Ricky Grove 00:45
Hi everyone. I'm Ricky Grove. And this is And Now For Something Completely Machinima podcast where we cover machinima and related real time technologies, as Phil always says, I'd like to introduce my friends, who are my co host Tracy Harwood, Damien Valentine and the inimitable Phil Rice. Hey,

Tracy Harwood 01:05
hey,

Phil Rice 01:06
hey there.

Ricky Grove 01:07
This final week of November is my pick. And I chose something more for its potential than its actual technical qualities. It'll be interesting to see what my friends have to say about it. It's called Life A Star Citizen Stuntman Machinima, and it's by a group called For Science. And it's exactly what the title describes a it's a stuntman in Star Citizen, which is a popular sort of space game. And it's about this sort of, you know, kind of dumb, dumb ass stuntman, who is more interested in drinking beer than he is working on jobs, he goes out, and of course, the jobs are catastrophic. And he constantly is being reconstructed, or parts of him are being rebuilt because he's just so dumb, he can't figure it out. I chose the machinima, which on the face of it, you might not think gave us some machinima that I would choose. But as I said, I was more interested in the potential with it. The film has lots of problems, sound issues, that visual issues, storytelling issues. But the thing that most impressed me is that the creators were seemed to me were trying to make a combination of humour, and drama. Because there are several times where this stunt man's drinking becomes quite pathetic. And you feel for him, he wakes up in a drunken stupor in some place and you, you begin it, it takes on a little bit of depth, and you begin to think, well, maybe the life of a stuntman is a problem, because alcohol would solve all of those problems. Now, they don't fully explore that. But I like the fact that it's potential. On the surface, it's very funny. But the central character often has this quality that makes you feel so sorry, sorry for him. And although the songs that they use the country in western song is a bit on the nose, it still is appropriate to it. And overall, I liked it. I thought it was a fun, interesting film that I knew would bring out ideas and conversation. So I'm looking forward to your comments on it. But I enjoyed it. I would urge you to watch it and make up your own mind. So Have at it you guys, tell me what your thoughts are.

Damien Valentine 03:51
I liked that. This was different from a lot of what you'd expect from a Star Citizen film to be like, we've seen things that are sort of heroic characters going into battle and defeating the enemy and having those kinds of adventures and we saw films that are very serious, but deal with the lives of people living in this world. And okay, so this life was stunt man is someone living in this world, but it's not the kind of life you'd expect someone to make a commission of a video.

Ricky Grove 04:23
Yes, right. That's right. That's it. That was one of the appealing things to me about it. Yeah. So

Damien Valentine 04:30
I really liked that this is a completely different approach to telling a story in the world of Star Citizen. And it was really funny. And you kind of explore this aspect of filmmaking in a game that's being used for filmmaking, which just kind of adds this extra layer to it, which I quite enjoyed as well. Good point. And obviously, when you have these other videos with big battles going on, all of the characters you see in all the vehicles are controlled by real players. So in a way, they are stuntmen. Hopefully, they realise they're a bit better than this case. But it's nice to see that I kind of felt like, they must have watched my those epic political videos and thought, what it's like for the characters in those scenes to actually be like, what would they be like after the film was, was that? And yeah, it's a little bit, it's a film, it's very rough. But I feel like that makes it work better than if it was a very polished video. It was do to have that perfect sound and perfect editing and all that, I don't know if it would work the same, because his, it reflects his lifestyle that is drunk, and he's a mess. And the video being rough, and a little bit messy adds to that in a way. I don't know if that really makes sense. There were

Ricky Grove 06:03
there were additional technical problems that they shouldn't have had, for example, several scenes are much too dark, they should have made them much brighter. Also, many of the scenes have no sound effects at all in them, they should have done some work on creating ambient sound. And it's not that hard to come up with simple sound effects for different scenes. I didn't do any of that. It gave me the feeling that the film was created. They came up with the idea and they just wanted to get it done. They didn't spend a lot of time on the details. But I'm hoping that with good feedback from us and possibly from other folks on it there might improve their filmmaking techniques and their next film will be even better. I'd

Damien Valentine 06:46
like to think so too, because I agree there's a lot of potential with these filmmakers to tell stories that are different in Star Citizen so I'd like to see more of that. That more of the characters that you don't normally see covered in in a game like this. Yeah.

