there's nothing out there really, which supports creatives. Other than those platforms, there's got to be something better than that. So roll roll on that somebody bleeds.

Damien Valentine 12:51
That'd be nice, huh?

Ricky Grove 12:53
Good report. Damien. Thank you.

Damien Valentine 12:55
Yeah. The other thing I found, just like I mentioned briefly, is it meme was going around and I tried to find out if this was true or not. I really hope it is. Is that is a news station has this contest where they asked people in local area to submit photos. And this girl had been submitting screenshots from Red Dead Redemption. Oh, yes. To the news station. And they've been posting those pictures thinking that there are real photos are not screenshots from the day. I wrote it. I hope that too. I had a laugh. Yeah.

Tracy Harwood 13:30
Wonderful. I hope it's true.

Damien Valentine 13:33
Now, that's it for me.

Tracy Harwood 13:35
Thank you very much, Damon, Ricky, you've got a tonne of stuff for us as well. What do you have to tell us?

Ricky Grove 13:40
Well, I'll try to keep it brief. The first thing is if you're a filmmaker, machinima filmmaker, and you want to submit your film to a film festival, the Austin Film Festival is open their competition to animated shorts. So take a look at it. We'll put the link in the show notes or you can just do Austin Film Festival. The early bird deadline is March 25. The regular deadline is May 16. And the late deadline is June 24. Now remember it this is a pay to play. So you're going to spend about 50 bucks to submit your film. But if that's not a problem for you, I recommend it Austin Film Festival is a well regarded Film Festival and I think you do well.

Ricky Grove 14:24
Secondly, Adobe is testing out a new web based tool that uses AI to simplify audio recording. It's called Project Shasta. It could make recording and editing podcast and other projects a lot easier in a sense you can get a you can set up a time where you can record together. So far, I haven't heard that it's a paying platform yet but I'll get more information on that. Just we'll put a link in the show notes or you can just do a Google search Project Shasta it looks interesting.

Ricky Grove 14:57
And then secondly, or thirdly, The Kerbal Space Programme 2 is launching somewhere in 2022 Kerbal Space Programme originally started in 2015. It was a Mexican company. And it was purchased by Take Two Interactive, it's a great space construction open space construction game with absolutely gorgeous spaceships, space platforms, all kinds of stuff. They the game actions basically working together with your friends who play these little fun characters in spacesuits and that to design and create space stations for assignments and rocket launch. It was hugely successful. And Kerbal Space Programme 2, looks even better. They've added they've taken a lot of feedback from users. They've updated it the it looks better, they've given you more opportunities. YouTube has a lot of interesting Kerbal Space Programme machinima which I like I think it's a great platform for machinima. It's something I'm gonna keep looking at through the rest of the year is the space open space programmes for machinima. So keep an eye on Kerbal Space Programme 2 its they say 2022 but they don't say what quarter so I'm not sure which one to look at. But we'll we'll keep you updated on it.

Ricky Grove 16:25
Lastly, I have to say it's not really news. It's more of an observation. I, when we first started this podcast, I would every week, comb the internet and comb, YouTube and Vimeo and all the other places to try to find interesting machinima and I didn't always wasn't always successful. So I ended up going back and doing a couple classics. Well, I have to say, I don't know why. But there just seems to be a greater percentage of really good machinima on YouTube in particular now. I went through several different searches this week and came across at least half a dozen films I could add to our film list, but I didn't want to do it, because they want to burden everybody but all all add the links in our show notes so you can follow through. And so I'm really happy about that. There's some really good stuff being done. Not only finally in Unity, and Unreal, too. But that's a real encouraging sign to me, and I'm really happy about it.

Tracy Harwood 17:28
Yeah, it could be the lockdown coming to fruition. Yeah. So last two years worth of work just now coming out. Because I know, a lot coming out in December as well, which I thought was quite interesting. You know, the fact that there were so many being released during December. Yes, yeah. Okay, well, I've got a few updates myself, which I'll run run past you all. Firstly, just as sort of a general point, general observation really, which was made by UploadVR in an article that I just sort of came across, which was the increase in sales of VR headsets over the Christmas period. And from what I could see, that's an increase of around three fold. From what I can tell across the different platforms reported on. There are no official release figures for VR headset sales, which I think is one of the challenges with that sector. I think one of the main problems with VR has been that there hasn't really been enough killer apps to justify the investment in the kit. And quite frankly, it's still a pain in the bum to use it. Plus, if you're going to make content for for it, or from it, you know, the VR games themselves are quite a challenge as we kind of found out when we talked to Half, Half Life Peeps, Half Peep's when he did that film series, Alyx a few months back when we talked to him. He was saying what a challenge it is to create machinima in VR. So much of this is going to be driven by the metaverse hype. I think the fact that you know, VR kit is going to be adopted through all this, all this talk going around on what the impact of the metaverse is. And the article itself suggests that one of the main drivers is Meta (Facebook). And of course, that's gone on and on and on, and most of it isn't really very positive. So I think it'd be quite interesting to see how VR does continue to evolve as a machinima creating tool or resource over the over the coming months, as more and more content gets made in, in that environment. And maybe we've reached a critical mass of adopters now, I'm not sure. So that was one point I wanted to make.

