Ricky Grove 00:04
Hello everybody, my name is Ricky Grove and you're listening to Completely Machinima.com for November 2022. And I'm here with my friends Tracy Harwood and Damien Valentine. Hello. Unfortunately, Phil Rice couldn't make make it because he's down in Florida and that big ol hurricane slapped him upside the head. And he has very limited internet connectivity. They're still working on that down there. So we miss you, Phil. And we hope you're back with us next month. But I'd like to remind everybody that our news has moved to the blog post. Thank you, Tracy for all of your efforts and putting that together. It's a lot of work and we appreciate it. We're looking at films now. Last week, we did my choice that this week, we're looking at Tracy's film pick. What did you choose for us this time, Tracy?

Tracy Harwood 01:01
Yeah, hi. Um, well, okay, so I've picked one called Metaverse Music Video, which is actually a 360 degree VR film by JSFilmz. Now I picked this because it's something a little different and intriguing. It's been shot in Unreal Engine. And it perfectly shows why and how 3d environments can work as a 360 degree video rather than a standard 2d render out. And of course, it's also intended as a VR experience. Although I haven't actually put a headset on to have a look at it. I don't know what either of you guys have. When when we talk to you in a minute about it. Now, it's a rap music video, and it shows two separate performers. The rapper is played by Jae Selina. And there's a dancer there as well played by Jess Jourdan. Now both characters have been mo capped and mapped to meta human characters. And the mappings really good movement and the music sync up really well, including the facial animation on the singing character too. The scene plays out in a wet city street in some kind of forested area. And you can use your trackpad or headset to move the camera view. And you can see either character and the edges of both characters together. Although that's a little tricky, because they are diametrically opposite each other in the in the environment. So you've got to continually keep moving the trackpad to watch them both. I think one of the challenges with this is that you're never quite sure what you should be looking at or why. And I guess that's slightly less of a burden when you use a VR headset, because you kind of, you know, you can move your head and sort of see what's going on. But that's a little distracting in other ways, as well. Plus, your view is from one fixed point. And yes, you can zoom in and out but you never move from that one position. So you're not really naturalistically immersed in the experience, as you would be in a virtual environment performance, for example, which is really what I associate Metaverse with, to be honest. And I'm thinking here of Friedrich's person was it 2184? In our review that we did a couple of weeks back, which was I guess in a Metaverse more of a Metaverse experience. And then of course, there's that amazing cityscape, which I understand has some sort of Batman easter egg in it, but I really couldn't find it. I don't know if any of you did. I think if I'd have done more looking at the environment, though, it probably would have detracted even more from the focal experience. But again, I think these are the challenges with pretty much every virtual event based experience that that we're likely to see in the so called metaverse. What's your take on it?

Ricky Grove 04:03
I have a question for you Tracy. Was this considered a demo? Or was it an actual creation of an artistic creation?

Tracy Harwood 04:13
Oh well it's it's clearly an artistic creation it would have been you know, Jae's quite good at doing tutorials and demos. So yes, there would have been an element of that as well. But I see it as a standalone piece as well. It's good enough for that.

Ricky Grove 04:29
I liked it a lot. I thought it showed that Unreal Engine is really the engine for machinima creators. It looked fantastic. And you know in the Unreal Engine, you can change the look easily. It was effective the map the motion capture was just terrific. I think they used I didn't say what they use for the motion capture Xsens, maybe accent Yeah. In any event, it was just so effective. Well, a couple of things occurred to me, obviously, the experience is meant to be for virtual reality. So you can move around, you know, it's like, as you pointed out, you're in that fixed position, you can move forward or backwards, but you can look at either side, which sort of limits their ability to do a 2d video. It made the cut to, to each shot, medium shot, medium shot, medium shot over and over, you kept wanting them to move into the face for cut to the face for a second. I think that would have been more effective. And then my only other criticism to it. And by the way, I these are niggling detail he was just terrific, is that I oftentimes can understand the lyrics. It might have to do with my hearing as I'm getting getting older, but I would I'm maybe I'm an old fogy or something. But subtitles, I think would have been helpful. Because I want to know what the person is saying all the time. I don't know. Did you guys have any problem understanding the lyrics at all?

Tracy Harwood 06:18
I don't think so. I don't, I don't really remember that being. I don't really remember it being something that I thought spoilt it for me. I guess I wasn't really listening to the words on it.

Damien Valentine 06:33
I'd have to say that too. I was more focused on the visuals and looking around everything. And I was aware that it was music playing but I wasn't really paying attention to it. Yeah,

Ricky Grove 06:42
I'd say, well, that's

Tracy Harwood 06:44
a good point, though. Because if you're only focusing on the visuals, yeah. I mean, it could be certain anything couldn't be really,

Ricky Grove 06:52
I wanted to know what they were talking about. Because Stop it, you know, I mean, it seemed like they were trying to make a point about something. And I wanted to know what it was, but I only got fragments, I think that happens a lot in in music videos. The music is so balanced in such a way that or imbalanced that it the the rhythm and the instrumentation is emphasised more than the actual clarity of the of the song. And so I think I would like to see subtitles, or at least the ability to turn on subtitles. I mean, with AI now, you can grab it like that and do captions, bang bang. So I would like to see that. But it I want to point out, it did not spoil it for me. I enjoyed it very, very much. In fact, I watched it twice, I thought it was just so so good. Especially the motions and the backgrounds made me wanted to peek around the edges of the thing to see more of what was a part of it is a really excellent choice. Just really an indicative of the kinds of things that we're going to see in the future, I think