Tracy Harwood 07:05
It's really interesting that you say that because this is obviously a community project and they've got a discord. And in when you look on the discord now I joined the discord just sort of see what it was they were doing there. I mean, there's some there's some well established Star Citizen teams on there. I mean, for example, there's EE Studios on there whose series Overclocked that, we we've mentioned that one in the past, there's about 500 or so members in that community. And the whole point of it is actually that they they support one another to make Star Citizen, what they call lore friendly machinima for the community itself. So they're, you know, they're really they're really focused on the, the machinima techniques that they can kind of deliver in, in the inside the, you know, the game and the aesthetic of the, of the game itself. And there's, there's all sorts of threads within it about, you know, finding different crew and helping with editing, video and kind of technical aspects and whatnot. And I think that's it, you know, the way that supporting one another to do that. It's really quite interesting, and worthwhile, if you excuse me. But from, from my point of view, in terms of the film, yeah, it was, it was a it was the whole, the whole thing was just a little bit too long for me. You know, we're presented with this sort of day in the life of this kind of alcoholic stuntman who's kind of clearly disillusioned with his lifestyle. And obviously does it just for the money, although he's not making any or not enough. And I kind of really liked I kind of liked the way that they presented the sort of behind the scenes story of it, I thought that kind of concept of really got really quite a lot of potential. With the actors, personality, more being teased than, than really what you saw in the tale itself. I think, I think I think what you got through it is the sense of this guy. You got the sense of what what he was trying to portray as this sort of almost what I call perhaps a B roll performance. Now he's not even a main stuntman. Yeah, he's kind of like a guy in the background that yeah,

Ricky Grove 09:47
the guy that will do the stunts that nobody else will exactly.

Tracy Harwood 09:50
It's kind of a sense of him not being the the main man or the you know, covering them. He's hardly the body double for Tom Cruise. Example. That was his story.

Damien Valentine 10:02
He's the guy that gets killed in the background about 1000 times.

Tracy Harwood 10:06
Yes, exactly. That's definitely the sense of the character that you got. And I thought that was portrayed pretty well, you know, he's, he's an average player. He thought what he's what he's what he's doing really, he's, he's, he's been portrayed as the background for a very average game player. And therefore, what you've got is the discussion you know, this bit where he goes in sort of talk to his agent. And then the bit at the end, where he got a little bit more of an interesting assignment was to do with the fact that actually all he's there to do is get killed by this really average gameplay. Much like a kind of a caged animal to shoot for certain types. That kind of that kind of thing. But so much more with that. I thought that was I thought the idea was there the execution just didn't cut it well enough for me, but definitely got great potential. I, you know, there's, there's so much more they could do with that. I just really, I really liked the potential there. I didn't pick up so much as you Ricky on the soundscape. I thought it was. I thought it was okay, perhaps there could have been some elements that were more exaggerated. And they could have made it clearer and easier to see what was kind of going on. I thought that the music was okay to a point. But then it got you know, that same music was sort of running through the first part. And then it was also running at the end. And I

Ricky Grove 11:40
noticed the different style of the music at the end. The music at the end was a punk. Yeah,

Tracy Harwood 11:46
yeah. But it was still the same. I get I get where you're going with that. But and then then I thought, well, actually, the point is, it's just, it starts all over again tomorrow. It's just exactly the same for this character, day in day out. And I got that. I thought that was kind of nice, but I just wanted a little bit more from it, I think. But yeah, I don't think I've got anything more kind of really say about it. But I mean, I did enjoy it. I just thought you know, needed a little bit more finesse.

Ricky Grove 12:19
Thanks for being tactful, Tracy. Phil.

Phil Rice 12:22
So you're not good. You're probably not going to expect me to say this Ricky, but this is the kind of Star Citizen content that I've been waiting for. And I mean that without sarcasm. This is old.

Ricky Grove 12:44
See that? Say that one more time? Because I will I'm putting on my sarcasm detector go ahead.

Phil Rice 12:49
This is the kind of star citizen content I've been waiting for. This is okay.

