Phil Rice 00:45
Hello and welcome to And Now For Something Completely Machinima, the podcast about machinima, virtual production and related technologies. I'm here with my co hosts. My name is Phil Rice. I'm here with my co hosts Tracy Harwood, Ricky Grove and Damien Valentine. Good to be with you guys again. Yeah, so this week, we're gonna we're gonna kick off with a pick of mine. And I actually I don't know if I would have if this would have caught my eye if it weren't for Ricky's let's call it obsession with Elden Ring. Yeah, he's been captivated by it for, I want to say a year now. Over a year and yeah, over a year, very engrossing game. And we haven't seen a whole lot of what we would call machinima from that game. A lot of a lot of gameplay recordings, a lot of Let's Plays for sure. But this is one that I guess technically really isn't, isn't so much machinima either. But, but who cares? It's called Eldon ring. Monty Python, is that what the actual title is? Let me pull it up here. Sorry, Monty Python and the Elden Ring by by The Escapist and normally we tend to we like to focus our attention on, you know, independent creators, people like us, The Escapist is not really that they're, they're more of a, you know, they're more of a media organisation. That, that, if, if I'm understanding it right there, the main thing that they do is get video game related content of different kinds, but they've got more budget and more staff and all that behind it. So I don't know who all was involved in the actual production of this. But essentially, it's a blend of some live action footage from Monty Python and the Holy Grail with Eldon Ring. And I just found it pretty hysterical. First of all, the production values are very good. And you know, the the chroma keying, that they they had to do the keying out of these live action characters over the Elden Ring footage. It's It doesn't get any better than this. I mean, it's just, it's just perfect. I really admire that skill. Because I've tried to do stuff like that. This isn't keying out characters over a solid background, it's keying out characters over an actual background from a film made in. When was this made the late 1970s I mean, it's, it's unbelievable. And they basically have woven together these these iconic and silly scenes from that Monty Python movie, and woven it together with actions in the that will be familiar to anyone who's played the Elden Ring game. And I just found it really well done. I think it's funny. It's definitely a nice tribute to, to, you know, anyone who is at all familiar with Monty Python is going to instantly recognise where these clips were pulled from. And I think the same is true for the Elden Ring stuff that the scenes and the the events that are shown there are ones that will be familiar to and I thought they wove it together to really nicely. It's not too long, which is good, because this could have easily been overdone. They kept it pretty short. It's about four and a half minutes, I want to say, guys that right? It's short. So anyway, I really enjoyed it. It's a little bit of a silly pick. But what did you guys think? I liked

Ricky Grove 04:41
It is a little bit silly. But then again, that's what Monty Python is about. Silly and weird humour. The scene that they're taking Elden Ring from is the first boss in the game Margit the Fell, who is a big blowhard and he's just a very funny character. So the fact that they chose him to be there, the character that they're composite was very smart. It shows that they played the game and they know it. But you're absolutely right about the compositing of it, the hardest thing in compositing to do is to match the lighting from one source to the next, then they did that just brilliantly in the game. And they, it's smart. It's funny, I hope that they're going to be doing more bits from Elden Ring, because Elden ring has such a huge diversity of environments and characters. And it could really use this treatment from this sort of ironic and funny treatment. I liked it a lot. It was a lot of fun.

Damien Valentine 05:49
It kind of reminded me of these similar videos where they put I don't I'm not familiar with the Office TV show that much, but they put him in Mass Effects. And then there's a similar one, I think it's Austin Powers in Mass Effect as well. Oh, we kind of had - it reminded me have those. But I think this is actually done better. Because this is just the right length is not too long. So it gets annoying. It's not too short that you don't get the joke. Yeah, they've got it just right. And they've done the compositing, as you've already said, so well, that it just works perfectly together. And obviously, they can't change the lighting on the original live action footage, because obviously, that was something they had no involvement with at all. And normally, when you're compositing for your own film, you at least get an idea of where you want the lights to be. So with what was already there. And of course, late 70s video quality isn't going to be as great as you'd get from modern technology. So

Phil Rice 06:48
I know, right? I would expect it would have been pretty washed out compared to Yeah, contrast to the game. Yeah,

Ricky Grove 06:54
yeah, there are some there are tweaks you can do in compositing in terms of colour. And also you can change the lighting a bit by adding a light in compositing, and then changing the contrast. So there are tweaks you can do to make and I suspect they did a little of that in order to make it but one of the things that just really impressed me was their matching of action. So that when the Elden Ring character boss swung to hit them, they composite him in just the right way. So it looks like that they were being attacked or responding to him.

