Ricky Grove 00:39
You welcome. My name is Ricky Grove, and you're watching And now for something completely machinima podcast, a podcast devoted to machinima and real time related technologies. I'm here with my pals, Tracy Harwood, Damian and Phil Hello. Hello. We're in our July series of podcast. Last week we had Phil's excellent pick, which engendered quite a fascinating discussion. This week, I think it'll be interesting to see how that discussion leads over into my pick, which is a film by Andy Hughes, who is a filmmaker who lives in Cornwall, UK. The film is called inner migration, 720, it is a artistic film. I'd like to say experimental, because of some of the visual techniques in it. The main game that it shot in is cyberpunk, 2177 but it also includes fragments of audio and sound and narration and video from two, what you would call educational films here in the United States, films that are made to show at high schools or at meetings. They're sort of non fictional films meant to educate people. The Prelinger archives@archive.org, is a great place to go for these because they've this fellow Prelinger got maybe 6000 of them together, and they cover everything from war instructions on how to avoid syphilis, to kids, young kids, learning how to throw a party for the first time, or the story of how bread is Made in a bakery, all sorts of interesting things. The two films that this and Hughes used was out of this world from 1964 it's a non fiction film that speculates about what the future will look like in terms of how cities are designed, their architecture, the the way roads are used. And then another one that came earlier, called the new United States from 1940 which talks about the, again, it's more futuristic looking, talking about how, what the United States will look like in the future, in terms of its politics, and it's, it's the other people and culture will change. The filmmaker uses cyberpunk. 2177 is a kind of background where and then the narration from these two films, he's cut and split and put together as a commentary on the Machinima movements of the character usually done like writing or walking a POV from that character. And it creates a very interesting contrast of things, between these of feelings and ideas, between these two things. It's a non realistic film, in a sense that it's a film about ideas and about characters. Irony, which is something that I spoke last about last week. Irony, meaning you present something knowing that it's going to be interpreted in the opposite way, which creates a kind of oftentimes either humour or a poignant feeling, and viewer so the viewership for this thing is not, if you're looking for a story, you're not going to find that it's a different kind of viewing experience. And it's something that I wanted to talk to you about. How to view this kind of film. I chose it simply because I found it on the internet. I had no idea what its background was, anything. I just watched it and I thought, well, it reminded me quite a bit of the 1930s modernist films in which the ability to superimpose images on top of each other to create IRA. Ironic contrast was being used at the time, which a sort of odd, bright kind of feeling in all the modernism, and it appealed to me in that way. But there are also some things that are goofy with it and are strange with it, which I want to discuss with you. I enjoyed the film very much. I found some of the moments poignant, some of the contrasts poignant. I thought the editing in the film was just spectacularly good. The guy obviously knew the source materials and the Machinima that he had created. I think that was a quite a creative use of it. Sound Effects and whatever tiny scratches of music were in it were effectively well made. There was strong, poetic imagery in it. It was an original and as you three know, I always admire originality in films, above many other things, those people looking for a plot or a story are going to be disappointed. I enjoyed it, and I'm eager to hear what the three of you have to say about it. You

Tracy Harwood 06:05
want me start

Ricky Grove 06:07
Sure? Oh, please. I want to hear what you have to say.

