Ricky Grove 00:10
Hello everybody. This is episode 57 of And Now For Something Completely Machinima podcast. We do every Thursday we put out a new podcast that focuses on machinima which is films made inside of game real time game engines. We're in our 50s. Now this is episode 57. And we're going to be focusing on machinima news, which is news about films about filmmakers about technology, game related technology and all of that. I'd like to introduce my two co-hosts, Damian Valentine. Hi Damien, Ricky. Hello there. Damian is an established filmmaker with a great series that he's been working on on YouTube. And we also have Tracy Harwood. Hello, Tracy. Hi, how you doing? Good. She's a scholar and historian of machinima and related technologies. We're glad to have you here. Phil Rice is usually joining us. But he's gone off to join the Foreign Legion, I think! In any way he'll be back with us when we do our films section, which is films that we collect, you can contact us through talk [at] completely machinima.com. We welcome your comments. We welcome your ideas. And with that, I'll go to the news that I have today. Okay, so starting off, I'd like to talk a little bit about Nvidia's Omniverse creation. We've been talking about that for the last several months and this last several weeks, there have been two interesting developments. One is is that NVIDIA has released a new app called Omniverse Code. And it allows developers to write their own code and Omniverse. You can build your own tools you the app is includes the Omniverse kit, SDK, templates and documentation. It looks to be very promising, it's not really a mod, it's more of a tool for people to build applications to take their application, for example, say Silo, the 3d application. It allows the developers of Silo to take the NVIDIA SDK and convert it to an app so that you can use Silo inside of Nvidia Omniverse. So it's a way for developers of applications and, and things like that to bring their product into Omniverse. And the second is a really interesting series that NVIDIA has has created called Meet the Creators are the omniverse creators, and are I think they call them omnivores. And this article is from imagination to animation, how an Omniverse creator makes films virtually now they say virtually, because that's the term they choose to use, but it's how a filmmaker makes machinima basically. And they're focusing on a filmmaker named Jae Solina. He has a YouTube channel called J S Filmz, spelled with a Z at the end. And he uses his channel to showcase his machinima. And he talks about his workflow for how to use Omniverse to create machinima and his films. It's a very informative and somewhat short documentary, and I liked it a lot. And if you're interested in Omniverse, it's a good way to start learning about it.

Ricky Grove 04:11
The second little piece that I have in my news is a couple little pieces. One is that I read that a 16 year old Russian game player was sentenced to five years in prison for blowing up the KGB's Virtual Building in Minecraft. And I have a very capitalised WTF question mark. What the hell? I mean, you blow up something in a virtual world I could see maybe at most somebody might come and talk to you and say, what are you doing kid? But since into five years, Jesus Christ, I'm so glad I live in America. So if you're in Russia, be careful about what you do in Minecraft or any other games.

Ricky Grove 05:00
The next thing I have is I came across an interesting application that's machinima related called backlot. I saw it on a Facebook page, it was mentioned as being something like movie storm. So I thought I'd give it a try, you know, thinking that I could go over, download the demo, check it out and come up with a report for you guys. So I went to the website, and it's a very professional website. And they have a seven day free trial, which I thought was pretty skimpy on their part, a 30 day trial is the best thing, even a 14 day trial, but seven days, and then I figured out why they have a seven day trial, because when you sign up for the trial, you have to provide your credit card, and you have to cancel within seven days, or they charge you their standard monthly fee of $30. That's why they have a seven day free trial, because a lot of people will forget, they'll get charged $30 and too bad. That's not a friendly way to encourage people to use your programme. There's no reason to ask for a credit card - that makes their website suspicious pass on Backlot Filmmaker, despite it looking good, don't join it.

Damien Valentine 06:16
By it, but up until that point, we said about putting the credit card thing. Yeah, I'm staying away from that.

Ricky Grove 06:21
Yeah, get out of here. Yeah, for a demo, you shouldn't have to provide your credit card. Not so well. It's a fair exchange to offer your email address, but credit card and then have it cancel. Within seven days, you get charged automatically. Yeah, and you can't opt out of that agreement. That's what the agreement, so screw you Backlot.