Phil Rice 07:31
That was absolutely in that scene when that scene when the you know, the night from Monty Python is running up the stairs. He's he's charged in and he stabbed the guy here and slashes the guy there. And they got the reactions just right. I'm not sure exactly how they did that. Because you don't see any. Any sign of the player character in Elden Ring. Yeah, so I'm not sure exactly how they did. That's very clever. And clever. Yeah. Nice immersion, I thought. Yeah. Yeah,

07:58
that's why I hope that they keep doing it. Because there's so many interesting places in Elden Ring that they could have fun with. Yeah,

Damien Valentine 08:05
I really enjoyed it too. And I can appreciate it from the technical side of it, but almost two videos together of the game. And of course, just the humour of it, it works so well on both levels. So excellent choice.

Tracy Harwood 08:17
Yeah, my my comments are very similar, actually. But actually, what I will say is it's a collaboration with a guy called Eli handle b dot wav. Yeah, and if you look at this guy's channel, Eli handle B's channel, this is his own personal, what do you call it? This is the way he

Ricky Grove 08:41
magnum opus or no, this is

Tracy Harwood 08:44
the way he operates basically.

08:47
The Vendee is his MO or alpha,

Tracy Harwood 08:49
yeah, whatever. I forget the words. It's one of those days. And basically what he does is he integrates movie characters into the video games. And from what I understand he's primarily using After Effects, something called Mocha Pro and the Pro and Adobe Premiere. And if you have a look on this guy's channel, he's done one, which is hilarious of John Wick in Resident Evil. And another. Yeah, and another one of Borat in Resident Evil, which is also very good. But like you guys said, I thought that the way that he that he did the storytelling and selecting the scenes to put them into Elden Ring was just absolutely brilliant. Because of because of the interaction, but I did spot on the stairs. There was one bit where the character was stabbing something and there was nothing there that was being stabbed that I could see. So that was a bit of a blip. But other than that, I thought it was brilliantly well done. God knows how long it takes to do these things because I bet it takes a while.

Ricky Grove 09:57
I don't know when you get your compositing skill up. It's just the same process. It's just you have to adjust it for the particular scene. Yeah, it is. It isn't that easy, that's for sure. But once you know what you're doing it, you can go faster.

Tracy Harwood 10:14
Well, to that point, super ironically, I was going to share this with you guys. So anyway, I found this week, a how to on Twitter. And I know this guy won't necessarily have used AI to do this. But this is an AI process with with largely from what I understand free tools, including Adobe's Express, through which you can remove backgrounds. images, you can remove the background, and then put anything AI generated into the background of this image and literally do it in about five steps. Wow, effectively about 10 minutes to do it. From what I understand what this guy has done. It's not film or animation as such, but it's it's it's brilliant, the way he's done it. And I will share that with you the guy that's done the how to is a chap called and Guy Parsons. But it's really it looks, it looks great. It's got loads of likes on it. And people are just sort of posting stuff up. Actually the similar kind of thing. So I imagine this isn't that difficult to do, particularly with new AI tools. But here's a question for you before we kind of move on: Monty Python. Wasn't that some of the inspiration for the name of our podcast?

Ricky Grove 11:30
Yes, exactly.

Phil Rice 11:31
Yeah,

Ricky Grove 11:32
we were Phil and I were kicking around stuff. And it just came to me from Monty Python because I enjoy. I rewatch episodes. And from that series all the time.

Phil Rice 11:45
In the early days of the podcast, Tracy would Ricky and I were batting around the idea. And we landed on this as the title, which when Ricky said it, I was like, Yes, that's it. And so Ricky had this idea where let's, let's try and put together some scenes. Because in Monty Python when they say And now for something completely different, it's John Cleese in this dark suit sitting at a desk typically. But a lot of times they would place him in an unusual place. Like at one point, it looks like the desk is sitting in the middle of a moving stream of water like and so his idea was let's let's for the promo for the podcast let's try and put some of this together. But it just ended up being more trouble than it was worth pursuing those because it's too bad. That

Ricky Grove 12:30
would have been fun.