Tracy Harwood 19:46
The other is to do with NF T's now we've talked about NF T's in the past. Exactly. Well, I got two comments on this. Firstly, Peter Molyneux, who you you'll recall, had made that well of machinima game The Movies, which was released back in 2005 is now it turns out working on a business open world sim, where creators can earn money from their creative work using Blockchain technology. So think Minecraft and Second Life. And in Molyneux's game, you can already buy land. And once the game releases, which is scheduled to be later this year, you'll be able to own your own assets as well in you know, after you've kind of created them, so you own them continue to take a stake out of them. Although I think it sounds a little different to from what I understand of it, it sounds a little different to sort of what what you do with Second Life. Because you you continue to earn money from them using this crypto setup cryptocurrency setup, which they called Legacy, so it implies that you continue to generate revenue from it. I think that's going to be quite an interesting one to watch. Not Not least because it's, you know, it's still rolling on with us NFT's that we haven't really kind of bottomed out. That said, the second thing on NFT's that we picked up this this last couple of weeks is it's sounding really quite interesting. And that's the John Gaeta of the matrix, Bullet Time infamy. infamy has also created some real-time machinima content, which evokes the Matrix Experience that he's now listed on on an NFT market. And these are not just films, but they're snapshots of a virtual experience with eggs embedded into them, that buyers can find for themselves. So it's kind of like a mini Matrix-like, Matrix Awakens-like experience with specific content, and sold whatever that market rate will will bear and what the exchange determines. Now they're listed on Opensea at the moment, although I couldn't actually see much trading taking place on the works. And neither is it clear whether the pieces on the market have been made using parts from Matrix Awakens Experience, say the cutouts, or to my, to my point earlier, really about VR. Are they are they bits and pieces that he's made himself? And can he make? Can you I suppose can you collect them? Really? I think a lot of this depends on along on on the the viability of the content itself. Now, of course, you know, we know that The Matrix has in least at least in theory, got a pretty wide audience. But I think the other part of it depends on the the the name of the artist, which of course John, John, you know, John, is a name, so I think he's onto something in terms of the concept here, but whether other machinima creators can, can do a similar thing like create, you know, part of their film in say, in Unreal, and you know, as like an unreal you know, frame or, you know, part of the part of the story if you like, and then try and sell that as a as a an experience. I think that that might be one option, that that kind of thinking may look viable. But I think if all you're doing is using Unreal to create your own films, and then putting your films out there, I think that's doing something else. And I'm not sure that that will be viable in this NFT kind of market context that he's clearly developing. So I think that's a really interesting development in machinima and NFTs. I mean, we always kind of knew that there would be that - interesting that John Gaeta is one of the first to jump into that.

Ricky Grove 23:55
I agree.

Tracy Harwood 23:56
Okay, so another bit of news. Philip Rosedale is now back at Second Life.

Ricky Grove 24:03
Yeah, what the hell happened there?

Tracy Harwood 24:06
That is incredible. Um, so I think it's really exciting for those creators working in Second Life, but also something of great interest to other metaverse creators. Because of course, you know, Philip was one of the founders in creating the first sort of viable metaverse environment Second Life, which most folks seem to have forgotten in this kind of hyped up world about talking, talk talking about it. Now, it's not actually him working for Second Life. What's actually happened here from what I understand is that his company, which is High Fidelity, which is as we know, a VR focused startup, has basically merged with Linden Labs. And as part of that merger, Philip is now doing some strategic consultancy with the Linden Labs team, and it not just brings in Philip, but a load of the other High Fidelity team members, as well. So it's a really interesting development, I think,

Ricky Grove 25:09
What do you think we can expect from his involvement at Second Life?

Tracy Harwood 25:13
Well, I think it's going to be very interesting to see. Well, you know, what he's been working on is spatial audio in recent years. I mean, we had a dabble around with that. Very early last year, if you remember, I think the VR side of things might have something to add to this, too. We know that, that Philip dabbled around with you know, some of the very early was the Oculus Rift, wasn't it? The very early Rift headset was compatible with Second Life all those years ago, I remember investing in one of those and having to go with it all that time back. So maybe we can see a bit more out of this. I don't know, what do you guys think might come out of that?