Tracy Harwood 06:10
Oh, well, okay, let me start a bit with the Creator then, because I like to know who the creators are. This guy, Hughes, he's, he's, he's an activist artist, I would say, influenced by personal experiences of waste contamination of the natural environment, and he aims to move what he says is beyond the visual tropes of eco or plastic awareness, often exploring this kind of complex relationships between plastic nature, the natural and The Virtual, where he kind of interweaves archival material, new, you know, in Game of Schiller, if you like, with film footage from sort of early exploration type videos as you as you've kind of said in what he calls as a kind of a new materialism. So how he's describing it, his projects, most of them, they kind of touch on concepts like viscosity, object, agency, circulation, hyper objects, the abyssal, abyssal, okay, deep sea. And ongoing, kind of ecological concerns to do with, well, just the natural environment, really, through the work he's trying to, I think, challenge conventional ideas surrounding climate change and the broader environmental crisis. And interestingly, he says the first ocean life forms because they were microscopic. He argues, therefore, that it is what we cannot see that should be focused on. Now that's, I think, the context. Now he's got associations with organisations such as plastic pollution Coalition, which is based in LA, surfers against sewage, plastic free Jeju Plymouth, Marine Lab, blue mind, the European Centre for Human Health, sustainable Earth Institute, raw Foundation, and numerous others, where you know collectively, what they're doing is working on the impacts of plastics and waste. So he's deeply embedded in that kind of movement, if you like. I think therefore, it's perhaps not surprising that he's adopted video games as kind of found media, which, you know, some argue are a pollutant, and others a kind of perfect illustration of a of a broken world in their aesthetic representation. And that's the kind of thing that we were talking about with Phil's pick a couple of weeks ago, which I think was particularly relevant in this one. I actually found some really interesting comments made by Matteo batanti on gamescene.org about Hugh's use, particularly not of cyberpunk, but of GTA five, which reflects on the many controversies around things like gang violence, car theft and racial stereotype, racial stereotypes. Now he's he appropriates video the video game context, because it's possible for him to go beyond the world to describe New imaginaries that allow for this kind of creativity beyond simply photographic. Photographic is one one of the media forms that he uses as well to representing something new or different, if you like, and and it's in this way that some of his work has been described as analogous to the work of another director called Adam Curtis, who worked on films like hyper normalisation and can't get you out of my head, particularly in the technique side of. How it's presented. Now I would describe this kind of film, the particular this particular one that we're looking at this week as a Futurama of idealised life. And it's juxtaposing this imaginary corporate vision of a of a major company, and that company's General Motors, with another corporate, hyper technologized environment. And that is CD Project, red, cyberpunk, 2077, and at one point during the video, I latched on to the GM commentator saying something like, this is the new horizon in the spirit of individual enterprise in the great American way. And shortly after that, what you saw on the screen was the word flatlined in relation to the character being portrayed in the game, because of the way that these things are being juxtaposed. And I think that gives you a sense of where this is positioned as commentary on the oil industry, in particular, which you see represented in many different ways on the screen in the film, everything from gasoline stations in the game to the motor industry of the 1940s to litter and mountains of waste connected using this kind of what I would describe as a palimpsest of time, where the older imaginary window is seen through the virtual newer views underneath it. So you've kind of thought, you know, superimposed together, but basically presenting this window through time. I think it's making a point, but I actually think it's quite crude, and that's not really a pun. In fact, the more I watched of it, the more I kind of expected just stop oil to kind of pop out from behind a car and spray paint onto something in the in the game world somewhere, because it was just so literal. And that's a literal level. I think you know what you're looking at. Here is an observation on the polluting impact of the oil industries on our world and the consequences of manipulating consumption, which Hughes argues is in this is being achieved through a focus on efficiency, convenience, speed and productivity, and to present a world that can be whatever we propose to make it is also at another level, Hughes, I think, attempting to comment on where he thinks the world may be going. Alice cyberpunk or Blade Runner, perhaps. And I guess that may be a fair point for some cities or parts of the world, but these days, I kind of expect a little more from a film than this kind of literal commentary, especially from people that use machinima. We see much richer attempts at doing this kind of thing from machinima creators. Also, I think, you know, Matteo comments. Also, I think, on the literal nature of it, he said, he said, it's basically a film that reflects the disparity between historical optimism, optimism and kind of current, the current global situation. Not sure I actually fully agree with that, though, and that's because when I was looking at this, I was thinking about the work that we reviewed some months back now, probably about this time last year, in actual fact, which had been filmed in Unreal and I don't know if you guys would call it, it was a it's about a greenhouse where the privileged few, if you like, the wealthy, have