Phil Rice 12:31
Yeah.

Tracy Harwood 12:32
Well, I think that's also super ironically, because what season are we now in?

Ricky Grove 12:37
fourth season? We're in our fourth season?

Tracy Harwood 12:40
Oh my God, we've been doing Yes. For how many years?

Damien Valentine 12:47
We 27 we have officially

Tracy Harwood 12:53
lost more than four. That's what I was gonna say. We've been talking to each other for donkey's years, it

Damien Valentine 12:57
seems Yeah. This show is especially lasted longer than the original series of Star Trek. So we're doing well.

Ricky Grove 13:04
That's brilliant. We've topped Star Trek. I'm very proud of us all really happy. And you know what the best thing about it all is that the shows and the experience have just gotten better and better.

Tracy Harwood 13:18
I completely agree. Actually.

Damien Valentine 13:19
I agree. Yeah, I enjoy coming here chatting with you guys and seeing what films you've chosen every month.

13:24
Oh, yeah. completely exceeded my expectations. Because as we started, I was sort of grouchily saying that I thought that there wasn't much machinima out there. Boy, was I wrong?

Tracy Harwood 13:37
Yeah. Big time. You were wrong. Yeah.

13:41
In fact, there's so many ms, much machinima. We on the board, we use a sort of creation board for all of us to put our ideas and picks and everything. Tracy usually has four or five extra films that says, well, if you guys hadn't found one yet, here's some you can choose. So for all of the ones that we pick, there's probably six or seven that are that are helpful that we could have. We could have chosen as well. Yeah, um, some of

Tracy Harwood 14:09
them I roll over to the next month. But mostly I put them on the blog. So there's a there's a stack load of films if you're ever short of content to watch where I where I've put them up on the blog. And sometimes, you know, they really did you know, we really should talk about them because some of them are just so good. But you just don't have space to talk about all the things that we're finding.

Ricky Grove 14:29
Yeah, well, the podcast would be too long, but we are going to have a special 100th episode which I think falls on October 20, in which we'll be sharing our our thoughts about the podcast and reminiscing and highlighting things in a general discussion

Tracy Harwood 14:47
that so you've got some other things for us this month. I'm gonna do this. Yeah, I

Phil Rice 14:50
thought we'd just take a couple moments to touch on some some items. The game Starfield has launched to great acclaim,

Phil Rice 14:58
big acclaim. Yeah, like backgrounds?

Phil Rice 15:02
Yeah, it's certainly not. You know, it's not a perfect game, but none of them are when they first come out. But if you've seen any of the footage from this game, it's just gorgeous. Just Just amazing environments and animations and settings. It's just so much detail. Really hats off to Bethesda games for. I mean, this this one's a, a real winner. Yep. And I think it's one two that we ought to keep an eye on for machinima. I think it's very well poised to be like the next big machinima engine, I think, on the level of like a Grand Theft Auto kind of thing. Let me see I checked over at Nexus Mods, which is a place where you know, they have mods for GTA and Red Dead Redemption, and you know, all these different games that people make machinima in. And one week after the game was released, there were 1000 mods already at Nexus Mods. And now mind you, there are little tweaks to the UI and stuff like that. But still, some of them are modifying the way that the game behaves, and all of that, and it's only a matter of time before somebody puts together some kind of a free cam mod. Oh, this is really Yeah, that's going to really break things wide open. And it's one of those game worlds, like Red Dead Redemption, like Grand Theft Auto, that is so expansive, that it really gets people's imaginations going in terms of, you know, side stories and other, you know, not just fan fiction, but also just, it's an inspirational game environment is what the feedback is. So I think that that's a really fertile ground there that we should keep an eye on.

Ricky Grove 16:57
Yep. keep

Damien Valentine 16:58
our eyes open. Yeah, this is without the more tools that they're going to release early next year, which is going to allow modders to bring in their own content with the actual tools that they use to build the game. Wow. Yeah.

Damien Valentine 16:58
And if they deliver on that, that's going to be just enormous. Yeah.