Ricky Grove 25:54
I'm not sure since he's on a consulting basis, the the ability of him to have influence might be limited. Their biggest problem has been the technical side of their organisation, not so much the content side, because it's filled with all sorts of interesting creators, but it's always had streaming problems, it's always had resolution problems, it said, animation issues. So I don't think he's going to be able to affect any changes there because that sort of heavy lifting architecture that that they have to work on, and they just haven't spend the money spent the money to do that.

Tracy Harwood 26:35
Good point. Really good point. I think one of the things that they have got, though, which many other organisations haven't is the virtual currency side of things. They've got that stitched up? Well, in surely wouldn't have had for for years, and I think they'll draw a lot on that experience.

Ricky Grove 26:51
Because I have to say I'm dubious of, of organisations that are creative. They're they're focused on creative artists and also their creations, suddenly, in getting themselves involved in money making. I think there's something changes when you start doing things for money.

Tracy Harwood 27:16
Yeah, I don't think they're doing it for the money or they I don't I don't see them in that way at all. I would say,

Ricky Grove 27:22
Well, then why are they adding the NF, for example, the fellow doing the NFT's and you could put your project out there in order to get profit from NFT's?

Tracy Harwood 27:33
Yeah. Okay. Well, that's not a Second Life. Oh, okay. Okay, that's,

Ricky Grove 27:38
I guess I'm mixing up my stories. I'm sorry.

Tracy Harwood 27:40
Okay. So from now, I don't think Second Life that are in in the NFT world. But they do have an exchange, an exchange currency, don't they? Yeah. Linden Dollars.

Ricky Grove 27:54
Yeah. Well, I guess it's just in general, any organisation that is creative focused. As soon as money comes into the picture, it changes people's motives. And it also brings in a marketplace, attitude, for example, in an NFT marketplace, you look at what's sold, and then you start, you start pushing your creations towards what sold as opposed to what you want to create. You know what I mean? And that's always been a frustration for me. So that's just a general comment on on that, you know, cuz I was always happy about machinima, because it wasn't about money. When he got involved. You know, I remember when I first got involved in machinima, and people wanted me to act in their shows and if I liked the script, I would. And they said, Well, hey, let me send you $100 Or let me send you $50 for this amount, I would never take it. Because as soon as you have money involved in it, there's a sort of obligation on the other side. Yeah, but they're paying you then you have to perform a function. Whereas if there's no money involved in it, it's based on your good work. It's based on your your faith in in working with that other person for a different end. That's just a general observation on it. I don't know maybe I'm half cocked, will say I think I think

Phil Rice 29:14
I think you're right Ricky, I honestly mean Second Life has long had excuse me long had a the currency that's been around for a long time that the marketplace people able to sell what they create, and that does introduce market dynamics in terms of if you want to make money on that platform, you are going to study what are other people having success selling, but that that money making aspect of it is amongst the users more so than it is Linden. Yeah, they kind of, you know, play the role of the federal government if you will, and they regulate the currency and make certain decisions and all that but I I don't think that anybody at the top a second life is not doing what they're doing with it for money. And that's, that's either fortunate or it's just a reality of the world I don't know. But I mean, if you look at if you look at the way... so I've done a little bit of experimenting with affiliate marketing over the years, which is where you can sign up to, you know, host the ads or things like that for certain products on a website that you run, and then you can make a percentage off of sales and things like that. And when you join an affiliate programme, the vendor, the product provider, provides you with marketing collateral to use: banner ads, and all that and basically, it kind of conveys here's the emphasis of what we want you to emphasise when you're selling this as a product. Well Second Life participates in that, it has for years. And if you look through their marketing collateral every single banner image that they want you to host on their site with the Second Life logo on it. Every single one is one of two subject matters. Either advertising the idea of having a virtual pet so it'll be you know, an avatar there with a dog and you know, you could have a virtual pet that won't actually poop in your house or something to that effect, I guess is the benefit of that. Or, two scan, scantily clad, a scantily clad couple, posing together in, okay, it's not Kama Sutra or anything, but it's, you know, laying around the spa, you know, or something. Romance, basically, like, the Second Life equivalent of the cover of a Harlequin romance novel.