Phil Rice 13:31
access to, like, a really dark future, right? That's

Tracy Harwood 13:33
right, that's right. So, so they have access to unpolluted air and natural food, and everyone else is reduced to growing tomatoes illicitly in derelict and condemned buildings, because that's the ultimate impact of pollution. And what you saw in that film was the politics of power, you know, over remaining resources playing out to as a destabilising influence, to to kind of create this dystopian world where, I think what you've got here is a much more, you know, not questioning what you actually see in the video game, but kind of accepting what it is and not kind of interpreting it beyond that kind of, you know, literal representation, if you like. So for me, this film, I, you know, whilst I really enjoyed it, and particularly enjoyed the, you know, looking into what this guy was doing and how he was doing it, I thought it actually lacked vision in its execution in the context of some of the other work that we've seen. And I have to say on that point, much like a lot of other GTA artists made films we now see, I feel actually, very few of them challenge what they see on the screen in a truly creative way. I think that French one that we reviewed a few weeks ago was probably an exception to that, where it was questioning what it is to be virtual and real. Thought that was a much more creative interpretation, given that what we're talking about here is for then found media and. Mean, it's interesting actually, that there is a very small selection pool of games being chosen to make these kinds of work. And I'm not really sure sure why that's the gay case, given there are so many, so many games out there, I just don't understand why they just settle on just such a small pool, like GTA, like cyberpunk. I guess cyberpunk was always going to be one of those that they would use in that way. I guess also, it's quite interesting to think how many people are attempting to do this, as activist artists, using these, these games, in this way. So, you know, given this, this particular film was a selection for the Milan machinima festival this this year. Yeah. Okay, I can kind of see why they would do that, because their focus is particularly on avant garde genre of artists, game based practice. But I kind of wish they pushed the envelope a little bit more than they seem to be. Now, there is one more thing I would like to say about this. A couple more things. Actually, I was intrigued, given that this is a machinima Film Festival pick. I had a look at Matty O's comments about it. Matteo suggests it's drawing on the work or drawing on the philosophy of somebody called Michelle Ceres to illustrate what what he described as soft pollution, which he says is the impact of the portrayal of corrupting images and sounds on our psyches. Now, Sarah's was a humanist. His philosophy focused on big picture narratives, really, of of human culture and historical change, particularly focusing on the positive impact of science, he was actually a techno determinist, believing that the interconnectivity between technologies and the internet would lead to a new chapter in human history, equivalent, if you like, to the invention of the printing press. And Matteo comments actually refer to a particularly influential book that Sarah has wrote, called malfeasance, appropriation through pollution, where basically he's arguing that in our search to be clean, we have, in fact, contaminated the earth, arguing that instead of solving issues related to our human well being, we have multiplied pollutions effects catastrophically since the Industrial Revolution, through the economic systems, mode of appropriation and its emphasis on mindless growth. But I'm not too sure how cyberpunk pollutes our psyches any more than any other media form. Or maybe the point is that it is yet another layer of soft pollution, which, with the weight of history upon it may ultimately come to a breaking point. If I'd had more time, I would have probably tried to find out what Sarah's thought about computer, video games, specifically, because he only died 2019, I think. But I did find something that made me think Sarah's would probably have been less concerned about their polluting impacts, and more interested in the ways in which they may provide the means for a new generation of people to learn. And that has very little to do with the realism of a specific game, but the way that games engage young people generally, very much in, you know, in reflect, in on flexion of the comments that we were making last week on Phil's pick, you know, the way that people were sort of playing and learning new things from from games such as, you know, social responsibility and respect, or testing ideas and what have you you know, games perhaps give People a new way to come to, you know, socially acceptable ideas, if you like. So they they learn how to be part of the human race, if you like. I think the only real problem with this is that they haven't really solved, particularly artists, activist artists, haven't really solved the distribution challenge that comes with being a machinima creator influencer. You know, these, these, these films, particularly this type of film, has very limited reach compared to something like the the film that we spoke about a couple of weeks back. Phil's film, right, right? Um mattio also makes reference to the first person perspective, and that's something you commented on Ricky when you were introducing it, this perspective of the camera as documentarian or commentator, and I get that, but actually I saw the camera as doing something a little bit different, which is that it is used to portray the passage of Time, rather than as an imaginary of a lived experience. And why I think that's the case is because the final thing that I wanted to mention, and you'll probably have much more to say about this, is that I found the sound mixing odd, but I suspect, quite deliberate in the way that it was done. Now I you know. You know, I've got a binaural headset on here, and that allows me to hear how sound has been designed and can be controlled. And what I was hearing in my headset is that in one ear, the sound of the piped narrative from the older videos was being, you know, pushed into that one, and in the other one, the game space was being pushed in, so I got two different things going on in my head, very separate. And then as the work progresses, there are shifts in where you hear things in the headset. Now, generally the older stuff remains in the left ear and the newer stuff in the right. But the more, the more towards the end you get, the more mixed it gets. And I'm guessing that that is a deliberate strategy, I think probably as a I would say it's a clever device being used here. And I would imagine that what they're trying to do is portray the sense of of time passing, somehow left versus right, and together being the sense of now. And I listened to it a couple of times because I wasn't sure if I'd made that up. But I haven't, and I have got a headset on the right way before you asked me that one, Phil, so I was quite impressed with that and, and that's what kind of what made me think about the context of what I was seeing more as a passage of time, rather than kind of a literal, first person perspective sort of thing. So it led me down a lot of interesting paths. Ricky and I think I really enjoyed it from that point of view. If I didn't quite enjoy the film as much as some of the others that I've seen that are what I would call activist art. So that's my thoughts on it. Thank you.

Ricky Grove 21:36
Thank you, Tracy.

Damien Valentine 21:38
Well, I did. I watched it. I didn't make the oil connection. So if that was the purpose of this film, it kind of fails, as far as I'm concerned. I did get the first sense there was a real message with it. And of course, you've got the videos from the 40s and the 1940s and 1960s of portraying this bright and hopeful future, and how we're designing it, or how they were designing the cities so that they would be nice places to live, and they're talking about the the raised walkways, so that you would have to worry about traffic, and there's more space for traffic because people aren't walking there, and all of that kind of stuff. And you know, it's kind of like the Jetsons type future, where everything, all the problems have been solved, and you could just live a nice and happy life and all of that. And then you got the opposite of back with the cyberpunk 2077 game, which I did play quite extensively, and there's absolutely nothing bright and hopeful about that future. And in the game, yeah, there are elements where you find out what's happened to Earth between where we are now and when the game is set. And there are some people who care about it, but there's nothing can be done to fix it. And they know that it's a very bleak world of people just trying to survive. Way back we did, we covered a video that was a look at, I can't remember the name of it, but it was a look at cyberpunk and the world. And it wasn't focusing on the story. It's just glimpses of people around the city and how hopeless they all seemed. And if you go back and watch that, that that kind of gives you a sense of that world, Earth's been devastated, and there's lots of artificial and implants and things for people that pretty much no one has their own original body intact, that you're going to Find everyone there has got some kind of robotic and like a erotic leg or an arm or the implants on their face. And some people take it to huge extremes where there's very little of their original bodies left. And you know, it's just there's nothing nice about that world. It's fun to have as a video game setting, but it's not somewhere you'd ever want to live or even visit. So the message I got from this video is, this is the future that we were promised, where everything is fine, and this is the direction that the world seems to be you're going now. I didn't pick up on the line. It's just just a general feel of that. And I did notice the sound kind of overlapping. It's kind of like we're kind of here, where it could go either way. It kind of depends on what people do next. It's not saying we're definitely going on the cyropaic route, but it's also saying we're not going on that hopeful, promised future that sounded so good in those old videos. But, you know, there's still a chance that we could possibly make that happen. So that's the why I came away from it. And it's nice to see cyberpunk being used and for this kind of video, it makes perfect sense that if you want to show a bleak future, you have to choose a game that is set in a bleak future, because all the content is right there. And and, of course, it's a huge city to explore. You're going to find lots of places that are very run down, and a lot of the environments and shots did match up quite nicely with the dialogue from the videos. They were talking like I mentioned just now, the the raised walkways. Now they talk in the video, in the audio, they talk about how this is going great, because it keeps people safe from the traffic and all of that. And then in the they show them in the game, and, of course, just

