Ricky Grove 00:39
Welcome to the And Now For Something Completely Machinima podcast. I am Ricky Grove. We're here this week to review another film. Damien's pick. But let me quickly introduce my pals, Phil Rice, Tracy Harwood and Damian Valentine. And I'm Ricky grove. So Damien, tell us about your pick.

Damien Valentine 00:59
So I picked two films this month, I kind of went for a space exploration theme. Because I'm a little bit excited for Starfield, which by the time everyone's listened to this should be released. And I think I'm going to have a similar problem with that game that you do with Elden Ring, Ricky. So I found these two videos, the first one was called Terra. And it's made with the Unreal Engine by J Thomas Wilson. And it's about this is a very short video, it's about this little robot drone thing. And it's scouting around this devastating environment. And then it goes under ground, and it finds something down there. And I'm trying to work out should I see what it finds? Or shall I just let you watch it and see for yourself? So I think I'm gonna go with that last one. But I really enjoyed the craft of this, it's kind of it's kind of a mystery to it, it doesn't really give you any answers. Like you don't know why this planet is the way it is, you don't know who this robot is, or who sent it or you know, where it came from, or why it is after what it found. And I kind of liked that. It kind of makes you think, why and leaves you it's up to your imagination as to be kind of entertained by it. We've seen some other videos in the past where someone's going to explore some planet and there's some kind of monster there or something nasty happens. And nothing like that happens. This one. It's just a it's a pleasant little video about this robot thing. And I really enjoyed it. And I thought I would share it with all of you this week. So what do you think I think,

02:35
well, what about the second one Into black? Tell us about that.

Damien Valentine 02:38
All right. Into Black, it's actually last month, when we were talking about the No Man's Sky video that I found. Phil, you said something about if there was a game that combines the backgrounds of No Man's Sky with the faces of Star Citizen and something space battles from some other game, which I can't remember. And I thought Elite Dangerous kind of has that mix up. So I started looking for Elite Dangerous videos. And I came across this director Indigo. And what he does, he does some very cinematic videos of the game. And he's done hasn't done that many as five or six. They're all really good at showing off different aspects of the game, much like the No Man's Sky video I chose last month. And obviously this is a much more gritty and realistic type of game than No Man's Sky is. It's got realistic physics and everything's designed to look functional, and dirty and really lived in, where No Man's Sky is so colourful and bright. But it still has that element of wonder and because a huge galaxy to explore. And so what Indigo has done is he's made we've made several videos, showing off some of those things he's found and seen from space stations to planets. And one of his other videos he did has this really stunning one take shot, which normally we think wouldn't work but he's kind of got the spaceship flying down that night, cross this planet surface and as sort of base up in their distance and he kind of flies around, it's shooting at the defences and they're shooting back at it and it's all done in one take. I don't know how he did it because the camera is following him perfectly. And there is a camera mode in the game. But you can't really control it like that. So I don't know how he did it. But it works so well kept it interesting the way the cameras moving around the ship and the ship was moving all over the place. It wasn't just like that, right behind fixed it. And I just I was completely blown away by all of his videos and I had a struggle to pick one to choose because I couldn't obviously couldn't pick all of them. But I went with his most recent one in the end, which I think shows have many different aspects and again, so that's why I chose it. Great.

04:56
I prefer Terra over Into Black cuz into black is basically space landscape. And a it's not something we've seen before and other games it I have to say it's quite beautiful and it's very well crafted. So it certainly is worth watching. But it was less interesting to me because it didn't have a human element to it of it's more of a display of, of great scenery and things like that. Whereas Terra was very much in the Pixar style, in which the central character is the sort of robot who is curious, and makes sort of awkward and funny discoveries. The thing that they did that Pixar doesn't do, or that Pixar does all the time, is that Pixar has so much sentimentality attached to everything, whereas this movie did not have that sentimentality, I don't think and I much preferred it. As strange as that sounds, because Pixar films that millions and millions and millions of admirers who love that sentimentality, but it's like green kryptonite to me. So if you understand the Superman reference, but I thought that was just gorgeous, it was beautiful, beautifully rendered, very creative cinematography, the character develops the music element of it, this sort of accidental discovery of mixtapes, and things like that. liftover really added a beautiful aural quality to the whole thing. It made me want to watch an entire feature film with this character. So I thought it was Terra was an excellent pick. Again, it shows off at what Unreal Engine can do for the modern machinima why everybody isn't using that engine. I don't understand, but really great picks. Damian joins him.