Ricky Grove 12:54
There's no reading. There's no sheerly reading here early

Phil Rice 12:58
engine machinima. It it's you know, this month writing has come up a few different times. And we've we've kind of danced around the idea that everything else in a film can be great. But if the writing isn't good, it brings the whole thing down. The inverse of that is also true. If the writing is great, it elevates the whole piece, even if the rest of it is a hot mess, which is what this is. It's a hot mess. That you're there's, you know, he turns on the bed and there's no sound whatsoever. It just sound guy just jumps out. It's like, Oh, come on, how hard is that? There's all kinds of flaws. But it's hilarious. It's a hilarious film. First and foremost. That's not the only emotional element to it as Ricky, you mentioned very, very astutely, but it's hilarious. My favourite moment and line is after he's met with his agent slash boss. And he's walking out of the office and the agent says, I love you say it back. It's just so perfect, man. Perfect. Yeah, yeah. The way that the beer drinking scene that happened shortly after that, where it's him standing at the bar, and he's got the bottle up, and it just keeps cutting two additional bottles. Young guys waiting behind him at the bar, like trying to get just wonderful decision. They're like, it's so sloppy. But it's also what a great way to convey that, you know, I'm reminded of there's some scene from I want to I want to say it might be one of Tarantino those movies where a guy is watching someone from a car like observing it, smoking cigarettes, and as he finished something, he dropped him out the window, and then it cuts forward in time, and there's this huge pile of cigarette butts. He's still there smoking, and finally someone comes out of the house. And that scene has been replicated many times. That was, that was the feel of that of this is way and somewhat funny way to, to convey something. So the music was interesting. And you know, I kind of I have almost an allergy to, to copyrighted music. And you know, because of my experience in the past with, with, with copyright and with copyrighted music getting in the way. I have to recognise though that the climate has changed. And if you're not looking to commercially capitalise on your work, then all hell copyrighted music, you know, because YouTube, as long as you pick something that's not so obscure, it's outside their catalogue, you know, certain artists are not in the content ID system, you could use any copyrighted music you want to. And as long as you don't care that you're not going to monetize your video, YouTube's happy to let you use it. So there's a part of me that goes, well, then why not take advantage of that? Why not just have fun with that. And so he picked songs, whether or not they were great songs to pick on, you know, that's, that's, that's debatable, for sure. But there, there's numerous copyrighted music uses in this. But he did it, I could tell that it was picked to serve the story. And I don't know, it kind of made me examine my own attitudes about that, that, you know, again, it's like something we talked about earlier this month, it really comes down to what is the objective in making this film? What are the long term goals for it? And if it's not to monetize, then why deny yourself that? You know, I don't know, it's just something that's rolling around my head. Now, the the song that was talked about by Ricky and Tracy, both, it actually occurs three times. There's the initial thing of it. Then the second time it templated. He gets drunk, they slow it down. And then there's the punk version of the exact same song. I feel like that, you know, that song was there as like the punchline of a joke, basically, the main line of it of, you know, how does the phrase of it go? If you're dumb, you have to be tough.

Ricky Grove 17:36
If you're dumb, you gotta be strong, something like that.