Ricky Grove 25:31
reckless, wild driving, right and on on the freeway.

Damien Valentine 25:35
But the way it's done also the the player behind the you know, the player in this video, there's a he was walking through the road. He was not walking on the safe walkway. He was walking through the on the road. And he wasn't driving. He was actually walking and getting hit by cars or near misses. Yeah, and if that happens in the game, the drivers shout things at you. They get out the road and or they don't care. They'll just drive straight into you, because the society in this game, they don't care if they drive into you, because they'll just hit you and then carry on going. Because that's that's the theme of the game. And yeah, I was impressed by the use of the game and the way they lined up with that. So as far as the oil goes. If they wanted to make that message, maybe it should make it a little bit clearer, because I didn't. I got a similar message. But it wasn't down to oil and fossil fuels specifically. It was just a general, this is not the way we want to go. We want to go the other way. So, yeah, that's what, that's what I came away from. It

Ricky Grove 26:38
good points,

Phil Rice 26:40
very, very similar impact on me. Damien, I totally missed your I think, brilliant observation about possibly what the audio was intended to symbolise. That dichotomy never occurred to me that that's what they were doing. I was, I guess I'm probably listening to it from an engineer's perspective and thinking, Oh, that's an interesting way to you know when, when the when the GM films, audio was off centre. Sometimes you do that in a mix, just because it stands out a little better and will come through. And he could have it at a very low volume, but you still perceive it. If you put everything in the centre, sometimes it gets muddled. So I assumed it was for that reason. But I love the idea that that was intended to be symbolic. That's that's pretty genius, if that's what was, what was intended, right? I found this film very moving, and I'm not I'm not an activist. I'm not particularly sympathetic to activists. I feel like that. A lot of them are just non corporate propagandists of their own, and they put their agenda out there and are out to manipulate people. That's a very broad and oversimplification. I get it, but that's I'm just explaining. That's my general attitude. And I think if I had known what the filmmaker was, was into and such. Before watching this, I would have watched it very differently, but instead, I didn't know anything and didn't seek to know anything before watching I just watched it. And so the I don't know there's kind of a and I don't mean the word, this word in an insulting way. I mean it in the kind of elevated way that we've talked about over the years. Ricky, the amateur nature of the production and the the kind of it little rough around the edges bits of it, to me, was it gave it an everyman sense. It was a pot. To me, it ended up in a positive column, even though I love good production values and I love when people tie up every loose end and try to get every single detail, this had more of almost a scrappiness to it, but I for the way that it impacted me. It worked like really, well, um, I did see an awful lot of shots lingering on gasoline signs to where I wondered, is someone trying to say something here specific, but like, like, Damien, it never really came blasting through, although, having learned some of the history and background and stuff. Now it's like, obvious, okay, yeah, they were trying to do that. But as someone who just came to the film cold, it didn't overwhelm for me. It was there, but I felt like that. That wasn't out of place given the overall theme of the film, which was all about that contrast that Ricky highlighted right at the beginning. I would I would even call it high contrast. These are two starkly different views of the world juxtaposed right on top of each other. Um, starkly different. Uh, weirdly enough, this film made me think a lot about the Paul Thomas Anderson film. There will be blood. Which was, oh, who was the actor in that? Somebody helped me? Please?