Phil Rice 29:36
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Phil Rice 29:52
You know, that's how they have been encouraging affiliates across the globe, to promote Second Life. Paths, a very different understanding of it. So basically, that turns Second Life into a, you know, Tinder with graphics, if you will, you know, well, that's not what the people that I've known over the years, who have gotten excited about Second Life, and who promote Second Life and who do a lot of things in Second Life. And we could name dozens I'm not going to try start naming people will leave people out, there's so many. That's never what they talk about as the plus, you know, it's, it's, it's these very deeply, you know, creating 3d experiences for someone and you know, you know, using it for machinima is just one thing, but there's people who it's not I don't want to make a movie, this, I want to create a place in this virtual world, and have people come experience it in, in Second Life, not outside on YouTube, right in here, where it's all around you, where there's not really a set camera, you're the camera, what you look at is what you look at, you know, like, augmented reality experience in real life in there. So that's what creators that know about Second Life love about Second Life. Not that I might find a date, you know, so to some degree, I would say, I, what I would hope for the, let's say, powers that be at Second Life, is that they kind of really take some serious stock of how, what kind of image do we want to create for this place? Because it seems like marketing wise, the emphasis has been on, you know, people who come in there for some kind of, you know, enhanced dating experience of some kind. And maybe that's because some study that they did, said, Hey, you know, what, our longest term subscribers, that's what they're there for. So that's where we make the money. And so let's attract more of that. That's a marketer's approach, you know, or salespersons approach, right? But if they really want it to be a metaverse experience, oh, my God, I hope the metaverse ends up being more than about more than just that, you know. Now, I don't I don't want Ashley Madison with graphics. Okay. I don't want it to be a place that if I go there, my wife wonders if I'm having an e affair, you know, it shouldn't be that but that's kind of the reputation that Linden themselves have encouraged promotion of it to be that.

Damien Valentine 34:47
if it's because of the last two years, there's been a great emphasis on virtual dating with all the dating apps have gone to virtual dates because yeah, so they're getting in on that trend.

Phil Rice 34:57
I think they're good were on it. goes back further than the past few years. Okay. That's not something that they shifted to post COVID They were already promoting it that way.

Damien Valentine 35:08
Okay. I didn't realise that. Yeah, yeah.

Phil Rice 35:10
So it really I think I don't remember exactly when Phillip left there, Tracy, but I think it's all since since he departed. I don't I don't know if there's any cause effect there or not. But

Tracy Harwood 35:21
it's 2013 ish, I think. Yeah.

Phil Rice 35:25
I first noticed that about five years ago.

Tracy Harwood 35:28
So I think I think it goes back right, almost to the beginning of it what you're talking Yeah, definitely. Yeah. There was two different and

Phil Rice 35:34
I get that that's a that's an attractive part of it for some people. But I'm saying if really, what they're looking at is what we want to create this place that people are going to take seriously for like what we did Ricky with the Machinima Expo. Right? If we had thought of Second Life as just a virtual dating platform, I don't think we would have even considered it as a venue. But we knew Second Life was more than that. Yeah. But I don't know how we discuss I guess we discovered that by using it. But if they're wanting to attract and regrow their user base, I just, I think that they need to their their marketing strategy needs to reflect who it is they want in there. And not just people who hey, I can look like, you know, anybody I want. And, you know, I can be a virtual Amsterdam hooker. Yay. You know? Well,

Ricky Grove 36:27
I, one of the things that I really liked about it was, well, two things. One was the exploration of the various creations. So you'd get together with a buddy. And it wasn't a date, but it was more like a hey, let's get together and chat. And then go

Phil Rice 36:43
hours doing that. Yeah, it was fantastic. Yeah,

Ricky Grove 36:47
go see interesting things, you know, that was so much fun, that social aspect of it, and then travelling together. That was just so great.

Phil Rice 36:58
Yeah, yeah. Well, hopefully,

Tracy Harwood 37:00
we'll see more focus on the on the sides that we were that we I mean, not it's not just us, is it? I think there's a lot of people that are in that, that

Phil Rice 37:09
Well, I think those places and those activities still exist. Yeah, I think there are people who still do that. There was one. I don't remember what the name of the performer was. And I'm not sure what pronouns to use for this performer. But they did a it was a comedy act. Lauren Whalen does that. Is that ring a bell? Is that?

Tracy Harwood 37:35
Yes, that rings? By Yes. And

Phil Rice 37:39
for years, and just attracted as many people as could fit on a sim would come to see these performances. And it was, you know, this this kind of glamorous, like, oh, I can't remember the actress' name. But you know, like a blonde bombshell avatar, and this really deep voice guy. And he was so funny. He she pardon me. Because I don't know. I don't know what the full story was there. But highly, highly entertaining. Things like that would go under Frank, Frank Fox, that we all know, is great. He for years performed. I can't remember the name that he used the stage that he used, but he would go and live perform music in there. Hathead Rickenbacker if you remember he has to go performances with people in different places and stuff. Yeah. And I mean, when I think a Second Life ad in its heyday, that's what I think of it. I just feel like it's a shame that, that it doesn't seem like that the marketing people there realise that that stuff exists and how unique it was, and maybe still is that you can do that - gather in a space with other people and experience those things, live activities.

Damien Valentine 39:00
As far as I know, some of those people just mentioned still perform

Phil Rice 39:03
they probably do. Yeah, I haven't been in an agent. So I don't know. But I'm sure that they do. Chantal, or someone who's whose I think is more in touch with it would know, probably knows the names of all these people that I'm completely butchering, but if you're out there Chantal drop us a comment or something and correct me. But anyway, yeah. Second Life is extraordinary. Even with all its glitches, yeah.

