Tracy Harwood 00:04
And now for something completely machilima. Hello. I'm Tracy Harwood. Welcome to a special episode of completely machinima. And today I have the pleasure of talking to Andrew Knight, who works as a professional in the filmmaking industry, but who also is very passionate about machinima, one series of which we are going to be reviewing in our March podcast. And Lucky us, we're going to be talking to him about that later today. Now, Andrew got in touch a couple of months back, having seen, well, in fact, says he's seen more than one of our episodes, which is great, when we were talking about the great late Peter Rasmussen, stolen life, which he produced with Jackie Turner. In fact, it turns out that he was in Melbourne when stolen life was released in 2007 and was heavily involved with the Australian center for the moving images machinima Film Festival, at which I think Rooster Teeth and members from the Academy of machinima Arts and Sciences, folks like Paul Marino and Friedrich Kirschner, presented at the time. But again, we'll double check that with Andrew in a minute. Let's start anyway. Let's, start anyway. Let's just get on with the interview, I think. And Andrew, it's really great to have you with us here today. Yeah, you're very welcome. It's lovely to meet you. Start by telling us a little bit about your journey with machinima. Then, sure.

Speaker 1 01:36
So I think, like a lot of people. My introduction to machinima was with red versus blue, the Rooster Teeth series, which a friend of mine introduced me to, you know, in season one. So it was quite, quite early in that. And as much as I loved the show that there was very much seeing, that there was this idea of, I think I'd like to have a go at that, not specifically Halo. I've always wanted to try to choose different games that I haven't seen machinima in with my machinima, rather than using I just like the idea of, well, certainly not wanting to be seen as a copycat, but yeah, just liking the challenge of doing something new. So as an avid PC Gamer, that was just something that became part of my consumption of video games. Was thinking, would this be a good game for for making machinima in? And I tried a lot of different games and and made machinima in a few different games. But as you mentioned, I'm from Melbourne, and there's the Australian center for the moving image, or Acme, as it's known, which were a big proponent of machinima in those early years and used to run a machinima Film Festival. It wasn't so much a film festival, I'd say, as it was a machinima showcase, yeah, where it's not so much that that films were, you know, competing for awards or something like that. It's very much a showcase where they would get, you know, machinima filmmakers from from all over the world, and invite them to showcase their work, and also invited local filmmakers to showcase their work as well. And I'm a bit foggy on the timeline. It was something that they used to run every year for a number of years, and I can't remember when it started and when it finished, but I feel like I probably went to all of them, and I think for the first one or two. I didn't have anything to present myself, and I really wanted to make something, but it was just not knowing how I was already, you know, working in at the time, I was working for a company which built and supported post production equipment. So it was company that built, you know, workstations and hardware for for people in video post production. So it was already fairly well across that, but just the idea of how to to actually go about capturing images from a video game to make it was a sort of first barrier, and I went out around it in a in a very sort of roundabout way. I wasn't familiar with software like Fraps or anything like that. And had I known, I would have, I would have used that. But I actually devised this system where I took a feed out of the an analog output on my graphics card and and fed it through an analog to digital convert that I borrowed from work, and then fed that into a digital video camera. So I was actually recording stuff from the video game on on DV tape, right? And that was sort of a very roundabout way of doing it. And so I made my first machinima, which was, um. A little mini series called once were clone warriors. And there was a famous New Zealand film called once for Warriors, starring Tamira Morrison. And so I'd sort of taken snippets of that and put it under footage from Star Wars Battlefront, sort of with the idea that, you know, Tamira Morrison voiced all of the clones in in Star Wars. And so it made sense that his voice would be, you know, the voice of those, those clone troopers. But I was using stuff from that film, which is, you know, it's quite a heavy film. It's, you know, it's about domestic violence and and, you know, alcoholism and all this sort of stuff. And so that was sort of my little take on, because I didn't feel confident to do voice acting or something like that. So I I used the audio from that film, and that was the first thing that I made, and that I then submitted to to Acme for the film festival that year, and they said it's really great, but you're the only person that submitted so that. So we've decided not to do the sort of homegrown section of this festival. And what I'd made wasn't up to a high enough standard to include in the, you know, the worldwide showcase. So it didn't actually get screened, unfortunately, but I did get to show it to, you know, the Rooster Teeth guys and Paul Marino and other people and, and I'm not sure if I don't think Peter Rasmussen saw it, but certainly Jackie did. And so, you know, I just took my laptop around to them, you know, in the after party drinks, and said, Hey, this is what I'm doing. So it kind of got screened in a very roundabout way. So, so that's how that you know, once, once that started, I was hooked, and went on from there,

Tracy Harwood 06:48
we still got a link to this. Yes,

Speaker 1 06:52
okay, so, and this is where I'm a little bit hesitant, because I've got two YouTube channels. I've got the one that I've sent to you as well, and I have another YouTube channel which I reserve for, what I would call Not Safe For Work content, and anything that I feel like could potentially get me canceled goes on that and so that the clone Warriors series is there, but it's it's Also on on that other channel, which I'm hesitant to to have my name associated, because it's, look, it's, it's, I mean, it's vulgar, it's, it's kind of, what I've realized, in a way, is it's kind of me giving a middle, middle finger to YouTube, I guess, taking the sort of South Park approach of, you know, how much can we get away with, you know, it doesn't have any followers. I'm not trying to monetize it. It's just sort of shock comedy humor, which is, it's more than racy. It's, it's, you know, it's, it's vulgar, it's, it's objectification of women. There's violence, there's, you know, drug references, there's, you know, basically

Tracy Harwood 08:08
it's your ego,

Speaker 1 08:11
yeah, and so, so the original once for clone Warriors series is incorporated into that, because what the channel is, is, you know, I do all the little sort of snippet videos, but then I cut it together. And I guess the inspiration is a show like Robot Chicken, where you have sort of, like a lot of sort of very unrelated little sort of sketches one after another, and then they make up sort of 10 minute episodes. So, so that's what that is. So yes, it is available to view

Tracy Harwood 08:44
Fair enough. All right, yeah,

Speaker 1 08:47
so it is available. That was a long, long way of saying, yes, it is available. I'm just not sure everyone's checked.