Ricky Grove 30:20
Yeah, that wonderful actor, yeah. Daniel Day. Daniel Day

Phil Rice 30:23
Lewis, thank you. So in that movie, Daniel Day Lewis is this oil baron back in the late 1800s up into the early 1900s I think, and he comes to this town and makes all these promises to the people about we're going to build schools. My workers are all family men, so there'll be children, and we're going to build the church, and all this infrastructure that was promised, and then he gets there, none of that materialises. He never intended to deliver that. It was just the sales pitch. He's about getting that black stuff out of the ground and and turning it into wealth. And that's it. So there's in the modern psyche today, the zeitgeist right now, I think, is to tends to be one of cynicism towards authorities and corporations in particular, and any promises that they would make. Well put, you know, so even though one could argue that when GM made these films, and if you've ever visited, if you ever visited Disney World in the in the 80s, tomorrow, Tomorrowland, yeah, you there's, there's this ride on there, a ride called the people mover. And it's just this slow indoor train that takes you through essentially that GM audio could be the audio of that trip. It's, it's all this very, you know, flowery and very positive vibed description of how the future's going to be, and technology and stuff. And I remember seeing that as a kid, and it was just, it was fascinating, you know. And this, this GM film, is made in exactly the same spirit both these films, but the modern tendency today is we're at a point where we question the veracity of those we questioned whether they were being sincere, and that is the central question when evaluating those films nowadays, I think, is, did they mean it, or were they being like Daniel Day Lewis's character, and there will be blood, it was just an empty promise to and it's ultimately just all about getting our money. And I don't know if anyone knows the answer to that, but people believe one or the other, and tend to believe that very strongly, so. And I feel like that. This filmmaker understands that and understands that 2024, years hearing those statements in GM about this beautiful future, nobody just takes that, just swallows that goes, Oh, okay, anymore. You know, there's, there's questions, especially given that when those were said, and then we look at where we are now and then through the the lens of this game, it's a potential future. It's very easy to just go, what's going on here? Were we? Were they just dumb and wrong? Or did they lie to us, you know? And yeah, I think that that regardless of where you fall in, that question, this film brilliantly strums those emotions and creates a for me, maybe for everybody, to some degree, no matter when you grew up. When you were a kid, you were more optimistic about these things you you you had, it was easier to believe in a utopian future of that kind. And as you get older, it's not so easy to believe because you've seen more, and you realise that doesn't seem to be where we're trending, not on all fronts. You know, there are things that are certain. I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm not a I'm not a pessimist or a nihilist. I have no doubts that we are living in the easiest time to live in probably all of human history. You know, we've got it good. We've got it real good. But is this world perfect or not broken? Absolutely not. You know, there's problems and there's potential dangers, looming, dangers in some cases, right? That even though I can those things can be true at the same time, I can recognise that man, compared to how people, what had people had to go through 200 years ago, even 100 years ago, and we got a pretty darn good, you know, as pretty good sitting here in air conditioning, electricity is you don't even fail. About anymore,

Damien Valentine 35:01
talking to each other, all the four of us talking to each other different parts of the world. Yeah, we're

Phil Rice 35:05
in on different continents, and we're having a live conversation. I mean, to just there's a lot to be positive about, but there's also a sense that don't get lulled too much by that Yep, because not all is great, you know, yep, and certainly not all is great for everyone, which I think is the central political question really is, what to do about that? Yeah, I think both sides of the political aisle recognise that that's problem and have radically different, in some cases, radically different, ideas of how to solve it. But we all know the problems there and that this thing is a, this is a machine that needs a lot of maintenance, and in some cases, probably a lot of repair. This, this thing we call society, there's even, you know, in different parts of the world as people who have a completely different idea of what the machine should even look like, you know, and would just soon tear ours down, yeah, yeah, the West is evil, etc, etc. You know, these are all things that are going on right now. And I feel like that, that this film really, really captured it well. I mean, I don't have a lot of criticism for this film, because, again, the scrappiness of it, I think, contributed positively to my experience of the film. There are some issues with the sound mix I felt like at some points. So there's this, there's this recurring theme in the audio of footfalls, rather heavy footfalls. It reminded me a little bit of there's a there's a running sound that they use in that Pink Floyd used, I believe, in Dark Side of the Moon, and maybe a little even a little bit in the wall. And it creates this real it really elevates tension in a very effective way. And so it kind of struck me in that vibe, the footsteps, and the fact that they didn't seem to completely line up volume wise with what the Movement was on the screen for again, it just didn't. I noticed it, but it didn't. It wasn't upsetting to me or or jarring. And this film really wasn't about immersion. So it didn't like take me out of it, right? It wasn't a story this. This was a i a poem of sorts, a wordless poem, because the words of the narration aren't the poem. The poem is the juxtaposition. So I don't know if it's a poem or a painting or what, but it's it's not a story. It's not intended to be it's a view. Yeah, yeah, I really liked it. I And again, I'm not a negative I don't I'm an optimistic person, not unhealthily. So I don't think, but, you know, when I was younger, I I dabbled with the nihilism quite a bit. You know, it's, it's seductive, but I'm not there right now. But still, I got this film, and it kind of moved me, and it probably would have done so less if I'd known that it was created with specific and maybe even propagandistic intent, I don't think I would have let myself I'm too stubborn. I would have gone. I'm not taking that. But I didn't. Fortunately, I think I just took it for what it was and and it did. It moved me. It didn't move me to action, necessarily, because, as I think Damien highlighted, nobody really knows what to do. But some of these problems, nobody has any any idea what to do, you know? But it did I felt something. I felt a discomfort, but I ended up grateful for it is that weird to say like I felt like, I, you know, like, not that I needed it, but that I didn't mind like, like I felt like, maybe I did need to feel uncomfortable about this. I need to to always remember that we're not on track with what was speculated, and it's either because those ideals were never realistic in the first place, or because we've been misled. And to me, the central, if there was a central theme of this that came through to me without the background, it wasn't oil companies specifically, it wasn't pollution specifically, it was more of, to me, cyberpunk, the world of cyberpunk, 2077 seems reminiscent of a world that has been completely consumed by consumerism, by consumption itself. You know that it's all about the.