Ricky Grove 06:44
And the last piece I have is the best games for the M1 Mac, I bought an M one Mac back in November. And I'm really, really happy with it. You have to remember the M1 is Apple's combination of graphics card and CPU. It's extremely powerful. And I've often thought that since Mac has been lagging behind and game playing, hence, not a lot of machinima done on Mac, maybe post production but actual production, not so much on Macs. I thought with this new improved GPU, they'd be able to do more machinima on it. So I thought about some of the games on Mac and I found came across a really interesting article. It's a video on YouTube created by Tyler Stalman. He is a really interesting guy. And he's really good speaker. His presentations are excellent. I subscribe to him immediately. And he went through some games that are really interesting to him on, M1 and they include Firewatch, Pathless and of course, Inside, not a lot of the contemporary games are on there because I checked some other places and you can do a couple GTAs and things like that but then the graphics component in the Apple is still not quite up to speed for the triple A games like that. But the smaller ones you can do it like Firewatch and Inside. Also another downside to M1 gaming is that the fan kicks in pretty quickly playing a game and the noise is pretty big. Now of course you can play with headphones, and record with headphones. It's no big deal. But that is something to be concerned about overheating since the Macintosh Mac MacBook Pro is not a game based creation. I don't think there have been too many studies about the overheating with games. But in any event, I think it's worth a try. I'm gonna try some of it during the course of the year and I'll share with my my results there. That's my news for today. So let's go on over to Damien. And see what sort of news Damien has. Damien.

Damien Valentine 09:10
Alright, thank you, Ricky. Um, first thing I found was severe by a YouTube creator that I discovered about a year ago. She's a singer. She produces lots of music videos. She's very talented. So a few days ago, she released a video talking about her home studio setup. And I watched it. It's very interesting. And I thought this is actually even though she's talking about producing music. What she's talking about is her sound setup. And she lives in New York is obviously a very noisy city. And she talks about how she blocks out that noise, doesn't disturb the neighbours, the equipment that she uses to record the sounds. I thought, Well, anyone who's getting into machinima, this is going to be helpful to them, because it's the same sound is obviously a very important part of machinima. Let's see what she talks about it's very useful for voice recording. If your machinima creator also composes and produces the soundtrack for your films, again, it's worth having a listen to having a watch of her video. She talks about various microphones and how she got started and what she uses now and all this other technical equipment, which I'm sure Ricky would be better able to explain, and I can. So I just thought, Oh, this is helpful to anyone. She talks about video as well. And green screens and that kind of stuff, for music video. So if, if you're watching, listening to us now, and you think about streaming, that's also a good thing to have in mind for streaming as well. So I thought, well, this is a very helpful guide, and I thought, I'll share it with our listeners, and you find it really helpful.

Ricky Grove 10:51
Yeah, I liked it, I thought it was really good.

Damien Valentine 10:53
And the other bits of news I've got today is NVIDIA doing a conference on AI. Now, it's going to be towards the end of March on the 21st of 24th. And they're talking about how AI is being used in their various products like Omniverse. Now, I obviously I don't know what their content of the presentation is going to be yet. But as we've been falling Omniverse quite rigorously for the last year or so since we discovered the existed. I think it'd be worth checking out the conference and seeing what what it's about. And I'm guessing they're going to talk a bit about how last month I talked about how they're using on the first to train self driving cars. So I imagine that's gonna get some coverage, which I'm, it doesn't really relate to machinima but I'm still quite intrigued by how this 3d rendering platform is used to do that, just out of curiosity. But I imagine they'll be talking about other AI related tools for Omniverse. Right? Canvas, or the the 2d painting thing that they've been playing around with. So I think that's worth checking out. And you'll find the links to that in the show notes below.

Ricky Grove 12:16
Right. It's a free conference. I've gone to many times, and it's well worth your time.

Damien Valentine 12:22
That's my News for the week.

Ricky Grove 12:24
Thank you, Damian. Now, let's move on to Tracy. Tracy always has great news. The best, she always has the best news. So let's see what you come up with this week. It's true. It's true.