Tracy Harwood 39:26
And still very, very active and on. Yeah, I think we've seen the end of it.

Phil Rice 39:32
Yeah, no. For me, they what's attractive about attracting more people in there is that we'll give Linden the money to address the issues that Ricky's been talking about.

Tracy Harwood 39:42
Absolutely. Let's hope we're gonna attract people in there.

Phil Rice 39:45
Let's attract people that actually want to make things or experience things others have made and not just, you know,

Tracy Harwood 39:55
yeah, hook up. Absolutely. That's, that's,

Phil Rice 39:58
you know, I'll sign off with my crude rant now, you know, it's not about prudishness. It's just, it seems like a waste to me of a platform that is still to this day extraordinary in its capabilities, largely untapped.

Ricky Grove 40:14
I don't understand what you have against virtual pets

Phil Rice 40:22
I hate following them around with a virtual baggie! or picking up their virtual droppings? Yeah.

Tracy Harwood 40:30
Good point. Okay. I've got another bit of news and which, in some ways, I think is yet another. Well, how many more nails can there be in this coffin? This is Microsoft in 343 Industries have now finally closed the Halo Xbox 360 on the online multiplayer servers. So for fans of the original Red vs Blue long running machinima series, which was made by RoosterTeeth in Halo 4, this is, this is I think, the very final nail of an era. Although it does look like some of the older games are keeping their player customization option open. So. Yeah, I just wanted to say thanks to Jason Boomer for asking about that one. Consider it mentioned.

Ricky Grove 41:23
No, no, wait a second. Tracy. Do you ever see those horror films where the climax? They finally kill the monster? Right? He's coming back. Then the credits come up. Yeah. And the credits finish. And the monster shows up again. I know. That's what's gonna happen here.

Tracy Harwood 41:41
Well, you know, already did didn't it in October, is they released yet another? What was it called? Family? Family Splinters, splinters family, I can't remember. Red, Blue yet another rendition of, a spin out from the cannon.

Ricky Grove 42:00
That's really nice to see that they're going in new creative direction. You know, RoosterTeeth has always been about being creative. Yeah, I'm doing new new exploring new forms and new ideas here that RoosterTeeth.

Tracy Harwood 42:16
We do you know what? Let's look forward to that one.

Damien Valentine 42:20
Well, there's a new Halo game that's just been released. So there's that platform available, that's the monster coming back?

Tracy Harwood 42:27
Oh, well, they go. Because they haven't actually done cinema for years. Have they? It's been just animation. Yeah, because they gave up on the actual, you know, real gameplay stuff a long time ago. But like I said, I think you know, the switching off of these services a little bit symbolic to a certain generation of, I think a few of our listeners will be some

Ricky Grove 42:50
I'd like to do a little plug here for Ben Grussi's history podcast that's part of our Completely Machinima. I just finished editing the video for Ben's January history. And what he does is he does a timeline of machinima history for a particular month. So for example, he'll start and say 1996 in January, and then he'll say what the important events that occurred in January 96, 97, 98, and then all the way up to 2006 2007, before the big machinima.com debacle occurred. And they're really, really interesting. Ben has just, he's been the archivist of machinima. Well, I don't think we've given him enough credit for that. Currently, 20 years for more than 20 years, collecting movies and needs put all of these on archive.org. And he does this information for us and I just want to thank him for doing that. But also encourage you that if you are any way remotely interested in machinima history, check out his podcast it usually comes up as the last podcast of the month - Machinima History with Ben Grussi. And thank you, Tracy for helping produce that as well. But check it out, though. The first video version of that will go on at the end of this month on our YouTube channel. And I really like it. I think it's gonna be really good.

Tracy Harwood 44:21
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Ben. Course Ben was also the co author on the Pioneers book and without his archiving specialism, that book would never have been written. So he's, he's an absolute boon to the to the community.

Tracy Harwood 44:34
I think probably now might be a good time to bring in a question from Matthew Loris, who was Zeke from TMU, who's asked us to reflect on what the differences are between machinima and animation, and their approaches when making movies is machinima. Now the same as animation, or is there something still that keeps them apart? And how could you tell the difference between machinima movie versus animation movie? And are the techniques the same when creating these movies? So there's also a lot of questions in there. But I think it's actually a really interesting point to reflect on that given a lot of the things that we've been talking about already in this episode. So, so let's start and then you guys pick me up? Sure.

Phil Rice 45:23
I just want to start by saying, I think that what he's asking is, it's Tom Jantol's favourite question is, what is machinima? Yeah, Tom loves. I wish Tom can be on today because he loves talking about that.