Damien Valentine 17:05
And if anyone's already thinking about wanting to try now, one of the options built into the game, if you go into the options and interface you can, there's a slider to turn the interface transparency, if you sit down to zero, the entire HUD disappears. So you don't worry about the health bar or anything else. Being in your shot, you can just turn it off. And then it's easy to turn it back on again when you know when you want to play the game again,

Ricky Grove 17:41
that's very smart. Very smart. I've always wanted to have a slider for transparency for controls because they're sometimes they are distracting in some games.

Phil Rice 17:53
Well then there's there's mods to change the size of those controls as well. So for gameplay purposes, there's tonnes of mods already. And then yeah, for machinima, there's stuff like that that's starting to creep into well, that's some of its built right into the game just somebody was thinking about those things for. Fantastic. Nice screenshots or video capture that kind of thing. So yeah, I think there's going to be some some neat stuff to keep an eye on there.

Tracy Harwood 18:19
Yeah. Well, I was just gonna say what I've been following the release of it so it was released 6th September, as I understand it, 1000 planets to explore only 10% of which have life on it, but I'll tell you what impressed me that there's this you know, that gorgeous scenery, and then the motion blur bit. Did you Did you notice all of that when they were ships was moving I thought that was stunning, stunning level of detail. And then the other thing that I picked up on was that Todd Howard the I think he's the game's director was basically comparing it to Red Dead. And and saying that what that what they were really after was trying to sort of develop a role playing game that can kind of compare to Red Dead Redemption. Wow. Which I think looking what is what's going on is probably achieved that. And then, of course, all the the hoopla around the modding. It's because as I can, I can sort of sit here and say it, it seems to be being badged as a modders paradise. And that's not just for you know, doing bits and pieces in the game but also a strategy that they seem to have in the background of it for releasing expansion packs and specials and what have you. So it looks like it's a really interesting game that's, that's being added to the arsenal for a lot of machinima creators.

Ricky Grove 19:49
here. I think that's great. Well, I think, you know, adding mining tools extends the life of the game, because it allows people to customise the game in ways that they had unintended are imagined. And that smart, smart business very smart.

Phil Rice 20:04
Yeah, very smart on but that's just part for sure.

Damien Valentine 20:07
Work for Skyrim is over 10 years old now. And it's still just very not quite as popular when it launched, but it's still very popular now people just play it regularly. Oh, yeah. The modding community is a very healthy one.

Phil Rice 20:18
So speaking of smart decisions, let's talk about what Unity Yeah. So if you haven't heard, Unity, made some very surprising and drastic changes to the way that its licencing and monetization works. Not, not well embraced by people who work in Unity. It was a debacle. I mean, there's really no other way to put it. Now they have since after, I want to say a couple of weeks went by, at the most of just absolute chaos. I mean, people saying this is the last thing I'm going to develop in Unity and independent developers fleeing. They have walked those back. And in fact, they walked him back, I think more than anybody expected, they would like it was actually a very good move on their part. But was it too late? I don't know that the problem with it, is it? It actually, will it damage the reputation not just to them, but it's created some suspicion now of gee, can we really trust and rely on Unreal Engine to not, you know, Epic to not do the same thing at some point? And a lot of people are looking at the the, I think it's pronounced Godot engine G O D O T. Yeah. Which does not is not built out in the same way as unity yet, but that's because, you know, a lot of the build out of Unity was, was not Unity was its users, you know, expanding the documentation and add ons and things like that. So, and a lot of people have really, you know, it's, it's, there's gonna be some fallout from this, there already has been, I think, and it's a shame to see, because Unity was, I mean, it was right up there with Epic and Unreal Engine in terms of it's a platform, not so much machinima. And I'm sure that there's some machinima stuff being done. But mainly, it was attractive to game developers for both 2d and 3d games. Yep. For years, they've built up all this goodwill. And now that's kind of been put in jeopardy a little bit, we'll have to kind of see how things, things shake down. There's an awful lot of games that you probably enjoy on on Steam and other places that were built with Unity. And it's gonna be interesting to see how it you're

23:03
gonna have a hard time overcoming this because there's been a slow decline of interest in that application, partially due to the rise of Unreal, becoming so incredible and free, you know? Yes. And developers flocking to it for virtual reality and all of that. So there was a decline, and then this event happens, which hurts them very much. I have a feeling they'll overcome it, but they won't be the same as they were before. And since they were in decline before, it's going to be iffy for them. I will look to see them possibly being sold in the near future.