Tracy Harwood 08:54
All right. Well, tell us a bit more than about, you know, the development of your journey with machinima. Then, because the film that we're going to be reviewing this month was a 2015

Speaker 1 09:08
that's when it was released. Yes, okay, that's not when it was finished. And there's quite a story about that. Yeah, so I don't actually know when we started it. As I said, I'd done, I'd done a number of things, I and certainly a couple of unfinished projects. I did another project which didn't get finished, using Star Wars Battlefront, which was about sort of a wall droids, battle droids that had gone AWOL and and were just sort of trying to have a party while, while the war was going on, and, you know, I made a trailer for that. And I think one of the things that was holding me back is, you know, amongst my sort of friend group at the time, I was the only one that was really into filmmaking. I could certainly rope them in for voice acting and and stuff like that, and helping me out with the machine and my puppetry. But all of. Production work very much fell to me and and so yeah, if I didn't feel like a project had legs, or if I just got tired of it, I sort of so those quite a few unfinished projects. But, and I was using Far Cry two for a bit, trying to make something in that when I discovered Red Faction gorilla, which was the game that I made optimism bias in. I just it something really clicked there in terms of, I think just the esthetic, and I think the opportunities in what the engine can do, having a very sort of destructible environment and, and it ticked a lot of boxes. It was a very difficult engine to make machine Marin, largely because it's a third person game. And so it's not like Halo, where you could essentially just set up one character as the camera and, and that would be your feed in, in, in, in all of our footage, there's going to be a character in the middle of a screen, because it's a third person game. There's no way to get that first person look. And the game does have a spectator mode which allows you to sort of see from various angles in the map, but they would, so they they gave us all our big wide shots that we needed, but getting in for all our close ups and all that sort of stuff proved very tricky. The way that I overcame that, because I was getting sort of quite demoralized with it thinking. And I really love this game, but I just don't think I can make machinima with it, because it's a third person game. And at the time, 4k monitors were they existed, but they were very, very expensive. And I came across this. I had this idea. I thought, if I had a 4k image, could I potentially record everything in third person mode and then just take that 10 ADP corner of the screen over the shoulder of the character, and sort of cut that out and use that as my my sort of feed for for the film. But I didn't have a 4k monitor. I ended up finding this. It was an IBM brand medical imaging monitor from Japan, like this very high resolution monitor, not at all designed for gaming or anything like that, but it did have the resolution that I needed. I picked that up off eBay, and that sort of was what got us over the line and got me a cheap 4k monitor. So that's how we ended up doing it. Most, mostly is by actually just taking that sort of HD corner of the screen, you know, recording everything with Fraps and and getting the screen capture in 4k and then cropping out that, that sort of corner of the screen. So it was quite a technical sort of process to actually be able to make machinima in in that the game, there are few other limitations, like the the maximum duration of a multiplayer match was 30 minutes, and that presented a lot of issues where, because the environment is so destructible, if you had, you know, a building that had been partially damaged, or whatever it was, you would then have Contin continuity issues, if you had to re host the game and then try and make that Damage look exactly the same as it had prior being, but a very talented code a friend of mine found a way to mod the game to give us, you know, I think, three hour duration or something like that. So there are a lot of technical hurdles that we needed to overcome just to actually make make it a game that we could actually record footage in. And so I think that took quite a long time to just get to a point. I don't know, I don't know how long it took from the sort of seed of, I really want to make machinima in this game too. I think I can actually get some usable footage out of this. Now, at that time, I was much more networked with sort of the sort of Melbourne local film industry, and had a lot of other people who are friends of mine, who were filmmakers, and I approached this show very much like a live action film shoot, where we were all in the same room. We had a bunch of computers in a room. We had the big 4k screen that everyone could see. I had different roles assigned. I had a separate cinematographer, so I didn't have to frame up the camera. I had a friend of mine named Rudy seara, who's a very talented cinematographer, and also a gamer who was just really great at getting a lot of really interesting shots using an Xbox controller, and so we we very much approach the shoot like a live action shoot, where we're all in one one space. Everyone could see the director's screen, everyone could see how their character was interacting with with that and and even that's difficult because. Is just getting characters to walk in a straight line, and all those sorts of things can be, can be difficult, but you also get a lot of happy accidents where, you know, just like in live action filmmaking, you, you know, you you choreograph a scene, and then you, you you execute it, and then something happens, which is either just looks really cool or is really funny, and you end up sort of modifying what your original plan was just based on the happy accident. So that's sort of how we approached it. But it was very much like there were my filmmaking friends who who were interested in it. But a lot of those, a lot of the shots from from the show, have a lot of characters on screen at once, and for all of those, we weren't doing any compositing. So anytime you've got sort of a dozen people on screen, that means we had a dozen computers in my in my house, sort of all linked up. And the only way I could sort of get people to do the puppetry was was say to my non filmmaking friends. Hey, we're going to have a LAN party, and we're going to do a couple of hours of of this show that I want to make, and I'll supply pizza and beer and and then after, we can play video games, and sort of, that's how I sort of shot listed. Okay, what are the shots that only have a couple of characters in them, and then just me and my filmmaking mates would shoot those. And then whenever we had sort of crowd scenes, we'd have these land parties where we'd go and get all those which, you know, the more people drank, the harder it got to sort of get people to actually focus and not shoot each other while we were while we were filming. But that's, I mean, everyone was a volunteer, so that's just what, what we had to work with. But the result of that was it took quite a long time to make, I think that series we were filming probably over would say at least two years anyway, you know, on weekends and, and, and, you know, whenever I could sort of wrote people in, and then I'd be sort of, you know, handling the post production by myself, because that's sort of something I'm very familiar with. And, and, you know, I was just very lucky with, with a lot of the contacts I had. I was living with a sound engineer at the time, and so he did all my sound design and and sound mixing and all that stuff. He did all the voice recording for me with all this very expensive microphones, lot of actors that I'd that I'd met on live action shoots, I managed to rope them in to do the voice acting for the for the cast. So everyone was volunteering. But it was, you know, as a result, it was just something that took a very long time. Very long time.