Phil Rice 06:52
Yeah, I very much got the Pixar vibe off of this off of Terra as well, Ricky. And I noticed I didn't know how to put it into the words you did, but I noticed okay, there's, it reminds me sort of like WALL-E, you know, but it's not the same. It's an I think it's that they don't try to overplay the cuteness, which Pixar has a lot of trouble. They have a lot of difficulty resisting that impulse. I think, you know, it's not enough to have WALL-E and make him sympathetic and make these cutesy little noises but then he's got to have a cute little pet cockroach with them as well. That's you know, and this didn't, it dispensed with all of that and just let the let the robot be what it is and carry us through this narrative if you want to call it that. It's it's not a sharply defined narrative. And I think that's why it works well is like Damien said it's, it's, there's a casualness to it, but it really works for this film. Yeah, the the rendering and all that is beautiful, and the character is interesting. But I think ultimately, that's what made this not have that, that overly sweet Pixar pneus was that they didn't overplay the cuteness part. This is a cute character. You could see it you know, this is this this could very easily be merchandised into a baby Yoda toy on the shelf or something it's cute, but they're not they're not making that the point. And I sometimes with with Pixar, that's that is the sense is we got to make sure the kids know that we know this is cute. So let's add this and let's have him do this cutesy little thing. And yeah, this was more kind of about just the daily business with a good Yeah. I love the soundscape on this the the one thing that stood out to me that kind of made me chuckle was there's a final scene where he is he's gotten into his spaceship and popped in, I assume one of the mixtapes and then as the shot cuts to outside the spacecraft, the music is playing while he's there in the cockpit. And then the shot cuts to outside as the spacecraft is taking off. And you could still hear the music playing but muffled like it was in a car that was driving. It just cracked me up it kind of out of the suspension of disbelief for a minute. But as a gimmick, I thought it was a really, really funny one. Kind of taking a trope from you know, a typical movie with a car driving away and you still hear the incident. Yeah, it's a spaceship. And part of my brain was like, Oh, come on. I can't eat. You wouldn't hear that it. It's great, you know, so who cares? Yeah. Into Black. It certainly raised my interest about Elite Dangerous as an engine to possibly steal from. It is it's a montage and I don't think it tries to be the more that is beautifully done. And yeah, it's a good advertisement for the game even though I don't think that's I'm not implying that he's doing it for that, that paycheck, but ultimately that's What it is it's looking at this beautiful game. And, you know, like, like you guys are both said, we've we've seen quite a few of films, that that seems to be the intent. This is one of the better ones that I've seen. So, but I definitely was was more intrigued by, by Terra because there was a character. And there was there was something to think about and Into Black was more of just something to sit back and enjoy the views, you know. So yeah, great picks, Damien.

Tracy Harwood 10:29
Do you know what my comments are not dissimilar. And a little bit of digging, of course, on Terra Wilson. Basically, the way that he made this film was, was to use it as a means to hone his storytelling process in the Unreal Engine. So it was a test project for him as far as I can tell. He also said he made the film using a 2016 iMac without a lot of, you know, visual enhancement tech alongside. So he didn't use any ray tracing or you know, or, or a special GPU that he you know, that he could use the we see a lot of Unreal stuff done with these days, Nvidia cards and all rest of it. It wasn't done on any of that. And basically, what he was trying to do was see how far he could push the look with just the basics. And, you know, I sort of read that after I'd first watched it. And I thought, you know, what, that probably makes a little bit of sense, when, for some of the things I was just struggling to see the detail of because it was really quite dark. And I suspect that's probably one of the things that a better graphics card might have helped with that darkness and the and the ability to see a little bit more detail in that darkness. So that's that was kind of one general point on that. The other thing, and I read the description of the film, before I then looked at it, which I perhaps shouldn't have done because from what I saw of the description, it was a lonely drone, looking for some some life, blah, blah. And then when I watched it, I thought that's not a lonely drone, that's a happy little drone. It's, it's out and about and it's looking for some playmates or it's, you know, it's doing it's doing something on this kind of deserted planet. So immediately, I kind of felt a slight disconnect with what I thought the author that you know, the creator said they were he was trying to achieve with it. When he got inside that cave, so there's, you know, this drone flying about he goes inside this cave, and he finds this wrecked thing. It looks to me like it was an old wrecked train that he'd found I don't know whether it was but that's what it looked like an old train. And you said he found a mixtape? Well, I looked at it and I thought is that a transistor radio that bursts into life as he picks it up? I don't know, it, that's kind of what how I how I read it. So it kind of you know, he sort of did that and then immediately heads back to the, to the, to the ship with that with the with the song that it recorded sort of presumably swimming around in it in its little you know, in its chip brain. And then it gets back to the ship and sort of as you say flies off. It's it's it's basically using the the sound, the soundscape. I mean, it sounds like it's brilliant, but it's also using Space Force by Mass Donkey, I think, as the original sound score, though, as an accompaniment to the original sound score. Which is an interesting kind of way of mixing up what you know what the what the sound design of it is, with something that's, you know, trying to trying to sort of be a little bit more eclectic, I suppose. I guess the thing that I sort of struggled with is some of the some of the ways that the story was put together just didn't make a lot of sense to me. And I'm being really super critical here because I loved it set for the fact to me what there were was a lot of Anakin and what to say and an aneurysm and a grism. Thank you.