Tracy Harwood 12:36
I don't know if you had the beep beep beep on my phone. But that's Phil texting. From his football games Have a nice evening. He's saying. Okay, so I've got three smallish pieces of news, but probably with fairly big consequences. And the first one I wanted to talk to you about is, you know, in recent weeks, we've seen a number of game publishers converge into the ownership of just a few organisations is that of Microsoft. That's Phil again. Are you getting our messages he's saying. The latest announcement is that of Microsoft, which is planning to buy Activision Blizzard, which includes games such as Call of Duty, Warcraft and Overwatch, right. And this follows it's purchase last year of of Bethesda. Now, their rationale, of course, is that these are the building blocks for their version of the metaverse. And, you know, the old adage there can be no Metaverse without content. What I think is interesting here is their strategy really, is to get those gains onto their Netflix like subscriber service. And what are surprised folks with their last purchase was that games such as Fallout and Skyrim, would still be available on platforms other than those owned by Microsoft. But that has actually proven not to be the case. So the question now is, therefore, with these additional games expected, I mean, are these additional games expected to go the same way, and what tools will they be making available for indie content creators to continue to work with once they tie down these titles to their Xbox and PC game passes? Now, I guess we're gonna have to wait and see but it feels like creators are really the last folks on their minds at this juncture.

Ricky Grove 14:33
Yeah exactly what I thought

Tracy Harwood 14:35
and yet, you know, they were the very ones that helped these developers push the story worlds into new directions. So I'm quite concerned about this. I'm guessing. Ricky and Phil and Damian will be equally as concerned when we see how this unfolds. I think it's definitely one to watch. So that's my first piece a different slightly different take on how these games are converging. The second piece of news is in terms of Second Life now. We're all now seeing. You know, many, many comparisons in news stories and video reports between current attempts by numerous others have to say to build their versions of the metaverse and draw lessons from Linden Labs experience over the last, was it 19 years since Second Life began? 18 years ago. Okay. So of all of the things published recently, I think you can probably do no worse than listen to Philip Rosedale and Wagner James Au on a recent podcast that they've released about transforming the future of Second Life and making a more humane metaverse. And in their January episode, they talk about some fascinating considerations for creating virtual worlds that can be navigated as a single space. Most of these are not single spaces, most of years old worlds that are being created and not being thought about necessarily in that way. They also talk about just how much detail is needed to make a world feel real, how you might deal with griefers, and monetizing engagements, what the development of currency, you know what direction that takes you in and the role of the virtual aesthetic, I think probably the only aspect they don't really touch upon is the role of machinima in documenting what goes on, which, of course, you know, is a massive part of the content that we see these days. Not just from Second Life, of course, but from every other virtual open world - its huge. And not a lot of folks are talking about that. Now, we'll put a link into the podcast on an on in our show notes. But to that particular episode, and I suggest you have a listen to it. It's quite compelling, of course, because Philip was the founder of Second Life and Wagner James Au, of course, worked for Linden Labs in those early days. Ever since which he's hosted a blog, really interesting blog actually called New World Notes. Yeah. And in 2008, he also published a book, The Making of Second Life. And I agree, it's a great book. Yeah. I daresay a few of the current incumbents into this Metaverse environment might do well to actually invest in some of those early resources. Yeah, and I'm not sure what they are doing.

Ricky Grove 17:39
In short, I'm sure to listen to that. That sounds like a fascinating podcast.

Tracy Harwood 17:43
It's a really interesting podcast, definitely recommend that. And then finally, my final bit of news today is TMUnderground, which, you know, all of us will know was a site that was home to many of them share in the community since 2008, has now finally gone offline. And this, of course, follows the passing of its founder Ken White, which we reported on in our August 21 News episode. And what's nice here is that Edan Mackenzie has written a really wonderful commemorative piece of music, which is published on SoundCloud. So this is not a piece of machinima news as such, but it is a beautiful composition, which celebrates the community and all its achievements. The piece is called A Fond Farewell and it really is beautifully evocative. It's a piece through which Edan describes what TMUnderground meant to him. And actually, I think, probably will resonate with many in the community. So well said Edan will include a link in the show notes. And that's it for me.

Ricky Grove 18:49
TMU was, I believe, stood for The Movies Underground, and was established when the movies came out back in what 98? Was it

Tracy Harwood 19:01
when it when The Movies was launched? Right. I think it was about back in 2004. Oh, geez, I'm

Ricky Grove 19:08
way off. Yeah.