Phil Rice 17:39
Right? That's a joke that deserves to be told once. But because the song was, was replayed and replayed, maybe that's that same joke. Again, it's like, okay, you know, maybe, yeah, we get it. Yeah. But it didn't, it didn't rub me as wrong as it sounds like that it might have with you, Tracy, that the video does go a little bit long. But I just, I just, I really liked the writing. And it's interesting there was at the end of it. I felt a little disturbed. But I couldn't pinpoint why I just felt unsettled. And it wasn't until you pointed it out, Ricky, in your comments on the alcoholism and the patheticness of it. That I thought that's it. That's That's what there was this undercurrent there, of, you know, yes, this is a comedy. But there's a real sadness to it there. Yep. That was so subtle. That subtle to the point where it makes me wonder, Was that intentional? You know, was it the in the subconscious of whoever put it together? Or were they deliberately going for that? I honestly don't know. I don't know how to know that. But it's definitely there. And, you know, the slowing down and the changing and the music helped convey that. The reuse of coffee, or beer, coffee or beer. Again, that was a joke at the beginning. And it was funny. It wasn't funny at the end, but the second time, it wasn't as funny and I was really, I couldn't figure out why. Like, I knew it wasn't just they use the same joke again, because that's common comedy technique. You reprise and tie things up. It's like any good Saturday Night Live sketch. It's when they nail the ending. The ones that don't, it's just feels like it just wanders off and your unfulfilled feeling, you know, sketch comedy, if you can tie in an ending. Great stand up comedians will do that. They'll have some kind of theme or joke they mentioned early in their set And then very often the last joke they tell, somehow ties back to that same theme and it's just brilliant. And it takes a lot of intelligent writing as, as a comedian to to be able to do that it's very, very hard. Well, this was a very simplified version of that, that reprise it wasn't a copy of the same scene, it it meant something different by the end. And and Ricky, I think you nailed it with the the reality of alcoholism actually isn't very funny. You know, it's, you know, it's, it's funny in the early scenes. But when you really let it settle in, it's not and when you really let it wash over you that this is this guy's existence, is just going from one hangover to the next, basically, and getting physically beat up. And unappreciated, and he's never going to be anything great. Dude, that's depressing. You know? That's, that's

Ricky Grove 21:07
the psychology. The Psychology of that is implied, which is the reason why he's doing this stunt work. Is because he's drinking and he's drinking, because he's doing some work.

Phil Rice 21:18
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's a spiral. Right. So I don't know, is this thing a hot mess? Or is it a work of genius? I'm left questioning that now. Because I guess what we can all agree on probably is there's some real promise here. Yeah. And, and there's no denying that more attention to details of production would only help the peace. Yes, we can disagree about to what degree the piece suffered for lack of those. But there's no question about it. More polish would make this even. I don't want to say even funnier. That's part of it. But better at it would be a better vehicle for for its message, which I think it's a message. Unless we're just reading way, way too much into this. I think the message completely transcends the star citizen universe altogether.

Ricky Grove 22:16
Yeah, yeah.

Phil Rice 22:18
There are people right now. This is their life. And I'm not talking about stuntman. I'm talking about people who are they feel like they're in a job that gives them no fulfilment, yet they feel beat up, maybe not physically, but in other ways. And they feel like they're going nowhere. Yeah. And for many of them, the coping mechanism for that is at the bottom of a bottle. That's not a comedy. Yeah, yeah. So this is comedy used as a vehicle, I suspect, to convey a message, which comedy is great at that sci fi is great at conveying certain messages that have nothing to do with space. And comedy is great at conveying some dark truths in a way that you don't feel sick. Yeah, after ingesting it. That's, that's the brilliance of when comedy is employed, right? As satire as things like this. So I have a great appreciation for that. And, you know, maybe the talents of this, whoever was involved with this, weren't either fully employed here or aren't fully fleshed out yet. Dude, what a great seed in the ground. This is for whoever's behind this. Please keep doing what you're doing. Because, you know, this is it's meaningful. It's compelling. Even though it's sloppy, I mean, how amazing is that? This this is, this is the most, let's say, primitive. In terms of production value. thing. We've watched him quite a while. But it moved me more than anything else we watched this month. Now. That's, that's that's the power of story. And frankly, I think it comes back to writing. Yeah. Regardless

Ricky Grove 24:09
of whether it was intentional or not. They chose the subject, yes, of this story. And the subject is inherently ambivalent, you can go either way. So the fact that they made that choice, and they portrayed this character the way they did, I think is an indication that that was intentional to some extent. Trisha, you had something you wanted to share? Well,

Tracy Harwood 24:36
I was just going to say I think you've absolutely nailed the the review of it. Because I completely agree with you. I can absolutely see what you're saying. And I I totally get what you're saying about the writing side of it, because it's all there in this. It's definitely all there. It's just the the aesthetic quality of it. Yeah, it is a little rough. Rough compared to some of the others that we've seen,

Phil Rice 25:00
you know what movie I'm thinking of when we watch this is the one from a couple months back. I don't remember what engine it was made in. But it was the guy on the train. Yeah. And yeah, hair restaurant. Yeah. Yeah. Remember, we had similar questions at the end of that about was this comedy or not? absurdist isn't riding on this is what made this a better vehicle for the message? Yes. And it was in this is greatly inferior production values wise to that one. Yes. Is a more memorable and more, more effective delivery mechanism for the message? And that's a