Ricky Grove 45:00
And just comes to a film to watch it with no information about it, no background history of the author, no nothing, just watching the film for what it is. How do you view a film like this? Just obviously, obviously, not a realistic film, but it has realistic elements. Yeah, you know what? I mean. It's not necessarily, it's not a documentary, and yet, it has documentary elements into it. So what are your takes on how does a viewer make sense of a film like this? I

Tracy Harwood 45:35
my my perspective on that is, it is entirely, uh, dependent on, on where they see this film, and what their familiarity and experiences with the kind of material that's in it. Now, we've talked about this in context of the games that we understand. We've talked about these games a lot. We've never seen these Futurama type videos before, but we kind of know what, what they're all about. So we've put a kind of a level of intelligence on it that perhaps an inexperienced, perhaps audience might but I can tell you something if you saw this film in a gallery where there is an exhibition about, say, the polluting impacts of the oil industry. You're going to look at this video in a very different way to one where you just find it on the internet mixed in, say, with a lot of boss kill type videos or Frank videos and all that kind of stuff. You're just going to look at it in a you know, just depends the context in which you see it and how familiar you are with the kind of work that you're looking at, I think so you'll see it in different ways. That's what I meant. That's really what I meant about distribution being the main challenge that these guys face. If, if there is a message in this, if there is something deeper that they would like to portray the challenge they've got is cutting through the context in which others might view it. And that's not easy to do if it's going to be distributed through, say, through the, you know, the various kind of common platforms that everybody accesses this kind of material through, if it's a gallery based thing only that you see which a lot of the films are, that the Machinima film festival showcases. You don't tend to find them necessarily online easily, but you, you'll, you know, you'll go to a festival, or what have you, and they're viewed in that kind of context. You're, you're appealing to a very different audience with it. And I think that's, that's, that's the challenge, that's the challenge the artists face. That's the challenge the, you know, the viewer faces in trying to make sense of these kinds of things.

Phil Rice 47:52
Yeah, I think I'm going to answer that your question, Ricky, and a little with a little bit different tack, because I think that the the viewer, very often, probably almost always, has no control over the context in which they'll they'll see the film. That's happenstance. Often, you know, the artist has can have some controls over that. They don't have full control. It's the internet, you know. So, but so I'm focusing more on as the viewer, and I think, you know, probably the most important trait or quality to approach this or any film, is just one of openness. If that's not too simple, but I think, and that's, that's, that sounds easy, but it's not, you know, exactly. Everyone who comes to a work that's been created, be it text a book or be it a film they're bringing, or even music they're bringing, they're bringing a lot of baggage with them when they show up, you know, like, and I mean by baggage, I mean a lot of experience that is going to shape how they perceive it. But you can't control that either. You know that's just your life has done that, and so you can't control that. And you can't control necessarily, where you're going to see it, but you can control your the attitude with which you approach it, I think, and I think openness is probably the most important trait there, of which is a learned thing. I think, I think very few people have openness to new things natively. It's something that one, I think, chooses to prioritise and work on and I've not, yeah, I am that way. Let's put it this way. I am that way, more now than I than I was. I'm not the most open person, but I feel like I've, I've made progress in that direction, and it's helped me. I. You know, in the same way, when I met my wife, I had a pretty after living single for 15 years, I had a pretty limited diet, limited palette for food. Like, what I like was a smaller set than it is now, which she's got, you know, she's, she's from totally different ethnic influences, and has introduced me all these different foods. And then I've got kids, and I want them to eat the vegetables, so I better too. And so all of that has expanded my openness to what's on my plate, and even let me eliminate some things that should have never been there in the first place. You know, I think consuming film, if that's not a horrible word to use, but I think that there's something similar there, that you can develop an openness to try new things, or to experience new things, and that that will benefit you. You're still going to come across stuff that you just strongly dislike. It's still gonna but the cool thing is, is you just turn it off. You just switched something else. You know, you're not strapped to a chair like the guy in clockwork orange or anything, with your eyelids propped open. You just stop watching if you don't like it. But just because you tried a weird food once and you didn't like it doesn't mean you shouldn't try other new foods. Yeah. And I think the same truth. I think the same is true. For I had never tried Vietnamese noodle soup until Ricky and I had it. He introduced me to it when we went to New York for the Machinima Film Festival, and we went down to Chinatown, and he took us to this place, and it was Vietnamese, and they were herbs and flavours in there that I had never experienced before. I just never been exposed to it. It was great. Now I seek that out. So I think films are the same way as food in that regard. Well,