Tracy Harwood 19:10
It was finally in, you know, Peter Molyneux definitely talked about it many, many years before. So you probably remember that kind of conversation back in the 90s. But it didn't actually come to fruition until... well, one of the first films to come out from it was the French democracy, which was made within a few days of it being launched. I think that was a 2005 film. So it's 2005. It was actually launched and then it ran until 2008 I think when it was switched off. And you're right, this is where TMUnderground came from.

Ricky Grove 19:50
Yeah. And so it was a repository for The Movies initially, but then it became wider, and it appealed to the Machinima community in general. I'm really sad to see it go. I understand why it's gone. You know, oftentimes, things like this are are driven by the passions of an individual or a group of people. And once they have moved on to something else, or someone dies or becomes involved in another job, it all falls away. And I'm sorry to hear that I understand that it's inevitable. But I just want to thank all of the people involved with TMUnderground for caring so much about machinima and the Machinima community enough to start a depository and a repository for films and to keep it up for as long as they did. Thank you. Yes. Listening,

Tracy Harwood 20:46
You can still find bits of it. Not all the links to the films. I'm afraid I did. Check it out earlier today. In fact, you can still find the site on the Wayback Machine.

Ricky Grove 20:58
That's at archive.org. Wayback machine. That's good. Yeah. Well, thank you. I thought it would be the segue in the very last bit of our news section. As a segue into our films section, which comes next, we're going to be focusing on films made in the virtual Metaverse now of Second Life, and I thought it would be interesting to do just a brief discussion of Second Life as a way to get us in the mood and thinking about them. And I was involved in Second Life for some time. We did a machinima film festival there for some time. So I had met a lot of people and worked with technology there. And then for some reason, I moved away from it. I don't know why. It'd be interesting thing to explore because I think some other people like Tracy and maybe Damien. I know Phil left Second Life there. So it'll be interesting to find out why. But I do want to talk a little bit about what Second Life is how it is survived for 18 years, to come to a point where it's thriving now with the whole promotion of the metaverse. Second Life was, is poised to reap benefits of all of that attention. But I think the main reason that Second Life has survived and it's done so well, is money. It has has 600 million annual gross domestic product, 2 billion user generated generated assets have been created to date. It has 200,000 daily active users, and it processes more than 345 million annual transactions and get this it pays more than $80.4 million to creators annually. I think that says a lot about why Second Life has stayed alive for so long, because it's a way for people to make a living way for people to make money. We'd like to see think of it sort of sentimentally as oh, well, it's a great place to be free and and you know, and we can create art and do all this stuff. But there's a lot of money to be made in this. And one thing that you won't hear on a Phil Rosedale-Wagner our podcast is the sex aspects of Second Life. There's a huge wall that separates people from the regular Second Life from the area where sex workers are, are and it's big. It's a really big deal. And a lot of money is made that way for virtual sex, something they don't want to talk about because of the bizarre morality of American and American interests middle class interest, but that's the main reason why I think it has survived What do you guys think?

Damien Valentine 24:09
Yeah, I'm spending a lot of time exploring Second Life and there are so many places you can go with a store set up and people are selling their creations costumes that you can wear or props you can carry around or buildings you can put on your own lands, even vehicles, you can get in and drive around or fly around, right? I mean, you're no surprise that I was quite interested in finding spaceships I could get in and fly around. Yeah. I even had a found area that was I don't know if it's still there now but they obviously big Doctor Who fan so they recreated the Cardiff Bay Area from the real city, which is used a lot for filming. And because I've lived near there, I went and had a look round and I said what I've been to the real place and what you guys have done is so accurate to the real place. And they were very happy to know that and you can go and you can buy all these Doctor Who related things that people are created. So I've got a Tardis, which you could sit in and press a button, it would dematerialise just like the show, and then it could make it randomly take you to other parts of Second Life - so that was great to explore in a way that is on theme for something I enjoyed as well.

Ricky Grove 25:27
Yes, a second life also rents, land, and buildings. I know that when I joined golley back in 2008, 2009, something like that. I probably spent over $100 in the first month, just buying clothing, buildings, getting a house at a certain place, filling the house with furniture that I liked, and buying hair and going shopping and all of that, in fact, that was one of the most fun things is I got together with somebody I met on Second Life and they took me on a shopping trip to all the places that they liked, and you go into these stores that are open 24/7 virtually, and you go in and you're looking you just buy, you find something you like and you bang bang, it's right in your inventory. In fact, by the end of the first year, my inventory was hopelessly snarled, with purchases that I just completely disorganised. You know, it was like you had a big room and you threw all your stuff in it.