Ricky Grove 25:39
great point, Phil. Yeah. So if we could say anything to our listeners, please spend time on the writing of what you're doing. Don't just do one piece, one pass. Think about it, work on it. And I'd like to make three suggestions to the for science, the people that put this together, one, spend time on the lighting of your scenes, so that they're clear, and that you can see everything, obviously, they're going to be scenes are going to be darker. But you can't go to dark, so that you have to squint to see what's actually going on. There were several scenes and then there were so dark I couldn't, it took me a while to make out what was going on. So work on the lighting of your scene so that everything is relatively clear, you could still see it. Secondly, work on your sound. spaces have sounds you need to have ambient sounds in each different space, because it lends an emotional tone to the same. And also work on simple effects. You don't have to create sounds for every single thing. But as Phil pointed out, if you're on the bed and you're sitting on a on a bed that might have springs or you're turning you need to have some sort of sound effect for when you fall on the stairs when he got drunk and fell on the stairs, you needed to have a sound effect of him falling on the stairs. Yeah, just simple things like that. And thirdly, think about going through your scene. And going through your film, when you finally get the last cut. And seeing what scenes you don't need to tell the story. Only include the scenes that you that will continue to tell the story of what you're saying that may that will make viewers like Tracy enjoy her film more because she doesn't feel bored by repetitious scenes. So if you do those three things, your next film will be much, much better. And combine that with the excellent writing and you'll have a knockout, knockout.

Damien Valentine 27:48
Thank you. Go ahead, right, the lighting. If you're using a game where you have no control over the lighting, and it's too dark, find a different location in the game. But if you can't place your own lights just actually find find somewhere else in the game that has a similar look to it. But you can still see the characters. Yep, because a game like Star Citizen is huge. If you've got a corridor that looks right, if it's too dark, there's probably gonna be another corridor that it's still bright, but has better than lighting in it.

Phil Rice 28:20
And the only person who will know that there's not physical continuity between those spaces is you know, viewers gonna know that or no one, no one's gonna care, you know. So don't let it get in your head that will that corridor isn't actually there between those spaces. Who cares? Who cares? Nobody

Ricky Grove 28:36
cares. Nobody's gonna be thinking about that, uh, see what's going

Phil Rice 28:39
on. Yeah, the

Damien Valentine 28:40
opposite big Hollywood film. So you can do it all the time, you'll get the scene in outside a building in one place. And then they go inside the inside of the set somewhere could be in a completely different city or parts of the world. But when you're watching the film, it's the character going through the door. It looks seamless, but it's not in real life. Yeah, and you

Phil Rice 29:03
don't have the challenges of real world production, which in real world production, they've got to worry about colour correction between different locations and whatnot, when you're within a game generally, stuffs gonna blend together pretty well without much adjustment. So yeah, yeah, it's a great idea.

Ricky Grove 29:19
But for science and group of people in star citizen, keep making movies and keep making movies about offbeat characters that you don't, that are non heroic, that are every day and you can say something about, like,

Phil Rice 29:35
this was my favourite. This was my favourite film of the month. HANSOL is great. I didn't expect it to be. I didn't expect it to be when I started. I thought oh boy. What's Ricky doing here? This is what

Ricky Grove 29:46
I saw one and I looked at it and of course my little critical eye was going all at all, but then I just put that aside and I just kept watching and I really got a strong feeling about it. You No, alcoholism has been a part of my family in my life. And I could see that they were trying to do something with that. And I think that's an important thing. Well, that's it for this week this month. I want to thank all three of my guests and myself for picking interesting, fun movies. We hope you enjoy them, please contact us. If you're part of for science and you have some ideas or you or you want to be interviewed, we'd love to interview you about this movie, contact us at talk at completely machinima.com and as always, we have show notes it'll link to the the movie and other significant links at our website, which is completely machinima.com. Thank you all for listening and watching and we'll see you next month. Goodbye. We love you. Audience

Phil Rice 30:53
say you say hi back.