Tracy Harwood 17:43
I think the professionalism comes through with it looks absolutely and sounds absolutely amazing. Actually, you did a cracking job with it, I guess

Speaker 1 17:50
you I mean, yeah, I think post production is probably where I sort of feel very comfortable and and so that that sort of allowed me, you know, once I had all the footage, I had that sort of allowed me to sort of really hone it, and then getting my sound engineer guy to hone the sound, yeah,

Tracy Harwood 18:09
or your sort of things that you're describing, though, are very much sort of the way that Hugh and the, you know, the original early mission, pre long, Pre YouTube stuff, they would have done it exactly the same way. Yeah, they, they all got together physically, and they all,

Speaker 1 18:27
well, I saw your, your, your episode from a week or two ago. Yeah, the artery machinima one, yeah. And that that felt, that felt very familiar in terms, yeah, how everything was laid out, yeah, yeah.

Tracy Harwood 18:40
Well, I mean that in many ways, Hugh, if sounds in terms of what you you were doing as well, was a little bit anomalous, because Hugh and and you, by the sounds of it, hadn't had a sort of a more professional approach to the way that you were going about making it in the first place, where a lot of that early machinima, you know, the red versus blue folks. For one thing, this was kind of a little bit ad hoc in the way that it was made and and then just sort of throw it out and see what happens. Although, to be fair, Bernie, Bernie was professionally trained and very into, you know, this sort of comedy side of things, and the likes of Paul professional animator, of course, Friedrich, and, you know, a professional artist and what have you. So there was quite a lot of technical skill amongst those early creators, but it's not quite made in the same way anymore, I guess, you know, do you think you could achieve the same sort of thing with the tools that you're you've got available now for machinimaters? Yeah,

Speaker 1 19:51
I think, you know, and sort of with, with those sort of early days, I think that sort of ad hoc, sort of. Sort of approach, I think was very much around, you know, the demand and the need for regular releases. You know, once they had the popularity, it's like, okay, we need to keep churning this out. This, you know, I feel like I was quite late to the game, generally speaking, with optimism bias. In terms of the Machinima bubble had very much burst by the time we we released it. And, yeah, I mean, it was originally made as a sort of 20 something minute film, rather than as a mini series. And so that's, that's why it wasn't so much, you know, make an episode, release it, and then, you know, make the next one and release it. And, you know, I learned a lot about, I think, you know, distribution and, and, and, I guess, I mean, if you look at Rooster Teeth as an example. I think, you know, one of the things that that I think really helped them was the popularity of Halo, which, you know, they've spoken about a lot. And I think, whilst I certainly wanted to make machinima in a game that other people hadn't made yet, and, and whilst I'm a big fan of Red Faction career there myself, it wasn't a hugely successful game. It did well, and people liked it, but didn't have the following the likes of Halo. And I think when you're dealing with the noise floor of YouTube, and just how much stuff, even 2015 when we released this, you know, we, we, I don't know if I think maybe the trailer has over 1000 views, but all of the other episodes of optimism bias have under 1000 views,

Tracy Harwood 21:49
which is a shame, really, because I would have thought it would get more well marketing, I

Speaker 1 21:55
don't necessarily i, and you know, part of this is ego, of course, but I don't see that as as a reflection of its quality, because all of the comments positive, there's only likes, there's no dislikes. I just think it's a little bit too niche. Red Faction gorilla didn't have the sort of penetration that games like Grand Theft Auto and Halo and games like this have, and so it was already a niche market in terms of people who would watch the show because they liked the game, and then, and then also, I just think, generally speaking, as I said, I feel like I was late to the game in terms of releasing a professional mission in my series, in terms of just the popularity of machinima at the time. And as an example, we we submitted this to the Melbourne International Animation Festival in 2014 and we were the only machinima submission. They had a machinima category, but we're the only. And I think that's sort of very telling as to sort of where machinima was sitting in 2014 I like to think machine room has grown in popularity since. I think there was sort of like that early Millennium sort of surge and then a big drop off. And timing wise, yeah, as I

Tracy Harwood 23:16
say, I don't think.com helps very much

23:22
about people, bad taste in a lot of people. Well, you know, they

Tracy Harwood 23:24
weren't really about machinima. They were. They were just about eyes on user generated content. Really, more about promotion of the games themselves, I think so, you know, now, now all of that sort of over. I think what you've got is a lot more genuinely creative material in whatever form that it's been made, that that gets viewed because of what it is. And I think you're right, there was, there was a point in time when people would pick up machinima based on the game that it was made in. But from from our perspective on the podcast, I certainly think what we we like to pick up and reflect upon is that good machinima doesn't just stay in that gaming community. It tells a story beyond and appeals to a wider audience, and yours most definitely does, although there are a lot of in jokes in it, I think that's the that's the challenge. But I think probably these days, so many more people get what those in jokes are about non player characters and what have you. And you know, the other, the other references to real life, which everybody loves. So you know that there's sort of the role of HR and all of those kind of stupid gamers and what have you I mean, there's some real there's some real comedy in the way that you've, you've set it up, which, to me, isn't really just about the game, but it's a, you know, it should appeal to a wider, wider audience, I think. And that's definitely what red versus blue did it definitely, you know, transcend. Did those folks that were just there for Halo to although you're right, it did sort of tip into that, but it was a breakout piece for machinima, and it's what, it's what generated, along with all the other people that were working with with content that was also sort of break out of the time. It's what attracted a wider audience to the techniques, the, you know, the quality of the stories that were told, the different ways that you could think about animation, and, yeah, you know, just generally interesting ways to tell short stories, which, of course, YouTube jumped in on the back of its story is, you know, continued. I think one of the biggest challenges these days is getting eyeballs on content with an algorithm that sort of doesn't reflect the, you know, the bias of the marketing machine, which, which, I mean, we've got.com to thank for really?

