Ricky Grove 00:08
Hello everyone, my name is Ricky Grove and I'm here with my pals Damian Valentine, Phil Rice. Tracy Harwood couldn't be with us today on the And now for something completely completely machinima podcast because she's at the Oberhausen Film Festival, which runs from April 28 through May 1. Tracy tells me that it's the first major film festival to include a programme dedicated to machinima and virtual production. I wondered about that at first, because there have been some other major film festival that included machinima. But I think what she means is it's the first film festival to have a full programme dedicated to it. So that's exciting. She said, their focus is on oh my god content. And she's looking forward to speaking to the contributors. While she's there, I'm sure she'll give us a full report when she comes back. Tracy, we miss you. You're always an essential part of the podcast. So we hope you have a really good festival. And we'll see you soon. I thought before we jump into the review of the first movie, we share a little bit of news. I was very excited this week to hear that an AI programme is developed to upscale images. So that if you have a low resolution image, the AI will upscale it for you. And the results are fantastic. I've also been following a video editing AI. And I just listened to an NPR story in which I was astounded at this because I had no idea. They used an AI programme to programme on a particular singers voice, then they could use that programme to have that singer sing any song they wanted in any language they wanted. And this woman who has been working on this since the early 2000s. Or actually, excuse me, mid 2000s, she doesn't speak Spanish. She used her own voice singing voice as a database. And she's had herself sing a Spanish song, using the AI. It sounded exactly like her. But she doesn't speak Spanish. Then she shared a Drake a recent hit on Instagram, in which somebody used Drake's voice that to sing a new song that they wrote. And you couldn't tell the difference. They wrote the music but they had Drake sing the song. And of course, the the people that did the NPR article, we're all speculating on what the hell does this mean? You know? You could get any Judy Garland singing your new song, you know, and what does that mean for legalities and everything? And once again, we're way ahead of ourselves in terms of the ethical and legal aspects of technology. But you know, that's been the case for so long. And I just don't know what to do about it. That's just the way it is. Have you guys

Phil Rice 03:19
rationally? Yeah, especially the ethical aspect in terms of like, you know, is it right for anyone to bring another Drake song into the world? You know?

Ricky Grove 03:31
Yeah, you know, I haven't seen it from that point of view. But you're right. You're right.

Damien Valentine 03:35
The phrase of ask the hard questions. Oh, you know,

Phil Rice 03:41
Actually, Ricky with with regard to that upscaling thing, that which I saw the news of as well. It's actually further along than that. There are now readily available tools, for upscaling video. Wow. And I'm actually using one of those right now to go through my back catalogue. Because in the early days, my releases were like Male Restroom Etiquette, for example, is 640 by 480. And that's still what's up on YouTube. And it looks terrible. I mean, like, if you blow it up to full screen, it's just, it's just awful. And then there was a period where everyone figured out Oh, the standard is 1280 by 720. So I've got like this series of films that are released in that. And then it's only the most recent stuff is in full HD. And of course, probably the next 4k tier beyond that's going to be 4k, right? So yeah, and this, this software will take a video and you can tweak certain parameters of how you how it should treat the imagery that it sees. So there's one that's specifically tuned to do well with faces, like actual real video footage of faces. There's another one that's specifically tuned for animation. So it treats surfaces a little differently. And then there's a few little parameters you can tweak. And I've been using that to upscale my old film for a product as well as upscale all of you Hancock's major work, and all of Peter Rasmussen's major, well. This summer, if things work out this summer, we'll be able to do those kinds of special special episodes we've been talking about where we, you know, focus just on those, those two filmmakers. And as part of that, I'm happy to announce we're going to be able to, to release for the first time ever, proper high res versions of all of that work. Yeah.

Ricky Grove 05:33
Obviously, you're happy with the results, right?

Phil Rice 05:35
I am. Yeah, yeah, I am. I mean, it's, it says it's better than I expected. You know, I don't know if it's, it's not as good as if I had remade the film in modern engines and actually rendered it that engine. Yeah, but it's surprisingly good. And it it makes Bloodspell, for example. It makes it look better than ever, you know, oh, that's, it does a really nice job. So the one that I'm using in particular is called HitPaw, H i, t, p, a, w, yeah, I've

Phil Rice 06:06
It's a little expensive. It's I want, I want to say that it's a subscription. First of all, you can't just buy it outright, or it wasn't at a price that made any sense to buy outright. For me. It's like 40 bucks a month. That's very expensive, if you're not doing this full time. So what I've done is, I got all my films queued up that I want to do this to and including, by the way, Ricky, the entire Machiniplex collection, oh, that I'm gonna, I'm gonna go through every single one of those. And just upscale them as high as this thing will go Oh, cramming it all into another into basically two month period, about three weeks in so far. It does take some system requirements to get this done. You put it on a regular, mainly GPU. So if you put it on just a regular PC with just a standard type GPU, oh, days, days for a less than 10 minute film. Yeah, on a higher end PC. It performs better, but it still requires quite a bit of time, and basically ties up the whole PC while you're doing that. But that's something that I'm working on with a PC setup for it. And yeah, I'm going to basically everything I can, I'll have to get it and we'll worry about, you know, getting permission to rerelease some of those things or whatever, when they can come, right, right. Yeah. For now, I want to at least have those copies that I archived from Machiniplex from years ago. And then all my back catalogue, all of us all of Peter Rasmussen's, getting them up to those higher resolutions, either Full HD or 4k. So I'm excited to start releasing some of those soon. Very happy

Ricky Grove 06:06
heard of them.