Tracy Harwood 45:40
Absolutely. And, you know, into the interview that I did with Tom, which answers that very question. Yes, yeah, let's just let's just be kind of serious for a minute, because I think I think there's some really important points to be made here. All right. All right. The first is, you know, when we when we go back to the very early definitions of machinima. What we were what we said back then, was that it was about using a 3d game environment to create content in real time, what was called machine cinema. And actually, it was Hugh Hancock, quite early on that added in that word animation, right in the middle of the term. Partly, partly of the I have to say, to justify the continued use of the misspelling of the concatenation of those two terms, machinima, machine animation cinema. So it was a cock-up round. Now, clearly, animation can be made in many different ways, now using techniques, you know, I mean, we've had hundreds of different techniques that we've talked about over the over the years, you know, for animation, stop motion, keyframe. And now even animators are beginning to catch up new 3d environments, whereas our definition of machinima I don't think has really moved on that much. And I think more like what it's about is the rest of the world catching up with the techniques that the pioneers in machinima originally devised. I think it'd be fair to say that the games engines that can be used for machinima have definitely evolved. So if you take, for example, the Unreal Engine, I mean, that that was really in its early days Unreal Tournament. And, and now, it makes much more of being an open tool rather than a predetermined set of assets and resources. I think it's worth remembering that a lot of machinima is game based, which is to say that is inspired by or informed by specific games in some way. Of course, you know, machinima evolved, not, not least because game based assets as tool sets were a way to access creative resources in a cost effective way. So if you think about Unreal, and Omniverse, and a whole load of other tool sets, they are now freely available to create, it's not withstanding the amount of money that you need to, to actually have the kit. But for a long time, one of the things that held animation and machinima apart was the distinctive aesthetic. We talked about that a lot on this show the differences between poor quality rendered game outputs rather than sort of higher quality animation outputs. But isn't it increasingly hard to tell the difference. And how I think it was always going to be the case that that gap would close as games improved their cinematic quality. So I think another distinct difference was the quality of creative storytelling in machinima versus animation. And I think that's a really important point now, because as the games themselves have developed and evolved, we've seen, you know, and we commented on this, in our December show, a huge amount of different types of approaches to creating machinima content. And it's continually improving and continually evolving. The next week, when we look at our films, you'll see, you know, yet more different types of machinima than we've reviewed so far on the show. So I think that is an you know, something that's really worth kind of reflecting on. So the fact that there are all these different types of approaches to machinima creation. And I don't think you see that in animation. It's definitely not true in animation. But I think it's perhaps worth reflecting on why that's not true. And that takes me back to a comment that Kim Librari made when when Ben and I interviewed him for the Pioneers book. Now what Kim said was the animators in the movie business that did not go to animation school have a very different way of doing things, which is probably going to upset the whole animation industry industry. And the example he gave was in creating human expressions. And he said that trained trained animators tend to create bigger than life performances for, you know, for their characters. But that self taught real time creators tend to make use of the very subtle nuances in human behaviour, which they've learned over time. Some genuinely real differences. And we're seeing that play out in the, for example, in the, in the, say, the meta human set of tools that Unreal are making available. So I think you can now still tell the difference between traditional animation and game based animation. Even though you might find it particularly hard, increasingly hard, I'd say, to tell which game was actually used in the machinima itself. And I think if anything, machinima remains at the very forefront front of pushing boundaries of creative practice, which, you know, taught animation just isn't doing. So there's my 10 cents worth on that one. What do you guys think?

Ricky Grove 51:07
Golly, I don't think I could have put it any better. I mean, there's nothing more, you can say you encompass the entire complete answer to the question. The only thing I would say is that, I tend to look at it as the difference between amateur, and when I say amateur, I mean, the original definition of amateur, not as a derogatory comment, like poor craftsmanship. An amateur, which is somebody has a passion for something, and professional, a professional works in a marketplace in which they have to structure their work, according to certain standards and subjects. Animation tends to operate in that realm, which means you learn through hard work, how to do certain techniques, and they're acceptable looks for animation. If your animation doesn't look like a Pixar film, then it doesn't, it's not acceptable. You have to redo it until it does, versus somebody who doesn't an amateur production. And is able to do it just the way they want. Because they're, they want to get the work out. They don't have to spend two weeks on five minutes of animation, you know what I mean? Like they do it at Pixar. It's the difference between doing something for passion, and something for profit.

Tracy Harwood 52:27
Yeah, well said. I forgot about the money though, that that's so true.

Damien Valentine 52:31
I was thinking what you just said about self taught animators, and it got me thinking about my own way I do fish animation myself in my projects. And I am a self taught animator. And you're absolutely right, I go for the more realistic approach I expect from watching people around me or if I need to look in the mirror and sort of copying my own expressions, when I try to catch a look rather than the more exaggerated look you would get in someone who has been trained to do animation, they would do more exaggerated movements, and facial expressions. And yeah, I can completely see where that's coming from. It wasn't actually something I thought about until you just said that is that is just the way I make faces. And that was it.