Damien Valentine 51:49
Damien, so this is one of those films that, obviously that is that message about fossil fuels that kind of went over our heads a little bit, but it's designed to make you think one of the other things that came to mind, yeah, or feel there was an episode. Well, it's two episodes of Star Trek, Deep Space Nine released in 95 called past tense. And the idea was, some of the main characters get sent back in time to 2024 Coincidentally, the story's been on my mind quite a bit. I remember watching that originally, when it first dead, and it kind of shows society is kind of breaking down. There's lots of homeless people. And the story focuses on something called the bell riots, which is meant to be the most violent civil disturbance in American history, according to Star Trek. And I were watching that in 19 five and thinking, what's an interesting story, but that could never happen. It's that's just silly. Um, watching it again more recently, I now thinking, well, that's hard to imagine that not happening. And there's conversations in in the episode, talking about other problems around the world that very strangely echoed the real world. And so I actually feel like after this conversation, I want to go and research the episodes a bit more to see what the writers were thinking about when they wrote it, because I as an elder and with more wealth experiences like Phil you talked about a few times. I understood this episode a lot better than I did when it first came on, and it gives you a lot of to think about. Of I imagine the writer thinking, this is something we should probably avoid happening. And so that's why I want to do that research and have a look see what they have to say. And obviously we haven't done a good job of avoiding that because it feels very close. And those episodes were designed to make the audience think. Now I think when I first watched it, I was a little bit too young to fully appreciate that. I still enjoyed the story, but that particular message, I didn't get it, but now I do. And I think this film that we've been talking about is one of those things where you watch it, it gives you something to think about. Now maybe someone watching it will get actually, I know how to fix that. Whether or not they have the ability to fix it, that's another matter. And you know, the people who maybe do have the power to fix it, if they were to watch this, it may go over there completely in a different way, because they'll look at the side of thinking, this is just some stupid video game. Who cares about that without thinking, well, maybe this is something we should not necessarily be striving towards. So I think, yeah, it depends on the mindset of who's watching it. And I'd like to think maybe more people watch it will start thinking, Well, what can we do about this? Because I watched it, I asked myself that question. I have no answers, but it was something I'd like. Cannot. It's a two.

Phil Rice 55:00
I'm glad you brought up Star Trek Damien, because I think Roddenberry, Gene Roddenberry is a great example of of an activist, in a way, you know, I mean, he used that show, and for the large part, the show continued that tradition even after he was gone. But he used that show to directly address social ills that he thought they were solutions for achievable solutions. And so he was he would take chances with regard to, you know, issues that he thought were just silly, that we were being silly about, like race, you know, that and, and he solved that. Solved it by portraying a world where that that wasn't the issue anymore. And look it, it works. And I think that that's the formula to to most of Star Trek, like, that's, really what his intent was. It wasn't about Captain Kirk or Spock or any aliens or anything like that, really. It was an environment in which to address issues that we could fix. Yeah, and that may be the biggest contrast to this type of film, which is, like you said, designed to make you think and feel but it doesn't have any solution in mind at all. It's really just focusing on the problem. And I think it's mainly because nobody quite knows what to do here, really, not really, yeah, so, but I think it's important to note that that doesn't mean that you shouldn't talk about that problem or make films about those problems. They need attention too, even if, like Roddenberry, you don't have the solution there to kind of sprinkle into the into the writing of the episode or something well put illustrating. You know, humans encountering a different race, and that planet has these problems that look a lot like some of the problems we have, and then they help them solve it, because they're, you know, they've moved past it. Those are great because you it's a project you you can see yourself finishing, you know, as a society. But there are bigger problems that don't have quick solutions. But like you said, maybe somebody gets the idea, we just have to keep it in their mind. The worst thing in the world that could happen to us is that we forget about an issue like this. And I'm not being an issue, as it struck me, not not the anti Oil Company thing to me, that's too specific, and it's an oversimplification of a much larger problem to just say, No, it's just oil companies. No, it's not, it's bigger than that. So, yeah, no, it's glad you brought up Star Trek, because it's a nice contrast to other types of using what was the Word, the phrase that you came up with, Ricky fiction, a fiction of ideas. Yeah, fiction of ideas. Sci fi has has long been the king of indeed,

Ricky Grove 58:04
it's one of the reasons why I love science, because

Phil Rice 58:06
it feels safe to play with those potentially really aggravating, really upsetting ideas in sci fi and fantasy, even it feels safe to explore those in more detail than it would be to just sit down and address them directly, and not only safe, it's much more effective messaging, like it's it's digestible and palate indeed. Yeah, yeah.

Ricky Grove 58:32
Well, the reason why I asked the question of you three, and I appreciate your answers, as usual, they're right to the point, is that I watched the film cold, enjoyed it, took a lot of notes, and then started doing a little research on it, and discovered it. It was a Milan Film Festival, 2024 pick. And I thought, oh, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Right, yeah. So I read the description that the person who chose it, and they wrote this long, three paragraph description of some film that they saw that I didn't see, made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. I understood the words, I understood the concepts, but it didn't apply to the film that I saw. So it made me think, well, why? Why would they write that when they're so obvious, so many obvious things in this film that appeal more directly to a viewer than going to an elevated notion of philosophical concepts of ecological disaster and ecological because none of that to me, you could see that in the film. I mean, yeah, you could find little parts of it here and there, but that. Wasn't what I got out of it at all. And I thought, well, well, then I guess different people view films of this nature, polemical kinds of films in different ways. And I wanted to hear what you guys had to say about it. But Ricky, don't

Tracy Harwood 1:00:15
you think also partly, partly with this particular film, I could not find a description that the artist had put out about the film at all, even on his own website. And it was entirely down to in this case, I think this film premiered at the Milan film film festival. It was entirely down to Matteo to describe it. Why did the artist not do it?