Speaker 1 26:02
Yeah, I think just YouTube in general, and and this was very eye opening for me, because, you know, the second channel that I told you about, that I that I started up just just as a test, I uploaded my first video to that new channel, and then from a different computer, I logged in with my first YouTube channel and then did a search for the video that I had uploaded with the other channel the exact name invisible, yeah? Because it's a channel with zero followers and one video. So, so I think, yeah. I mean, I thankfully, I don't have aspirations as a YouTuber. I'm not trying to to earn a living from this. This is just about, you know, wanting to make stuff and and sharing the process, yeah,

Tracy Harwood 26:49
and see what folks have to say about it, and and the collaborative

Speaker 1 26:52
process as well. You know, it's just a lot of fun. But going back to what I mentioned before about our release. It's a bit of a convoluted story. I think we actually finished optimism bias in 2013 I'd have to go back into my files and look at that. But essentially what happened was my producer on the show, Brian temple Smith, he's a guy originally from Austin, and, yeah, did an amazing job. Just, you know, with, with the business side of things, he actually reached out to, you know, once he, he, he, he sort of had seen what he first sort of came on board because, you know, we were mates and and, you know, he just wanted to help us out with the project. But when he saw the quality of what we were making, he was like, I think we can sell this, which is bonkers, generally speaking, to just the idea of selling machinima in the first place, unless you get a licensing deal like Rooster Teeth did. But he essentially, he, he rang up. He Nordic Games, which are the publisher and and rights holder. They didn't make it was made by a company called volition, which are now defunct, and then were incorporated into Nordic Games. But he called them up and said, Hey, we've got this thing. Is there anything you can do with it? I wasn't on the calls, so the, you know, I only have information that he relayed to me, but it was all very exciting. He they were leading up to their remaster of Red Faction gorilla. And essentially, you know, he ended up speaking to the CEO of Nordic Games. It's just, you know, he's just one of those, one of those guys who just knows how to talk, I guess that's Brian I'm talking about. But he ended up getting put onto this business development manager, or some, some sort of role in that regard, who just loved what we were doing. And was like, yeah, we can definitely do something together. We're doing the remaster of Red Faction gorilla, you know, we let's, you know, let's, let's talk. And so I was super excited thinking, you know, I never intended that this is something that was going to be commercially viable. It was just something that I was making for for YouTube, for obvious reasons. It's, you know, you can't sell machinima because IP issues and blah, blah, blah, but to actually be talking with the rights holders was, was, was really exciting. I had already decided that I was going to take a sabbatical in 2015 because I, you know, I just come off a slew of a bunch of long form projects, feature films, and I just, you know, I needed a break, and so I was planning to take a year off. My producer, Brian, was going to the Cannes Film first. Of all for a feature film that he'd produced, and he'd organized a meeting with Nordic Games that are based in Austria. I was going to be in Europe anyway, because I was coming over here for for a gap year, essentially, he was coming over for Cannes, and he organized us a meeting at Nordic Games. And I was like, Okay, this is this. Is it. And it was quite heartbreaking, actually, what happened. But essentially, as from what I understand, there was some sort of company restructure at Nordic Games, and the business development manager who loved our show and really wanted to work with us, either didn't work there anymore, or was now working in a different role, and the person that replaced him just didn't understand what the show was. He was like, Is it a game? We make games? We're like, no, no, it's a show. It's like, yeah, we make games. He just didn't get it. And that was the end. And so we didn't even get the meeting. In the end, I just sort of, so it was, I just Yeah, I think about what could have been. So, you know, we, we took it to South by Southwest as well, not as a in the in the festival, but we, Brian and I were both going, just because, you know, he's from Austin and and I've always wanted to go and and he said, Well, while we're there, let's see if we can shop it around. So let's so there was just this delaying, delaying, delaying. Let's not upload it to YouTube yet. Let's see if we can actually do something with it first. And that went sort of on and on and on. So when we did, did finally, I mean, we submitted the moment international Animation Festival, and as I said, it, it, it was the only submission. And he said, Well, you know, we really love it, and you know, we can't enter it in the festival because you've got no competition. But would you like to essentially do a showcase and and hold a machinima panel at the at the Melbourne International Animation Festival, which we did. So that was essentially the premiere of the the 20 something minute version of the film. And then, and then we went to South by Southwest. And then, yeah, afterwards, we just sort of said, Yeah, you know, I've been sitting on it for so long. And you know, when, when you've made something that you're proud of, you want people to see it, yeah, and all the other people that volunteered, I'm not sorry, it's my dog barking, all the other people that volunteered on it, you know, they've put in so much, so many hours and just sort of sitting on it and just And so eventually, in 2015 that's when I decided, well, rather than releasing this as a as a 20 something minute film, I'm going to chop it up. I think it sits well. I think it sits better as a series than as a single piece, anyway. So yeah, it was quite a long sort of process. Tip from actually finishing it to to uploading,

Tracy Harwood 33:01
yeah, yeah, that's a real shame. I'm really sorry to hear that. Actually, you know, you would have hit the kind of 2012 2013 would have been the absolute peak of the.com period. I think there were, can't even remember how many millions of users there were on that channel at that point in the in the in the millions, like 10s of millions. And I suppose really the the fest, the Machinima, the dedicated machinima festival period, was kind of dying down a little bit, because that had been going since mid 2000s till about 20, I think the last, just thinking when the last,

Speaker 1 33:51
I think Acme probably wrapped it up around 2007 2008 as early as that. Yeah,

Tracy Harwood 33:56
I was just going to say that because, because I think, you know, the, the, probably the, the first wave of machinima in the year in ours would have been probably no later than 2004 five. I would have thought, yeah, because red versus blue was 2003 and it took off very quickly. And, you know, Garner global interest. But, but I was just saying we, we were on the sort of the second wave of the, you know, the festivals, and trying to keep the interest going in, in in in production, you know, generate, generating interest in delivering high quality content with reasonable quality production values. That was always our thing. Keep keeping going, which was sat in contrast, a little bit to what com.com, was up to. And we kept the Machinima Expo going well, very various folks did up until about 2013 2014 I think, and after that, it just that kind of just faded. And then. You know.com, was on the wane, and, you know, and then over a series of murders and what have you finally was, was switched off in kind of 2019 with,

Speaker 1 35:11
well, I mean, I even signed up to the Machinima partner program, yeah. And I got, I got rejected, because I didn't, and I'm thankful I did. Otherwise, I would have you know, Oh, yeah. I mean, of course, I keep backups of everything I make. It wouldn't have been lost content. But, yeah, well, it would have

Tracy Harwood 35:29
been lost content because anything, anybody that signed up to that they were signing away their content in perpetuity. So, you know, even though there were 10s of 1000s of films on those channels, they wouldn't be able to use them now because they don't own the content anymore. So I think you had a lucky escape, yeah. And it's kind of ironic, really, that Rooster Teeth, which is also, of course, Warner has also now wound all of that up, but Bernie's now bought back the brand. I don't know if you saw that a couple of

Speaker 1 36:03
weeks ago? Yeah, no, I listened to his podcast. So I'm sort of swell up on that as well. That's, that's, that's

Tracy Harwood 36:08
also, I'm, I'm really delighted to hear that. And I think his understanding is basically, or his intention is basically, just so that the the brand doesn't get assets stripped and he can work on nice projects that he he he wants to work on going forwards, which, yeah, which, at some point, I would hope would be machinima projects, because they, they were very good at doing that kind of kind of aspect.