14:33
Anna Crism is a character in the new Star Wars. That's the one

Tracy Harwood 14:38
that's got a whatever. anachronisms with the story itself me. So although it was beautifully presented and a lot of fun, it neither matched what the description was, nor really stitched together in terms of what it was showing and how it was doing it. Fun though it was with a with a fantastic soundscape beautiful editing, and, you know, some some clearly quite gifted way that it was all sort of put together. But there were, I don't know, it jumped me out more in more than one way I think, to use your terms Phil. But I loved it. So that was my thoughts on that one. Into black into black. Yeah, okay, so made in Elite Dangerous, I think film filming done in the game. And what I understood was that the creator Indigo had enhanced the colour in some post rendering process. And obviously, it was a cinematic piece, not so much a story. But it's a love letter, basically, to the world of Elite, or Elite, and, or Elite Dangerous with some of these stunning shots. But to be again, the images didn't make a lot of sense to me. And that's because obviously, I don't know this, this world. So I didn't know the way in which just the spaceships and the space generally connects to the to the planet and what's going on with the, with the fighting and all of that kind of stuff. But you've got basically a jumble of scenes that were kind of random both in, in, in colour in what they were portraying and in in how they then told a lot, there wasn't really a connected story that I could detect, other than the fact that it was an homage to the game. So, you know, beautifully rendered as it was, it didn't make a hell of a lot of sense to me, if I'm perfectly honest. And I'm and I'm still not really entirely sure why I got a vibe from it that made me think this has got a real retro feel to it.

Damien Valentine 16:51
I can answer that. Alright, so the very first shot, you see this space station, it's just a wireframe model that's from the very original Elite from 1984. So and then, at the end, you kind of get that, that same shot again at the space station. So it kind of is how it started. This is obvious now, but then we're looking back at how it all started again.

Tracy Harwood 17:14
I see that makes a lot more sense, because I didn't know that but I definitely got a retro sense through it vaguely Star Wars ish, have to say, but with more triangles and then you know balls kind of thing, which is what you've tended to get a lot more often in Star Wars so yeah. I thought the you know, the music accompaniment was great. I think it was an original score for it as well I believe both both very enjoyable, but to me didn't have both of them didn't really cut it for me in terms of the storytelling capability. Which I you know, we've seen some others that I thought you know, even though it's a cinematic it tells just a beautiful story. And there's a there's a last last one we looked at No Man's Sky when I just thought even though you said it was a cinematic the narrative was there that I could pick out because of what it portrayed. Didn't get such a good sense of what that was in this one. But great picks, nonetheless. Thank you.

18:16
Yep, really good pics. So write to us and let us know whether you agree with Tracy. And that doesn't make any sense. But it's really pretty. Or you agree with Damien, myself and Phil, which is it's excellent. And we understood it very well. Send your comments to talk at completely machinima.com yours. Get a lot of show notes from Tracy, who does a great job. Thank you at completing machinima.com website. We'll be back next week with Tracy's picks which I have. I've got questions for you, Tracy. These backs I've got questions. So that's it for this week. Thank you for watching. I'm Ricky Grove, Damien Valentine, Phil Rice, and the omnipotent Tracy Harwood. See ya. Bye bye.