Tracy Harwood 23:49
That's really interesting. That is interesting. I mean, I was following this obviously, of course, I couldn't, I could not believe what they did. But what made me smile was on my LinkedIn feed, I saw Unreal people, quite senior people share sharing links to consultancies who were saying that they would they have set up teams of folks to help people convert them from Unity to Unreal I mean, if that isn't the wound I should you really sharing that but they were so they were obviously making hay so to speak, because the sun was shining in the other direction. But actually, I I saw the q&a video which I put on the Milanote so you could have a look at it with with with Jason Weimann was interviewing Marc Whitten, who's I think he's the general manager. I have to say it's probably one of the most cringe worthy interviews I've seen. Really quite a long time. Yeah, I actually wonder how long this guy's going to stay in post. But probably worse than that is The CEOs, kind of what's been going on in the background there? Because apparently he sold a number of shares just a few weeks before their original announcement. And even though you know, there's some obvious things about that happened. It's got loads of tongues, wagging. You know that that's terrible. No, yeah. Well, you see, a lot of this sort of stuff happens in an automatic way. And they don't necessarily have any say over when shares get sold and whatnot. So it's not perhaps it's gonna

Phil Rice 25:30
raise some eyebrows for sure. With the SEC. And wow, yeah, well, absolutely.

Tracy Harwood 25:35
Eyebrows conspiracy theories. And it's that sort of behaviour, really, that spooked the market. So there's, yeah, there's a lot of questions about whether this guy is actually a credible lead for the company.

Ricky Grove 25:49
That's why I'm suggesting that the company when might be sold? Well,

Tracy Harwood 25:53
yeah, yeah. Well, and because the other thing is you and I don't think Unity will ever recover its position on the back of this, and one of the reasons why it will never now catch up the ground that it might have had for them, you know, you know, closing the gap a little bit between them. And Unreal, is the fact that it just doesn't have a Fortnight, which basically funds a lot of what Unreal, does, because it's just one of the most phenomenally successful games and course they have no strategy for putting anything like that in place. Right. So So I definitely think they're now you know, they will they've dropped the ball big time, I think,

26:33
yeah, well, Autodesk, and Adobe are in the acquisitive mood right now. So there's a chance that they if they can fit it into their family of games, family of assets, it might work in that way. But they're, that's really bad. I'm really sorry to hear that. Because Unity is excellent. It's always been excellent. And it's gotten better because of the user base. But if the user base starts to leave, or is upset with them, they're in real trouble.

Tracy Harwood 27:03
Yeah, yeah.

Phil Rice 27:05
I even wonder if Apple might by it for acquisition, simply, though much of their app store games are. They were built on Unity. That's who was probably the largest user base affected by this as developers who are selling their games on the App Store. So yeah, if if unity must be having some financial strain to even have considered a move like this? I mean, although I think it is,

Ricky Grove 27:32
across business, in general, though, I think there's been a trend towards finding ways to boost profits. I mean, now there's my partner, my wife was telling me that airline travel has become impossible for the general fare, because they have made it so difficult, so hard, and they they literally, it made it harder, so people will pay the extra to get into the Express lines. Yeah. And I think that's the case with other businesses who are working on Netflix, I think, is working on some way where if you pay extra, you get no ads or something like that. But I think there are people sitting around trying to figure out ways to make extra money in the economic climate. But I've always thought that that was a bit bogus, because sometimes the economic climate is not as bad as they think it is. There's sort of buying into the the mood, the general mood and the general ideas about what's going on with the economy. Whereas two years down the line, you find out that they've had the biggest profits in the history of their company. Right. Yeah, you know,

Tracy Harwood 28:51
well, there's a big difference between nudge and push away. And yeah, Unity has crossed that line.