Speaker 1 36:31
I imagine he's probably fed up with machinima himself, but I think he would be willing to support other creators that were,

Tracy Harwood 36:40
I think that's where they went to, really, with, with the whole the Rooster Teeth and, you know, bringing in all the different, different creator groups under, under that kind of banner. So what else are you going to do? I mean, have you been completely burnt with machinima? Are you? Are you still working in machinima?

Speaker 1 36:59
Well, I mean, my Not Safe For Work channel that I mentioned I still semi regularly upload to, but that is, you know, that that sketch comedy, I wouldn't call it narrative. It's like, like I said, it's sort of like a very robot, chicken esque sort of format where it's just a bunch of sort of sketches, one after another. In terms of narrative, machinima, essentially where I got to So, so after we finished optimism bias, and, you know, I had big plans for optimism bias in terms of, I'd already sort of planned out subsequent seasons. And essentially it was sort of a similar sort of story to wreck it, Ralph, where you have, you know, all these NPCs that I would have actually traveling into different games. And so Season Two probably wouldn't have been in optimism bias. It would have been in a different game, but the same characters, the same voice cast, so that was what I was planning to do with it, and I sort of was trying to foreshadow that with Cheryl's character, which obviously is the drone from half life. And sort of trying to sort of give the idea that, you know, video games as a universe are all sort of interconnected. And these, these NPCs, are just, you know, characters that. So that's

Tracy Harwood 38:15
what I really putting on a skin, basically. And, yeah, basically, yeah, fantastic.

Speaker 1 38:20
And I mean, I would love to where I sort of got to with with Machinima is so before I left Australia, a couple of other filmmaker friends, and I there was, there was a, there's a film festival in Australia called the Sci Fi Film Festival, which is based in Sydney, and they were still running a machinima category, as this would have been in 2014 and they were one of the few sort of festivals that were still running. And I said I wanted to have sort of one last hurrah before I left the country, and make a short still using Red Faction gorilla, because it's just something. We had a workflow that worked, and we could sort of pump it out with not having to do any sort of technical R and D. And so we wrote this short, which I thought was really funny. And then, you know, life got in the way. And, and we just never got around to shooting it. And and then I left the country. And then what turned what was meant to be a gap year ended up me actually settling in Europe. And it was actually during lockdown that I was going through, you know, one of the things that I kept myself occupied was just, you know, going through my hard drive and just sort of sorting through my files and stuff like that, and I came across this short film script that I'd completely forgotten about, and I was laughing out loud, and I was just like, that's really funny, that it's a real shame we never made that. And so I got in touch with one of the CO writers and said, Hey, how do you feel about fleshing this out? I. And and, and writing something a little bit longer based around this. And with that, was our lockdown project. As we we, we sort of wrote what ended up being like an 85 page screen, my goodness, so and I think it's, it's, it's really good in terms of, in terms of the writing, and so we sort of, I got to work with it was like thinking, well, this is the only way to feasibly do a feature length thing. For me, it would be using machinima because, you know, can't do it live action and and animation. It was the only sort of, you know, financially feasible way of doing it. And so I got into research and development using Red Faction gorilla, which I was familiar with, and they had their remastered version now, so it was better graphics and all that sort of stuff. I hired a modder to make a camera mod where he could base so we could basically detach the camera from the over the shoulder sort of view and just fly it around anywhere we wanted in in the game, which was, you know, game changer for us, that I didn't have to do any of that cropping a section out of the corner of the screen or anything anymore. It had complete control over the camera. I'd also started working with one of the other things that I wanted to do differently was, rather than having characters with helmets on so you didn't have to worry about lip sync, was, was thinking, okay, how can we actually do some stuff with faces? I did some tests with some software called crazy talk. Oh, yeah, which is really illusion, yeah, where? And, and there's a, there's a test on this, on my YouTube channel, actually, where I did a test where I would actually get a see if I could use a combination of crazy talk and After Effects to get the characters in Red Faction, gorilla that weren't wearing a helmet to speak. And it worked, worked really well. So I spent quite a lot of time, sort of R and D on that, and got quite far along with it. And then, I don't know, maybe it was part of the bad experience we had with Nordic Games and stuff like that, where I was so excited about the writing. Thinking, this is really good writing. And I co wrote it with with a couple of other other people. And I just felt like it felt like a shame to to to not be able to sell it, given that it was was long form and that sort of around that time, that was when, you know, virtual production and Unreal Engine and all these things was really starting to gain traction. And so I started that became one of my other lockdown projects. Was sort of learning, learning Unreal Engine, and

Tracy Harwood 42:51
then up on the good idea, I think, yeah. And

Speaker 1 42:54
so that then moved to sort of using a combination of of Unreal Engine, and I clone character creator and sort of that suite of tools to then start building that out. And, you know, I've got a number of people working on on that show now. It's called the Gedanken experiment. Oh, yeah. And we've got an EPK for that. I can send you if you if you'd like to have more information about that, absolutely, but that has sort of gradually gone from machinima project to virtual production project to now it's essentially conventional animation where I've got an animator who's doing Everything in cinema 4d we're still doing it in Unreal Engine. That's still our environment that we're capturing everything, but, and so it's still technically virtual production, but, and, you know, we're using motion capture suits and stuff for a lot of the animation. But I would say it's, it's sitting more in the animation camp now than in the virtual production camp, which is really great that I've been able to attract a bunch of people to the project to sort of bring that level of professionalism. But it also makes it really, really slow, because it's essentially a full blown animation production, which I've got no experience doing. So I'm learning how to, how to direct, you know, concept artists and modelers and rigors and all that sort of stuff. We have finished doing all the voice recording though, which I'm, I'm very pleased with. And that's something that, you know, I felt very comfortable doing. Had a lot of experience doing, so that, that part of it, I was like, Okay, well, at least I got the voice, recorded. Really, really pleased with the voice cast. We got a lot of people with so there's bav and Leonie playing the two female leads who have a lot of credits in both TV and video games. You know, Leone was in cyberpunk and bav was in doctor, who. When both of them have been in but sort of really high profile things. Our male lead is actually miles Luna from Rooster Teeth. So it's all kind of gone full circle. So our male voice lead, which, you know, I just I saw a post on his social media saying, saying that he was available for hire as a voice artist. So obviously, once he'd gone independent, and I just reached out to him and and, yeah, that was that. So I've, I mean, these are all paid voice voices.