Damien Valentine 08:02
I am, I don't have a headset either to see it in 3d, I think that if he did have a VR headset, that's probably a better way to watch it than just on the flat screen. Because you can just turn your head. But if you don't have one, you have your phone, and it's gone transparent. If you turn your phone around when you're playing the video, it acts like a VR headset. So you can Oh, okay. So if you hold the phone in front of you like this, and you turn around, you get the same sort of experience of being able to look around as you watch it, which is something only just discovered. So

Ricky Grove 08:41
yeah, yeah. That's cool. That's very cool.

Damien Valentine 08:45
So if you don't, if you're interested in seeing this film, and you don't have a VR headset, try that approach and should work on a tablet as well like an iPad or whatever. I was intrigued by this idea of having a scene and being in the middle of it and looking around and stuff happening. And this element of you don't know where to look, well, if you're really there in it like is a real thing happening around you, you would have that same dilemma to want to look at this character. So look at this person over here, you kind of get the same. Of course, if you're already there, you will be able to walk around to find an angle where you can, of course, but you know, it's interesting, too, because I don't think we've ever, I don't think I've ever seen a 360 machinima video like this before. So it really stood out. And it's got me thinking, Well, what else can be done like this? Could you have a scene like a narrative scene, and you could be in the middle of it and you see the characters come along and have their conversation or whatever it is they're doing with each other and you can feel like you're actually part of it even if you can't interact with them. That some interesting possibilities there. So I like this film and I hope it inspires other creators to experiment with this 360 format.

Ricky Grove 10:01
Yeah, I think Phil would bring up at this point, the notion that early machinima was before it turned into video, which was sort of a, quite a quite a jump, and people were protesting about it, you could download the exe file for the scene that was created and then actually go inside of the game. And it had no limitations, like the 360 video, because you could walk around, come up close to the person, do whatever you wanted. So it actually have fewer limitations, than 360. And it might be an interesting time to return to some of that. If it's possible, I don't know whether it's technically possible now, to be able to do that.

Tracy Harwood 10:49
I also think when we talk about web three, we will be getting back to more of that in a more accessible way than just being in a game. When you have a look at the Snoop Dogg, website and web three experience that will be up one one week, this month, that's got, you can see from that, that's got really, really interesting and immersive possibilities. And it's just web I think that's

Ricky Grove 11:24
yeah, that's really I'll be looking forward to finding out more about that, in the future. I think there are some things are some challenges for the future, if you decide to use a exe version of the game, that you've created a scene and one as is that audiences are conditioned to be passive viewers of things now, more younger people might not have that same conditioning. And so we might be more willing to be able to explore the, it's almost like an installation. You know, you have these these events occurring and you go up and you can look at things you want to look at and getting closer pulled back. But I think people a large majority of people prefer to have that old done for them. They want them the filmmaker to make the shots and the edits and to tell them using those shots. And you also limit some of your you're gonna have to develop a new language. If you're going to use three 360 degree, a storytelling that's different from the traditional film language that there's always been there's, there's some talk about that already. I went to some SIGGRAPH conferences in which they the filmmakers were talking about the challenges of coming up with new language so far that hasn't hit, even though the prices for virtual headsets have plummeted. I mean, get one now for five $599 and explore that. But that's it's still game based. But I'm really interested to see whether machinima filmmakers or animation filmmakers, in general, might embrace this challenge and see what they come up with.

Tracy Harwood 13:23
Yeah, interesting. Yeah.

Ricky Grove 13:25
360, for one thing, even though its limitations as ideal for concerts are one thing. For example, if somebody's having a new year's concert, they can put you on the stage next to the band. So you can look out or write in the front row to be able to look up or look to the side or look in the back, you know. Nightmare Puppeteer, my friend, Mdotstrange creation allows you to do 360 videos inside of it with some of the updates. So we'll put a link to that. Anyway, it was a really good pick. We're going to have another choice coming soon with Unreal Engine in this month's films. And I urge you if you haven't tried Unreal Engine, it's free. It's the learning curve is not steep. It's sharp but not steep. And the tutorials and the community are vast because it's becoming so but the important thing it's free. It has all the tools that you would want for machinima, including a marketplace you can import free models. It's just a terrific way to make films. So check that out if you haven't tried it before. Any last comments that you guys like to make about the movie or, or unreal in general?

Tracy Harwood 14:47
Yeah, let us know where the Batman easter egg is. Yeah.

Damien Valentine 14:53
I didn't know there was one so I'm gonna have to go back and watch

Ricky Grove 15:00
All right, well, that's it for this week's choice. Really top top choice. You always make great choices. Tracy. Thank you, everyone and hello to Phil, if you have comments, talk at completely machinima.com. Also the show notes will be there as well. And with that, we'll close this weekend. Thank you very much, my friends.

15:19
Bye bye bye