Tracy Harwood 53:16
Yeah. Phil do you think?

Phil Rice 53:18
Yeah, for me that the, the central element is the real time quality of the animation. If you look back at when machinima or originally it was just Quake movies before that term existed. The reason that was attractive to creators is because you because of that rendering time. If you were to, we're talking about late 90s here. So if you were to try and render out, what back then would have been high res would have been 800 by 600 pixels, you know, roughly one quarter of the size of HD video that's common on YouTube now, it would take days to render a few minutes of footage. It was excruciating. If your computer could even handle it. Yeah, it would take days for you to see the finished product, you'd be working in LightWave, or Maya, or one of those 3d Studio Max, if you could afford it, they were all super expensive. Or maybe you would use you know some other tool that was cheap and just a lot harder to use. And you would be working in wireframe views and views that weren't the full, you wouldn't know really how it's going to look until you rendered it. And so even just to render to see houses turning out to render a single frame would take hours. This was the reality of creating computer animation content at that time. So along come video games. Who have you know, unwittingly stumbled right into this technology that, that not stumbled into the created this technology where something could be rendered live on the screen in higher resolution than the videos that we were scraping away to do. And it could be rendered rendered in real time 30 frames or more or a second, it was astonishing. And so early machinima makers, it was all about hacking the infrastructure of that, to get access to that engine. And I don't care if my character looks like a soldier, it's a dude. It's a humanoid, right, I can make them do something different, or I can just capture, I could be the camera and someone else can move the guy. I mean, these things were we take them for granted now. But it was extraordinary. And then along comes in software and builds in for a completely different purpose builds in the ability to record and playback something within the game. So all of a sudden, these things that people had been seeing since the 80s, with demoscene, which were real time rendered animations, but done with mathematics and programming. And it was not an easy entry level to do that you kind of had to be a real nerd to do that, you know, and, and all of a sudden, here's this game that has abstracted all of that into an interface that that anybody could use, really, you know, and all the real time rendering and all the mathematics, you don't have to know any of that. The game does that. And now I just want to inject my own actions into it. So it for people like Hugh Hancock, who were, you know, getting involved with it early in those days, he was completely capable, even then, of doing traditional animation. He was complete, he was completely capable. If he didn't know how to do it. He know how to talk someone into doing it. And being on his team. He knew how to infect someone else with his passion. And he could have got that together and done that. The thing that held him back was real time rendering was was traditional rendering. There's just not enough time. You know, it's almost precious now, given that he was taken from so early, but back then what he would say is I don't have enough years left in my life, to make the movies I want to make if this is how I have to make them.

Ricky Grove 57:21
Go man,

Phil Rice 57:22
right. And then he stumbles into machinima. Yeah, or Quake movies, as it was called. And all of a sudden, I can produce, I can produce my movie faster than Pixar can. Not just because they're going for a level of perfection that we aren't, not just because they have millions of dollars worth of employees and animators and engineers all working on this. But because the rendering even for them, they had to have this farm of servers working on it. And even for Pixar, one frame of the Toy Story movie took took days to render for them for them with all those millions to throw up. So yeah, that's what made machinima different. And Tracy you're absolutely right. It's not machinima that's really moved. Okay, the games have moved forward. They've evolved, they got more advanced. But it's the entire animation. The entire attitude about computer animation has moved toward the techniques that empower machinima. Absolutely, the entire thing has moved that way. Look at Nvidia. Look at Omniverse look at what Reallusion has done. Yeah, all of these, they're all they see that real time part and realise now even professionals want that because they can get the same quality of the high quality as is on the Mandalorian with a freely available set of tools from Unreal. It's astounding. Yeah, astounding. So yeah, that's the difference for me as a maker was always in the technique. And you know, yeah, some of the some of the skill set has changed. For sure. You know, there's more things that you need to know how to do. If you want the exact movie you're looking for you can still do machinima the old fashioned way, by the way, and it's easier than it's ever been. Because now you just capture the footage with a third party tool. But you know this the skills that matter which is deciding what in the heck to even produce and and you know, crafting the idea and getting the idea in shipshape before you even fire up an engine. Those skills are still the same. Yeah, no, it's just now the possibilities are I don't even know what the limit is now.

Ricky Grove 59:42
I think you point you've made great, great points there Phil. And I think one of the things that I want to emphasise is the attitude. Yes, the attitude of the Machinima filmmaker is a rebellious and personal. It's about community, whereas the attitude of the professional animator is it I'm doing a job. Now that doesn't mean they they're they're not creative and they're not passionate about their their job, but they're doing a job. Whereas the machinima filmmakers doing it for a different reason. And there's a certain rebelliousness in it, which is why you find so many satires of parodying the game itself, of turning the game on its head. You know, I just love that about the machinima it's one of the first things that attracted me.