Damien Valentine 26:42
Hello, these sellers, they give away free stuff as well. So you get a taste of some of their creations or something I just want to. So you can go just go around and collect all this free stuff. And again, your inventories fills up with all these things you've collected. And yeah,

Tracy Harwood 26:58
What do you do with them? That's it. That's an interesting thing. I mean, yeah, I like you, Ricky, I can't I just I get into it? Well, we, I got into it a little bit before you, I think, because we were exploring it at my work as a potential, you know, we bought an island, and we were going to use it as a kind of a sandbox environment with students, and with a view to doing some, you know, interesting virtual teaching experiences in that. Well, we have a few folks sort of playing around with it. And it kind of quickly died out as a sort of a classroom environment because of course was what we were trying to do, in many ways was replicate what we do offline. And, and, you know, during that kind of period, there was a lot of folks going in there and doing stuff, which was basically doing the same as you would do in real life. And, you know, it was just, it wasn't really pushing the boundaries of it, I think. Right? So, you know, there were a lot of brands in the I remember, and, you know, brands like IBM, I think was in there, and Harley Davidson and whatnot. And they were just, you know, creating virtual assets of their physical assets. And why? I don't know

Ricky Grove 28:20
Exactly, yeah.

Tracy Harwood 28:21
And so that was, you know, that that didn't last very long. But what I did used to enjoy is, you know, going around, I mean, Chantal Harvey was a, was a real good friend in this space. She'd been in there for years and years. And she showed me around and we went shopping, she showed me, you know, all the, all the kind of good places to go and get stuff. Well, you know, primarily, the reason we were doing that was because we wanted to, you know, do do sort of presentations, where we were doing the presentation simultaneously in the virtual space. Remember, one such space where we were doing it both in the virtual space, and I was in the physical space and, you know, my avatar was doing stuff in the, in the virtual space along with, with hers, and what have you, and, you know, so we had to get dressed up and what have you, what was quite fun about that was not that you weren't just dressing it in clothes, you would, you were, you know, changing its shape, or the way it moved or how it sat down, or if it could dance and you know, all of those things, I thought were really kind of fascinating things that you could add as character features, if you like to your to your avatar, which kind of made it more kind of more interesting, and this sort of social aspect of it. The fact that you were doing that with a friend was was was really you know, we had such a laugh. In fact, last year when we did a I'm recording in, in one of Chantel's meetup groups Machinima Mondays Meetup group, which remains the longest standing community group doing machinima type stuff in Second Life. You know, we had a bit of a meetup beforehand, and we went through some of the space and we were having just a real good laugh about, you know, how the avatars working and, you know, some of the things that you can do within can't do without and what have you. So that I thought was really interesting. The other aspect is to do you know, more recently, I think to do with using it for virtual events and virtual activities. And, you know, when we think about the last couple of years, it's been incredibly difficult to do social stuff in real life. And, you know, I think one of the reasons it's been growing again, in the last couple of years is because, because of what's been going on in real life, and people have wanted to sort of meet folks in social settings again. So, you know, there's some, you know, some great kind of destination things that you can kind of go and do.

Ricky Grove 31:13
Some timing, to some extent is what? Yeah, so everything manifests. Yeah, yeah, like everything else,

Tracy Harwood 31:21
I think, you know, like, like the growth of zoom, for example, like the growth of Omniverse. All of real, all of it really is, you know, it probably would have been a slow steady growth towards that but the fact is that because of pandemic has accelerated the adoption of that sort of stuff. No, go ahead. Well, I was gonna say, and that's probably why there are a lot of other organisations now interested in the metaverse, too.