Tracy Harwood 45:32
Yeah, it's gonna say it sounds like you've gone from sort of indie to pro with budget management and all. I mean, it's

Speaker 1 45:38
still very indie. It's self funded. So the plan is to try and make a vertical slice, sort of little one minute sort of piece, use that to try and get some investment, to try and make a pilot, and then use that to either make a feature film or or a series. But it's very slow. It's very slow. It's it's one of those things, not only myself, but all of the other people involved are all freelancers who are working on other projects, and it's just really difficult to get the planets to align to a point where we can all sort of get stuff done. So it's kind

Tracy Harwood 46:11
of tricky, isn't it? But very timely, probably, because, you know, there's an awful lot of interest in game to film type transformations at the moment, isn't there, you know, the, all the, all the things that you see on Netflix and what have you all got a history and Sure.

Speaker 1 46:26
I mean, this, this show is, is not video game related. It's completely new. So this is, this is a complete separation from optimism bias, okay,

Tracy Harwood 46:36
well, I was thinking Red Faction gorilla. No. Well, that's how

Speaker 1 46:41
we originally started making the show in Red Faction gorilla,

Tracy Harwood 46:45
and no longer got any esthetic to it. No,

Speaker 1 46:48
no. It's, it's completely removed from from Red Faction. Now it's, you know, we were, we were using that as our sort of sandbox to play in, and now we're using a completely different sandbox. So, yeah, there's, there's not really any video game I mean, it's certainly video game adjacent in that it's being being, you know, shot in Unreal Engine. But that's about as the only link there. So I Yeah, and you know, that's been that's been difficult in itself, in you know, one of the reasons that I love Machinima is, you know, the speed at which you can produce stuff. Not that optimism bias was made quickly, but potentially, things can be made quickly. And so I started working on another show, which is, is, is, because I'm often, you know, in a holding pattern, waiting for stuff to come through, on, on the Gedanken experiment before I can do any more work. So I've got another show I've been working on called, welcome to the better verse, and that is deliberately Lo Fi. And my intention with that is so that I can make, sort of again, be in that sort of mode where I can make stuff a lot more quickly, not being too worried about esthetics and lighting and that sort of stuff, something that's far more focused on the writing and the voice performance and not getting too bogged down in the visuals. But the elevator pitch on that is it's a fictional Metaverse which is essentially a scam. It's just a cash grab. It's, you know, people log into this Metaverse, and they're, they're immediately being accosted by this, this bot essentially trying to to get them to upgrade to to a premium account and and get a subscription, and trying to sell them in game, currency and all this sort of stuff. But the actual world doesn't have any content. It's just, you know, it's just this sort of barren, AI generated place. But that then becomes sort of a meeting ground for these people who sort of log in and and then, you know, the content comes out of the interactions that they have all the while this, this bot is trying to, trying to convince them to upgrade, and they're just quite happy with the free version. So that's that's essentially the story, but it's all of the characters, action figures that are photo scanned and then and then rigged in in acurig. And it's all very janky and and the animations sort of, but given that it's meant to be this sort of AI generated world that's just sort of a scam and a cash grab, it just sort of, it sort of fits very well with that. So I wanted to make something that that it's written into the story, that it's not supposed to look particularly sort of the animation is. Sort of very rough. So I don't have to worry too much about that, because it's sort of on brand. So that's that. And then the Gedanken experiment, which is is sort of a light hearted sort of science fiction, far more narrative. You know, I wouldn't call it a comedy. It's, it's, it's more of a light hearted sci fi, but it does get pretty heavy in the sort of stuff that happened. So that's sort of very much in the drama camp and and that I'm, you know, the plans with that is, is to ideally go to, you know, video on demand streaming, you know, that's not something that we want to sort of put on YouTube. We're hoping to actually make something that we can sell. And actually, you know, whatever streaming platform will take it, essentially, but, I mean, it may end up going on youtube if we can't make a go of it. But that's the plan with that. But I just wanted to have something on the side that I can just, sort of, yeah, whenever I have an idea for a joke, that I can just sort of incorporate that into, into something sounds

Tracy Harwood 51:01
like you're really trying to sort of professionalize the Machinima side of things into a into a kind of a more useful workflow for your for your career development, really, that sounds like you're you're thinking, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 51:17
I think you know what, what Machinima is, has given to me is, is the opportunity to write and direct, and I have made live action short films, not many, and I have a couple of, you know, well, a number of unfinished live action short films which certainly not abandoned. They're just maybe were very ambitious in terms of what were required, in terms of visual effects and stuff like that, which, which is, is all happening, but it's very slow for the reasons that I've mentioned on the other projects. Yeah, but live action is very expensive. You know, the last, the last short film that I made, it was, you know, as one actor in a backyard shot over two and a half days, and it still costs 1000s of pounds. Because being in the film industry myself, I don't like to ask people to work for free, and I'm certainly not paying them their their regular rates, but, but even paying people, you know, a fraction of what they're worth, it still gets very expensive very quickly. So what machinima has given me the opportunity to do, really, is to write and direct and actually finish stuff, and to be able to work with voice performers, which is, is something that I absolutely adore doing and and I think, you know, with with both of these shows that I'm working on, you know, it just allows, allows me To do things that I wouldn't have been able to. Been able to do whilst I am working in the film industry. The majority of my work is very technical. I'm working on, you know, big films and big TV shows, but I'm, you know, I'm in the camera department and doing very technical stuff. And so it does give you exposure to to the industry and watching other directors work and all that sort of stuff. But actually, the only way to actually have opportunities there is to essentially make them for yourself. And when they're live action, they can get very expensive. And I very much treat this, this show the better verse show, like a machinima sort of workflow. It's all being done in iClone. And I clone as as I'm sure you know, you can, you can control characters with an Xbox controller. There's a bit of motion capture suit stuff in there, but that's usually overkill for what's required. So that's much more in the Machinima camp, in Unreal Engine and I clone than than the Gedanken experiment. But, yeah, I think you're right. I think I think I'm I'm sort of using machinima as a as a way to to hone my craft as a director without breaking the bank essentially. Well,

Tracy Harwood 53:59
that's always a good idea. Have you been following Sam Crane's Grand Theft Auto experiment? Have you been looking at that documentary and its journey through to distribution?