28:58
I agree. Well, listen, I have a short little bit of like to share with you. I wanted to upgrade my graphics card, because it was starting to sputter a little bit, it would go out. And of course, when you're playing Elden Ring, you can't, you can't have that. So I did some research and I came up with the AMD 70 800x T. It's a sub 500 graphics card. It's really strong and very powerful. And I usually do due diligence on this to check to make sure everything works. It's a very large card. My computer case is very large and roomy, so I knew it would fit. So I went ahead and bought it and brought it home and started to instal it, put it in with my original system that I hand built a couple of years ago. And it wouldn't work. wouldn't come on. And so I did some checking in, I realise it's the battery, the power source, the power source for the AMDs is twice that of the NVIDIA GPUs, which is one of the downsides. I have a 550 watt power source in my computer, and it wouldn't work with that. So I had to go get in my car, drive and get a 1000 watt power source, put that in, plugged it in, and bingo, it just went right on. But I have to say this card is absolutely massive compared to my previous AMD card, which I had in there, which was like a two year old card, it's like half the size, it is so tight, you barely have room to slip it in there. And for some reason, they put the power connectors on top of the the graphics card instead of on the side, which means that the clearance that you have with the side of your case, is like a quarter of an inch. So trying to work in that space was very, very difficult. But after about three hours of hair pulling, everything worked fine, and it's gorgeous. It's a great great card updated drivers. Beautiful, no problems whatsoever. But the lesson to be learned is to make sure you check essential things like power supply, how much does your new card draw, because universally any new card is going to have is for the most part is going to draw more power. And I didn't do that. So I had to scramble and pay an extra. So the card was like 449. And it cost me 150 For the power supply. So I ended up paying more because of the power supply. But that's just a little fun bit that I thought you guys might want be interested in especially you Phil. Well, yeah, they

Phil Rice 32:04
make they make power supplies. 750 850 and then 1000 as well. And so yeah, if you if you end up not needing quite as much as the 1000 there's other options too, but 150 is good price for 1000 Watt card or a power supply. Ricky that's that's a good price. Yeah.

Tracy Harwood 32:23
I think that basically means also that you can actually play Starfield because looking at the description, doesn't that need an AMD?

Damien Valentine 32:30
It works fine on the NVIDIA card, but they've done something so you get a bit of a bonus if you're using an AMD card.

Ricky Grove 32:39
Yeah, some game companies connect up with GPU manufacturers to offer a little bit of extra, but it's not never a significant boost. Yeah,

Phil Rice 32:49
that's that's my experience as well.

Damien Valentine 32:51
And Bethesda actually announced that they're going to add the extra support for the Nvidia cards in the upcoming patch because it's been so highly requested. So

Phil Rice 33:04
interesting. Yeah, there's a big user base for those RTX cards for sure. Yeah, it

Damien Valentine 33:08
was already a mod that does it as well. So Oh, wow. Day to have it somewhere, I figured out a mod to add the NVIDIA support.

Phil Rice 33:16
Alright, last thing I'll mention today is over the Labour Day weekend, I caught word of this kind of accidentally on Twitter. But there was a Sims machinima and animation convention. Now it's an all online thing. Just like it reminded me a lot of the Expo Ricky. It was a three day event. They had interviews and guest speakers, and it was all hosted live streaming on YouTube. And those videos are now archived on their channel. And it's all you know, Sims 4 creators. And I gotta tell you, I was blown away by you know, there were probably I want to say the peak audience looked like it was about 100 to 150 people when it was picked out. But the the variety and quality of work being done by this sizable group of filmmakers that I'd never heard of. And it was fun, it was just it was fantastic. Now mind you the the, this is significantly younger crowd than me. These are I think, late teenagers and early 20s mostly filmmakers. And so the you know, that it's the the content. A lot of a lot of the content seems to be emulating shows that would appeal to that, to that younger demographic. So you know shows like, oh, what's the one on Netflix? It's not Roswell, it's Rose, Rose something Rosewood. I don't remember what it's called. But it basically is kind of a, for lack of a better word. And I don't say this in a denigrating way, but kind of a teen soap opera thing for nighttime TV. Right. Dawson's Creek, you know, that flavour if you're familiar with any of that, right? A lot of the a lot of the plot lines and settings are, I mean, they're geared towards younger people, which is that makes a lot of sense. But the you know, the the quality and the passion that these people have, for what they're making the the attention to detail. And they're all amateur creators, just like people in our audience. It was it was really something and there was there was a number of films and creators that they would show trailers for or clips from. And I thought, wow, you know, this is, this is quite good. You know, a lot of the, you know, when we've talked some about Sims machinima in the past, it's when there's a very amateurish film made with it, they don't cut around the weaknesses of the animations of the little coryza stuff that are particularly cartoony or jumpy. And these are people who have mastered that. So they're using a lot of custom content. There's a whole community around these filmmakers that just create custom content, clothing, and hairstyles and actual Sims themselves. And they're using all of this stuff in their production. So they don't look like something that you could make with The Sims 4 out of the box, a lot of the mods and the content packs, but particularly custom content, heavily used. And they are quick to credit. The creators of those things. There were several times during the interviews where they would mention a particular character, and then they would be sure to mention the custom content creator that was involved with that I just, I found that I was just massive respect for that. Really, really a neat little community that they've gotten. They're very serious about what they're doing. And at the closing of the third day, I missed the first day, but I attended both the second and third day, and at the closing of the third day, they were already planning for doing it again next year. Oh, that's great. So the coverage helps. Yeah, I think we should absolutely should