Ricky Grove 1:00:47
Why? Why? Yes, that's a very good question.

Tracy Harwood 1:00:51
Not because it, because that's a common thing. I think they just, they just seemingly put the the smallest possible description, you know, like a one line or even a title. I mean, what does in a migration 720 actually mean, I could find, no, I couldn't understand well, unless what he was talking about was the film format from 720 to, you know, bigger, I don't know. I couldn't get the sense of the title at all. There's nothing to do. I

Ricky Grove 1:01:22
think it's the David Lynch effect. They don't want to explain the film. They want the film to exist on its own and for people to get what they get out of it. And I think that's exactly the the right way to do it, because if you start explaining it all and you say, well, I intended in this shot to do this, you're going to say, Well, I didn't see that. Yeah, you could, as you so well, point out in your description of the film, all of those things that you talked about are in the film. Now that you've said that, I can see them, but that's not what I got out of the film. For example, at the end, it was a very poignant moment at the end of the film, where the GM, or no no, the America, the American documentary about how great America is going to be in the future, where everybody's going to live in prosperity. And the film focuses on the sad, lonely motel no vacancy sign in this beautiful lighting, no vacancy. It just the the contrast between those things was so poignant to me. It made me sad. And I don't think I personally, I don't think that's what the artist was trying to do in that, but he did it anyway. Yeah, he did it anyway. And I think sometimes that's why I pointed out that artists creation sometimes take on a life of their own. He may be describing something that he doesn't even realise is in his film, you know. Anyway, a couple of months ago,

Damien Valentine 1:03:04
I watched this interview with Christopher Nolan, and he was talking about one of his, I think it's his first film memento, and he took it to a film fest test screening. That was it, test screening. And then he did a Q and A afterwards, and he said that, you know, he explained the ending because someone asked, What does that end? Does that ending mean? And then afterwards, he said he came out and his brother capture took him by the arm and said, you should never do that again, because, and Christina said, Yeah, but he was not the what I thought the engine. He said, doesn't matter. You made an ending that's ambiguous, and you want the audience to come to it, but if you explain it to them, no matter what their interpretation is, as soon as you explain it, that initial interpretation is gone, and they'll just deal with what you said exactly, exactly, right? So, perfect, yeah. And so every film, he's made sense. He does not explain the endings, if they're ambiguous. He makes a big point of that smart,

Ricky Grove 1:04:05
great. Yeah, that's one more

Phil Rice 1:04:07
quick note, just to answer the to resolve a little ambiguity here the 720 on Vimeo, where we have this film. The video is uploaded in 720 p so the 720 is probably just a reference to that. He probably labels his film files like I do. If I've got a 10 ADP one, I'll put that on it. If I have a 4k I'll do that. So the seven, so really, probably the the title of the film is actually just inner migration. What that means? No idea. But yeah,

Ricky Grove 1:04:35
that's okay. It's a poetic, poetic thing, right? Um, well, thank you again for your discussion. I'd like to point out to machinima filmmakers, or possible machinima filmmakers, who are watching this, that the ability to take films from the prollinger archive@archive.org and we'll put a link in the show notes to this. They're all free. They're all create our they're all. So copyright free. You can use them. You can take a you can do, what this filmmaker did, is use a machinima engine or game engine or unreal, whatever you want, and then juxtapose in your own fashion films from the prollinger archive or or music or dialogue or all sorts of images you could do with this. It's a creative and interesting way to use machinima. All of that can be done. There's

Phil Rice 1:05:29
some writers in there too. Yes, indeed, of all types,

Ricky Grove 1:05:33
yes. And so I urge you to watch this film for inspiration, and then if you want to make your own fiction of ideas. Please do so. I think it's at a very interesting way to make films and and I think this film shows you how to do it well. Thank you very much for your your comments, as usual, they're interesting and unusual, and I think it's a real contrast from our last week's Pick. But the ideas were very expert, a lot of ideas, and I'm really happy. I'm glad the show does that. It's one reason why I'm I'm on it and participate in it. So thank you, Tracy and Damian and Phil for your thoughts. Make sure you check out our show notes if you have a comment about the film, or if you're the filmmaker and you want to explain the ending of the film to us, despite Christopher Nolan's Christopher Nolan's brother will seek you out, but it's okay contact us at in talk, at completely machinima.com and let us know what you think. So that's it. Thank you for watching. Stay tuned next week for more exciting action from and now from completely machinima.com podcast, bye,

Damien Valentine 1:06:50
bye, bye, bye.