Speaker 1 54:15
I don't know. Maybe it doesn't ring a bell.

Tracy Harwood 54:19
I'll send you some links, because you might find that particularly interesting. I'm not, because one thing that strikes me that's particularly challenging, I think, with machinima, is getting the getting a break, or thinking about how to get a break with it, because there's a certain set of, well, there's clearly a perception with it, unless you get that kind of break. But right at the moment, Sam's got quite a long way through the processes with various showcases, various festivals that it's been selected at, culminating in a distribution deal, which has seen it go to a. Know, it's on prime or Netflix or or it's even being released in cinemas as well now. So

55:06
Wow. And that's Grand Theft Auto, 455,

Tracy Harwood 55:11
it's a, it's a hamlet production that there's another lockdown project. It was a production of Hamlet made in Grand Theft also starting to

Speaker 1 55:21
ring a bell, actually, yeah, you mentioned the hamlet side of things, exactly,

Tracy Harwood 55:25
and so, so that's got a lot of interest, which has raised the profile again of machinima. So we seem to be in like, a third wave of interest in Machine Productions, the other one that's been long listed or shortlisted, I think, for one of the Oscar sects, one of the Oscars categories is something called, I think it's called the life of ibelin, which is quite, quite a sad story about a Young boy. I don't know whether he he was ill and and passed away, or whether something more since to happen to him, but it's a documentary. Again, I think about this, this young man who lived his life in, I think, World of Warcraft and so again, that has gained an awful lot of interest as well, because that's also machinima. So you know, looking at how they've managed to get through their journey might be a really interesting kind of way to reflect on it, and then, of course, may or not be the right sort of route, but festivals like Oberhausen have been very supportive of machinima of late, primarily, I think from their perspective, you know, they're very interested in avant garde filmmaking, so it's not necessarily something that's going to immediately appeal to you. They are, yes, Oberhausen, no, I can't remember whether I flew into Berlin or Munich for it. I can't remember or Dusseldorf. It might have been, I don't know it's what Germany, but yes, yes, they had a whole section on machinima at a film festival, not last year, but the year before. And it was one of the biggest retrospectives of machini Mona in a long established animation, Film Festival animation, the

Speaker 1 57:38
same one I I spent, when I was on my my gap here, I spent quite a few months in Berlin and and got quite involved with the creative communities there. And there were, there were people saying, Oh, you really should put your your work in this, this machinima Film Festival. I wonder if it was the same one. No,

Tracy Harwood 58:00
that wouldn't be the same one, not in those days.

58:03
Well, this was in 2015

Tracy Harwood 58:06
it wouldn't be the same well, okay, Oberhausen, I think, is more of, you know, short, a short film festival, and my understanding, it was the first machinima. Was a couple of years ago. They didn't so but like I said, the point is, it's generated a lot of interest in machinima, having had this major festival showcase all of this work. So the I think there's

Speaker 1 58:29
demand for it. I think go for it. I hope so. I hope so. I mean, yeah, I mean, and keep

Tracy Harwood 58:36
us posted, is what I was going to say. Tell us how you getting on with it, because it's, it's certainly great to see people succeed with it, where you know all of the things that you've described are things that probably you know Phil and and Ricky and Damien would certainly have experienced with the development of their projects over the years. I mean, Phil, Phil can tell you some, some wonderful, well, they're not very similar stories to your story with with Nordic Games, for example. And so would you know, had Hugh still have been alive, he would have told you the same sort of thing. He struggled continually to get traction with game based machinima. And I think really, the, you know, the with red versus blue, they were, they were, they were breakout because they were in the right place at the right time, when things were, were, you know, when, when, when there was a demand for exploiting something that appeared to be successful for a particular audience. So, you know, they they kind of rode a bit of a wave and were influential as a consequence of the traction that they then gained. So, yeah, absolutely, you know, it's just getting. That break, that's, that's, that's needed, but there is interest in it right now, which is, is useful.

Speaker 1 1:00:07
I mean, I hope so. I do sort of feel that just generally. And as I say, I feel like, you know, back in 2014 15, when we when we originally launched this, I felt like it was very different landscape. But, yeah, I think, I think there does feel like, just generally speaking, there is a new wave happening, just generally in content creation and and I hope, towards more narrative content as opposed to personality driven content. Yes, yeah, that's what I hope. Because, well, I don't want to be a vlogger,

Tracy Harwood 1:00:47
no, but I, but my, my, my, well, I think, I think all of us, Ricky, particularly, we would be able to comment on this. I think from all of our perspectives, what we're seeing is a lot a lot of different types of storytelling that are not traditional ways of storytelling, which is, which is refreshing and exciting to see, and you can only get that with the kinds of techniques that you're talking about. You can't, you know, if you're, if you're sort of putting on, or, you know, or, you know, creating stuff with massive budgets, and it's going to stick to a tried and tested formula, whereas I think you're seeing a lot more exploratory approaches to to narrative storytelling now,

Speaker 1 1:01:35
yeah, which is one thing I'm really interested in, as well, is is just seeing what can be done in the 360 space, creating content for VR headsets, which, you know, I I feel like that's something that's been on the cusp for a long time, and I think headset adoption is still quite low, But, you know, that's something really difficult to do in live action, is to, and I've worked on 360 films, and it's really difficult to to make something, but, you know, machinima and virtual production, I think, is, is, you know, making something for 360 is just, Just a setting on your export, you know, it's how you how you render it out, and, and so maybe there can be, you know, a sort of Renaissance, if you like, of being able to to make content for or 360 and and also adapt existing stuff, adapt existing machinima and existing virtual production, stuff that's maybe already been produced as a, as a, you know, a conventional film that then you can, you can actually have a 360 version of it, but I don't know, I still feel like the adoption rates quite low, but that's something else I'm looking into in particular, with this better verse show, is maybe considering doing that as a 360 show rather than a YouTube series, and seeing, seeing if there's any, any sort of brand partnership that I can sort of get with, with sort of an app developer Making a 360 player or something like that, that, you know? Yeah. So that's another avenue a

Tracy Harwood 1:03:27
lot of development in that sort of side. I was going to ask you about using AI at all. Or are you looking at the roles of different generative tools like that? Have you been tempted?