Damien Valentine 07:41
with my shop with some of my oldest stuff as well, because I got the same thing as yours. So low resolution, because that's all you could Yeah.

Phil Rice 07:50
I'm thinking like, Chronicles of Humanity with the animation setting. Damien, you'll be blown away by how good it looks. I really think you will. So yeah, it's worth it's definitely worth a try. Yeah,

Ricky Grove 07:59
fantastic. Is it in the cloud? Do you do though?

Phil Rice 08:03
No, no, it's a desktop app. The one that I'm using is an actual desktop app. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Well, that's

Ricky Grove 08:12
Very exciting news. And thanks for sharing that. I had no idea you were working on this project. That's yeah, I've been kind of keeping it a little quiet. But so awesome. Can't wait to see some of those older films. Beast in particular is one that I've been wanting to see. But anyway, let's go move on to our first film. We've got four excellent films this month, I'm so excited to share these firms, they just each month seems to get better and better. Last month was terrific. Even though I wasn't there, watch them all. Because they did some of the editing on it. And they were really good. I have a kind of odd way of finding films, we're going to do my film first. I look everywhere and I stop on a film that keeps my attention. And then after five to 10 minutes, if I'm still watching, that most likely will be my pick, depending upon the quality and everything. So for me, and it's an entirely personal way of doing it. It's about engagement with the film, am I engaged with it now? I'm a 68 year old man with you know, different tastes. I tend to not like mainstream kinds of things, because I've seen them all before I like unusual and creative kinds of things. So it'd be interesting to talk about that films, at least from my point of view. This film that I chose is called After War, a short film by RG Studio. It passed the test I started watching it. And about the time I started thinking, thinking well, maybe this would be my pic. The movie was almost over because I was so engaged with it. Now what makes this film interesting because there have been 1000s of Half Life 2 machinima, some good, mostly bad. But the interesting thing about this movie is that it was a movie composed of the same shot in the same position, camera position for every single shot, and it goes through a series of, of, of fighting by the Combine, a rebellion by the guerrilla forces, and then a post, after all of that's over. And at first you think, well, that's limited, you know that that's going to make it hard for them to be able to tell the story. It's not. And that's a great idea. That's a it's a great idea, and that's why it works. The music is fantastic in it. I love the way they use animals and birds in it in particular, there's a wonderful shift for each sort of section musically. There's a great theme as if to say that man can war all he wants but life and nature will still go on. You know, I was very impressed with the film. RG Studios appears to be a Russian group. With lots of a talent and imagination their YouTube channel has many Half Life 2 and Gmod machinima. So I urge you, viewers and listeners to check out their YouTube channel, I'll make sure that we have a link in it in the show notes. What did you guys think of the film?

Damien Valentine 09:12
The single shot. But the the single camera in one place for the entire film that really stood out to me is such an unusual thing. And it's really fascinating to see, not just what's happening, but the way the scenery changed in each shot. As the conflict progressed, the buildings got more and more damaged. Yes, yeah. And the so early on some of the combined propaganda posters go up and they get damaged, and they disappear over time. Right, that goes on. And, you know, there's a moment for big things happen in the background. And that has a huge impact on the next shot. Yeah, the aftermath of it. I was very intriguing way to tell a story because apart from shouting and things going on, there's not really any dialogue to it. So you don't get that you don't get characters telling you the story,

Ricky Grove 12:36
There's spoken words, but there there's no dialogue per se. You know,

Damien Valentine 12:41
it's more like people shouting each other. Yeah. grounded. Right. Yeah. telling the audience the story. And, you know, I think that works really well as a very unusual concept. It's interesting to see more like this. Yes. And I like the way that it goes all the way up to the post apocalyptic time when everything regrowing. Yes, it kind of ties in with Portal, which is the end of Portal. I can't reverse Portal one or two, but you kind of find out, you're in the same Half Life worlds, but just centuries later, yeah, yeah, he kind of gave the element into it as well, which I think was

Ricky Grove 13:21
touched. That was my favourite scene is that that very last post apocalyptic, because you'd seen all of this very sort of tightly focused, and that's an interesting thing, because of the tight focus that makes a conflict stronger. It could be a gimmick, you know, but it he didn't use it as a gimmick, they use it as something very creative. And, uh, you know, there was a tight, tight, tight, focus on the walls coming in, and then the post post apocalyptic, the music shift, the mood shift, and the walls are mostly broken down. And you see nature and birds, and everything is just marvellous

Damien Valentine 14:00
And the way the time of day changes between shots as well. Sometimes it's daylight, sometimes it's evening, because you've got the kind of reddish tint sometimes it's nights and it's very dark, except for the right, right.