Tracy Harwood 1:00:26
Absolutely. And the the community aspect is absolutely a thing that drew me in as well. Yep. Yep. So that's a really great question, Matthew. I hope we've given you the answer. Your question, we really enjoyed them tackling that one. Thanks for that. And And finally, today, I know we're up to time. But Phil, you've got an update for us as well. Would you like to...

Phil Rice 1:00:48
Mine are super, super quick. So Rockstar Games has launched their next let's call it plan to, to their next public relations plan to attract more users to their games. And that is they've decided to to pursue a lawsuit against a group of modders. So we're excited to see what will come to Rockstar Games from that. It's something that we've we've talked about this how many times Ricky of why don't the game companies just sue the users of the games? That's the way I've learned to win large cell lines. That's the way right. Yeah. Loss. Oh, yeah. So and there's a lot of misinformation, information and misinformation. And honestly, I don't know what's what but I mean, of course, the lawyers for GTA are saying, well, they stole some, you know, they misappropriated some copyrighted game code. And then the defence is saying they didn't do that. They just documented what was already out there. Tracy, thanks for filling me in on that right before this show. Who knows? To me that the story is the fact that they're actually suing is yes. Very unfortunate. You know, almost as unfortunate as the, the re-release of the GTA games themselves, almost almost that bad. Not quite. But almost that bad. So we'll keep an eye on that story and let you know of any developments there. Yeah.

Phil Rice 1:02:21
And then, In lighter news, YouTube announced right near the end of the year, that there have now been videos on YouTube that have Minecraft as a subject or made with Minecraft or that kind of thing. There have now been a total of 1 trillion views about a Stoker's just, just amazing. In a separate story, which I didn't link there. It turns out that about 950 995 billion of those views, people weren't weren't, weren't terribly satisfied with what they saw. And here's the thing Minecraft, people who play Minecraft they love Minecraft. They watch it all day long breakfast, lunch and dinner. They want to see people doing unique stuff with it. They want to see people building with it. They have a lot of fun with it. There's there's some some of the biggest YouTubers and some of the biggest streamers on Twitch. And to this day, Minecraft a 15, 16 year old game now is still one of the most watched things on all of Twitch.

Ricky Grove 1:03:32
Yep, yep.

Tracy Harwood 1:03:34
Unbelievable. Well, yes. Unbelievable. Yeah.

Phil Rice 1:03:39
So, congratulations to Minecraft for that. That's our Mojang that's, that's pretty neat.

Tracy Harwood 1:03:43
Absolutely. Okay, um, now we've also got a request from Pandora's 3d Films, which is to discuss translating a prose story to a visual medium. Like Damien's been doing and his Heir to the Empire series. I think what we're going to do with that is defer to a special episode where I'm

Phil Rice 1:04:05
like a quick subject.

Tracy Harwood 1:04:06
I mean, you know, it's a great 30

Phil Rice 1:04:08
seconds, and we're out.

Tracy Harwood 1:04:09
I'm not gonna do that, because I really want to hear that one myself.

Ricky Grove 1:04:13
Here's my advice. Right there. Don't do it that

Phil Rice 1:04:21
we shouldn't plan. One of the maybe maybe for next month. Maybe it'll be a slow news month. No, I plan. We should plan an episode where we discuss that and we could pull some adaptations as examples. Great. That's good. Yeah, some really great ones.

Tracy Harwood 1:04:36
Well, I was gonna suggest that Damian and Ricky do do a special podcast on it because,

Phil Rice 1:04:41
you know, I like that even better, because I don't have to do anything. Oh, good idea.

Damien Valentine 1:04:48
That's great. Yes, see where you're going with that.

Tracy Harwood 1:04:52
Anyway, anyway, he

Phil Rice 1:04:53
has nothing else to do. So

Tracy Harwood 1:04:56
he's the expert on the show.

Phil Rice 1:05:00
I just don't have enough to do in my life. And I said, Give me more to do.

Ricky Grove 1:05:05
And that's our show today, ladies and gentlemen.

Tracy Harwood 1:05:11
That's it for this episode. So we hope you've enjoyed our coverage of latest news items and the discussion today. Don't forget, you can give us some feedback on the usual social channels. Or you can contact us directly using the addresses on our website at Completelymachinima.com. We'd love to hear more suggestions for things you would like us to cover. And thanks in the meantime, to those of you taking the time to comment Jason, Zeke/Matthew and Pandora's 3d Films, really appreciate and look forward to seeing you next time. Bye bye