Speaker 1 1:03:39
Short answer, no. Certainly not in any of my virtual production stuff. We are looking at AI tools. Well, I wouldn't even call it AI. Would call it machine learning. My art director on the Gedanken experiment has been experimenting with using AI tools for, essentially, you know, texturing, you know, adding an esthetic, a look, to to all of our geometry in the show and sort of as a way of fast tracking, you know, essentially bringing geometry in, developing an esthetic, a look, and then applying that to to the geometry, and using machine learning as a way to do that to sort of as a shortcut. But I wouldn't necessarily call that generative, AI, I mean, it is generative, but it's, it's, I would put it more in the machine learning camp. Yeah, I don't know. I still feel, I think I'm just, I just enjoy too much the process of making films anyway, and I don't necessarily have a problem with. If generative AI as a creative tool. And I've certainly seen a lot of really cool stuff which couldn't have been made if, if Gen AI didn't exist. But, yeah, I just like the process of making stuff anyway. So I would certainly use it for, you know, as a shortcut to sort of get me from A to B quicker. But, you know, for this, for this better verse show, I'm, I'm deliberately making it look like a lot of the assets have been made using AI, but they absolutely haven't. It's just, you know, it's just being designed to sort of make it look that way.

Tracy Harwood 1:05:45
The interesting day you say that. But I'm,

Speaker 1 1:05:47
you know, I keep open minded with it. For for stuff, and there's been some so for a live action short film that I did, which is currently in post production. I looked at at, there's essentially some, there's a daydream sequence, which is, which is the the main character, imagining self as a comic book character. And so I experimented with, with Gen AI to, essentially, I trained the model with, you know, a bunch of photos of this, of this actor that I have, and then tried to to generate a sort of comic book version of them, and it just didn't turn out very well. And I think that's, that's more my lack of skill as a prompt engineer, rather than the thoughts using stable diffusion. But, you know, at the end of the day, I really enjoy the process of working with a concept artist and working with an illustrator and actually designing something and coming up with it, which, yes, I could get something, you know, freely, for want of a better term, but, you know, I'm also just conscious of cancel culture and stuff. And, you know, I'd hate to to to spend, you know, a really long time shooting a film of which, you know, 2% of it was aI generated, and then it got canceled because, you know, you got to put that display name there. So I'm just sort of bit wary of of using AI tools as well, in case there's sort of any backlash,

Tracy Harwood 1:07:29
kickback. Yeah, yeah. I can't see that necessarily being a game stopper ultimately, because I think everybody's going to be using it. It's just how it's disclosed and what it's used for. Although I must admit, I was quite concerned about what the US discussions or the outcome their copyright discussions have been without, you know, in terms of ownership and IP and what have you, that's slightly concerning, yeah,

Speaker 1 1:07:58
and I think it's and that's the thing that worries me as well, is because I wouldn't be using Gen AI to make something in its entirety. I would be using it to achieve some particular task that needed to be done. And I just think whenever people see that disclaimer, they were just going to assume that the entire thing has been made

Tracy Harwood 1:08:20
by Yes, it's got, it's got its own problems as a as a discussion at the moment, I think what I was going to say, which was really quite interesting, and I don't know exactly how close this kind of tech is, but I recently saw a video of somebody just, was just A piece of film footage where they'd used a generative AI to rebuild the it was, you know, as a flight up a street and around a building, and they they rebuilt in 3d just with one fly through almost like a photogrammetry technique To create a 3d model that could then be, yes, from, but from a film, not, not from any, no model of walking up and down the street with a, you know, with a bit of kit and what have you, it was just done from a linear bit of footage. I mean, if you can turn models from photographs, turn turn things like that out so quickly that surely is a game changer for creating sets and virtual sets. Absolutely,

Speaker 1 1:09:27
I think background, this is definitely a place where I can see, see myself using it. And, you know, often it's partially out of focus. Anyway, yeah, exactly it's and, yeah, I think it's a great tool for that sort of thing. But, yeah, I mean, it's, it's on this, this good Duncan experiment project. I'm essentially, you know, I'm, I, I'm treating that again, sort of very much like a sort of. Live Action hierarchy where, you know, I have an art director, I have a cinematographer, have a production designer, and, you know, we all I have a senior animator and, and there's sort of a division of labor there, where the use of of of AI tools, I'm, I'm happy to let those heads of department themselves decide if that's a tool they want to use to achieve their tasks. And just essentially, you know, as a director, just, you know, focusing on, on the directing and and, and, you know, coaxing that at that saying, you know, I like what you did there, but can we change this? And, and, you know, this is working for me, this is not working for me, and not really being too worried about how they got to the end result. And that's sort of quite liberating as well, just thinking, Well, you know, I'm open to the tools being used, but yeah, that's that's up to them.

Tracy Harwood 1:11:01
Brilliant. Well, look, I think we've probably reached a natural conclusion to the discussion today. It's been an absolute delight talking to you about the machi my work that you've been doing and and to hear about the new projects that you're working on as well, we're definitely going to be looking out for those. So you'll have to let us know. I can't wait. To keep you waiting too long. No, well, that was, that is what I was going to say. Please don't and why, in

Speaker 1 1:11:27
terms of, I hope it's not too long until they're actually finished. But, yeah, absolutely.

Tracy Harwood 1:11:32
Well, yeah, fantastic. Well, thanks very much for talking to us, and I'll look forward to hearing from you soon, and for those of you watching, I hope you've enjoyed the show. Thanks very much.

Speaker 1 1:11:45
Great. Thank you. I'm very interested to hear, of course, about and one thing we haven't talked about is obviously talking about what you think of optimism bias, but that will wait till when I hear you guys discussing it. I'm very absolutely to hear your exactly

Tracy Harwood 1:12:02
well. As we sit here today, we're actually reviewing it in a couple of days time. So I I've no idea. We don't, we don't discuss with each other what we what we each think. So we'll, we'll wait and see what the other guys think. But from my point of view, I love the humor in it. It's it's so dry, so witty, so observational, it's not aged.

1:12:25
Thank you. That's very nice to hear

Tracy Harwood 1:12:29
great stuff. All right, thanks very much. Can't wait to see it.

1:12:33
Okay, thanks for having me. Bye, bye, you're welcome. Bye, bye, you.