Phil Rice 14:11
Yeah, the lighting, the lighting really stood out to me as well, Damien, and I, you know, in film, there's some great examples of light being used to convey emotion. Maybe most famously, you know, like Vertigo, you know, with Hitchcock, and this stark light and stuff, but that was kind of unnatural. You know, this green light that's bathing everything or red light in the background behind a certain scene. And this, as Damien pointed out, it's all it's all it all appears to have a natural origin and it's just, that's just the nature of day and night and different times of day the light changes, and I thought they use that very effectively. To first of all, you know, this is it's on the surface is it's a very disjointed piece. You know, it's almost like if you weren't paying attention, it's almost just like a series of vignettes, you know, because there's really nobody to really latch on to, there's no person to follow it's, but that I think that the way that they use day and night and that lighting helped give the consistency was time. And yeah, we were jumping a little bit in time, but there's, there's at least a sense of almost continuity, that that I think contrasts nicely with the kind of broken up approach on the narrative. To really the breaking up then becomes, the breaking up then just becomes it's helping to narrow our focus. Yeah, what we should be paying attention to, you know, as, as opposed to just having a, you know, 36 hour time lapse, a lot of nothing going on there. And this is, it's, I don't know, in the same way that a director can use the focus and you know, rack focus and stuff like that to draw attention to a particular part of the screen. In this way, they used time in the way that it cut it up to draw particular focus to events. So I love that I thought the sound on this was used just masterfully. Yep. Yeah, the it's your right, Damien, there's not really any, not any dialogue that would necessarily appear on a screenplay. It's more like the dialogue was, was a sound effect. Yeah. And did it convey some information? Yeah, I think so. I think there's, there's pieces of information that are conveyed with it. But, you know, this wasn't somebody's monologue, it wasn't terribly important. what was being said it was more of the context in which that those lines were delivered. Yeah. And I think the reason the sound was, was so important in this one, to me is for that, that final scene, because of the contrast with this, this serenity, this quiet, that overcomes this scene that has been up to that point, very chaotic.

Ricky Grove 17:21
You know, and brutal to I mean, they're

Phil Rice 17:23
just, yeah, I've several bombardments of murder and death and destruction. Yeah. And, and the sound just helped just amplify all of that, no pun intended. But the quiet afterward was just was just super effective. When I first watched it, I wasn't sure how I felt about that structure. Because again, it's disjointed. And, you know, my, my brain tends to want to find the narrative in the traditional sense. And it's not here, it's not there. They weren't even it's not that they messed up. That wasn't the objective of this film. Right? It took me a little while to kind of accept that and once I did, then it's like, okay, so I'm, I'm starting to on the second watch, especially, I'm seeing more things now. And it's, it's resonating in a different way, than it would be if this was following a person or, God forbid, with being narrated, or someday artificially good exposition, you know, it didn't need any of that. No, and this this was, this was a painting in a sense, you know, this was not some guy's story this is about a situation and making I think a statement about exactly what he said I couldn't say it any better than that about war in general and that, that it sounds flippant to say life goes on because it means something deeper in a movie like this. But that's essentially what what the message is. Yeah, is that life nature life force will persist. It's kind of like it's strangely positive message coming through from a movie that is dark and brutal for most of it. And yeah, at the end of it, it's it's the sense of, okay.

Damien Valentine 19:16
It's kind of like someone was had a camera as the conflict started and dropped it there in the streets. kept filming. Yeah, constantly. And then sure, found it and put it all together. Yeah. random clips they could use. Yeah, I feel it has.

Phil Rice 19:32
Yeah, it does have that feeling.

Ricky Grove 19:34
I think that's what attracted to me about this film and attracts me to films in general and machinima in general. They're created. Somebody decided to do things in a different way. And and you're right, Phil, you, you're your mind. We've been film goers and film watchers for decades. And so we have a certain set of expectations. And I'm really happy that you were able to to challenge your own expectation and stay with it and say, Well, hey, maybe there's something even more here than I thought, you know, because you could just reject it out of hand. But that's the very thing that interesting. Now we'll see in some later films, that we're going to have the direct opposite approach in terms of storytelling. So it'll be interesting to talk about it then. Well, that's our film for today. It's After War, a short film by Rg studio. I wish Tracy was here. I sort of expect that she'd goes into great detail about doing the background and everything. I feel like I maybe I've left it. We miss you, Tracy. But that's it. If you have any comments about this film, please contact us to talk at Completely Machinima.com. We also have show notes, extensive show notes at Completely Machinima.com. And let's any of you have anything you'd like to say at the end here? Nope. All right. Well, that's it. Stay with us. May is going to be a great month for machinima. We'll be back next next week with Phil's choice, which is a really intreesting one. We'll see you next time.