Ricky Grove 37:34
do some coverage of that. And find out more about the community because that sounds great. Yeah,

Tracy Harwood 37:39
it does. And you know, what, when I was looking at the link that you you shared with us, Phil, this is the I think it's the second year they've done it, and it's taken months, for them to put it together. I think they started promoting it in about February. So that sounds familiar. Yeah. I mean, a lot of work has gone into this, I

Phil Rice 37:59
think I think a lot of work. A lot of the a lot of the interviews and segments were pre produced, which was very smart. You remember that we came to a point in the Expo, where the first year we tried to do everything live. And there was just so many points of failure, that when we strategize, how can we make this a little smoother? Well, let's pre produce this and that. And so it was a mix of live and pre produced stuff, very smart. And the fact that they've gotten to that point on only their second year is really good. So yeah, timing on YouTube was a great was a great idea. You know,

Tracy Harwood 38:35
it definitely is, but the only thing I would say to them after the fact after you know, now it's sort of up there as an archive is to go back and put in some timestamps, so that you can kind of find what the panels are, because just trying to figure it all out. They'll know what the times are. But

Phil Rice 38:51
yeah, hopefully they're doing that they'll go back and put in those chapter markers that are helpful to definitely another smart thing would be to extract particular interviews and post them as separate videos that are just just that interview. Yeah, hopefully, they're gonna have time to do something like that, because that would, that would help help greatly. You know, it's a long show. It was several hours each day. Yeah. Yeah,

Ricky Grove 39:15
that's great news.

Phil Rice 39:16
It was an easy thing to find. Again, it was just one of those things that I don't know if I happen to be searching for Sims four related machinima on Twitter. And the algorithm just popped that up right in front of me from someone I, I don't I didn't follow at the time and had never heard of, and caught word of it just in time. So yeah, and I'm very pleased. I was glad to be a part of that. I participated a little bit in the chat. And, you know, of course, nobody there knew that I was some old guy lurking that probably would have creeped him out. But they were very friendly and welcoming even though I'm not anybody that they know. So it was it was a neat experience. And just it was nice to stumble upon. A very tight knit. Yet not closed off community that's dedicated the same stuff we love. So it was it was great to see so yeah, we'll make

Ricky Grove 40:07
I find it ironic that you are participating with chat with people who didn't know that you created probably the single most important Sims machinima ever made.

Tracy Harwood 40:20
Yeah, that's sweet irony.

Phil Rice 40:23
And I did I did not mention that either. I felt like

Ricky Grove 40:26
that's why you're so special. Phil, make be a boomer. You know?

Phil Rice 40:30
Hey, everybody, I'm kind of important. I'm kind of a big deal. Ron Burgundy on it, you know, kind of a big deal. Well, thanks. So that's quite frankly, the production value of every single clip that they showed. I would have been embarrassed to bring up Male Restroom Etiquette on that bar - honestly its so much better. Yeah, so yeah, great stuff. All right, so that'll wrap up this episode. Thanks for joining us. And be sure to give us some feedback in the comments or emails or you know, through our website. We'd love to hear from you about how we're doing. Yeah, and have a great day.

Ricky Grove 41:09
Thanks, everyone.