Ricky Grove 31:44
Yeah, that's true. Oh, one thing I think happened, that caused Second Life to decline a bit. And go out of the sort of Zeitgeist was that I believe, Second Life preceded Facebook. And I believe Facebook came out just after the height of Second Life's popularity, and I think it provided a better way for people to do social interactions, it's great. Because one of the problems that you have a Second Life is simply the difficulty of access and control. That's why they have a beginner's area where you, you start out in a sort of play box area where you learn how to do controls and stuff. But even so it was, it took me a month or so to become comfortable with how to how to contact people how to go from place to place, how to move, how to how to, how to do messaging to people, how to record how to get things that you bought on to your avatar. And I think the interface, it is, and I think that was something that they hope that they'll address in the future, because they haven't done much to address it.

Tracy Harwood 33:14
It's still, it's still not easy to use, I think.

Ricky Grove 33:18
yeah. And Facebook provided a way that you could just do it like that. Yeah. And it was perfect. It was like a blog or a website where you could just drop and drag and move in. And I think that was one of the things that pulled people away from Second Life.

Tracy Harwood 33:38
Its interesting, I wouldn't have compared those two things. Or put them together because you know, Facebook is more asynchronous. And more about the real you. And Second Life was all about creating a another persona and multi-you write or an extended you.

Ricky Grove 34:00
Well, I was thinking more of the social interactions. Yeah. Rather than the because the people that wanted to stay in Second Life because they liked the avatar concept and then another you concept, they stayed. Yeah. And I also think one thing that that Facebook didn't have that Second Life has and still has a great abundance is its appeal to the artistic and freedom-loving people who want to create things. Yeah, whether they're creating art, whether they're creating architecture or land, or, for example, the people that did the Doctor Who thing what a great project, you get a bunch of people who are fans of Doctor Who and they say, We're gonna recreate this thing, and it becomes this driving force in their lives so that they share their creativity and Facebook makes that once you get past the hump of the interface, and how to change things and how to model and all that and you get good at it. You can create some pretty amazing things, you know, in fact quite a bit of of. I'm getting ahead of myself here, but I'll try not to do too much. One of the things that you see a lot in Second Life machinima is documentaries of installations or locations. Yeah. Which I think is fascinating. You know,

Tracy Harwood 35:22
It's, you know that that has given machinima a whole you know, it's a whole different world of machinima for something like Second Life where you're documenting that virtual experience. Yeah, yeah. There is no other way, you know, you have to use machinima. When you're, you know, when you're taking a photograph, position, whatever it is, you're doing, like in a virtual studio, or to create, you know, a fly through of an installation or an experience or whatever you do, machinima is the only way to do it. So there is a real, you know, it plays a really important role where it does.

Ricky Grove 36:03
And so some of the questions we're going to be asking in the film's version, which is coming up is every game the idea that every game creates a world for the player to be involved in. So what's unique about Second Life? What are the visuals and places in Second Life that that inspire filmmakers to create films in them? And how is Second Life filmmaking different from Half Life to filmmaking? Or Grand Theft Auto filmmaking? And what are the benefits of shooting in Second Life, creating a movie and Second Life as opposed to creating a movie in Minecraft? And those are some of the questions that we're going to be asking, as we go through our film choices, all of which will be Second Life machinima in our film section coming up next. And I hope you will join us in the Thursday after this one. And we're we're pre recording this. So this will be in March, the Thursday after to see what films we come up with. Phil will join us he's come up with some interesting films. And I'm really excited to talk about the films that Tracy and Damien come up with, and to talk about filmmaking and machinima in Second Life in general.

Ricky Grove 37:24
So that's our show today for you. Thank you so much for watching, I really enjoyed sharing the news with my pals here. We're gonna we're basically a podcast. So you'll get the audio version of this at Transistor. But you can go to, that's our provider. But you can go to Completely Machinima.com to see all of the episodes all the way back to number one. You can also subscribe through any major service, Apple, Google all the others. And you can send us an email at Talk [at] Completely machinima.com. We'd love to hear your comments about Second Life, especially people who create films and Second Life, your ideas on some of the news that we have today. And with that, oh, the last thing is make sure we're doing the video version of our podcast and that's on our Completely Machinima YouTube channel. And we're trying something different this week. We're using zoom as a way of recording our video. So we'll see how that turns out. But thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. And hey, guys, thanks for sharing your news with me.

Tracy Harwood 38:29
Welcome, thank you

Damien Valentine 38:29
See you, next time.

Ricky Grove 38:30
All right. We'll see you. Bye bye.