Phil Rice 00:44
Hello and welcome to And now for something completely machinima, the podcast about machinima, virtual production and related technologies. I'm your host, Phil rice, and with me are my co hosts, Ricky Grove, Damian Valentine and Tracy Harwood. All right, so this week we're talking about a film that I selected, and it's, it's, it's a very interesting one. So this, this film is titled beam ng drive, realistic freeway, freeway crashes, number 10 by Patrick Zeugirdor. I probably butchered that Zuger. I should have used the later, we're gonna have an episode where we talk about Damien's film, and the creator has quite the name, quite the mouthful of name. And I ended up running it through 11 labs so that we could use that to pronounce it. I probably should have done that for Patrick here as well. Anyway, this film is made with a game that's in the title of of the film. It's the game is called beam NG. It's over on Steam. I want to say $25 US right now is the the list price for it. And this game is, it is a driving, driving and traffic simulator that has emphasized, well, first of all, it's nice looking graphics. I would say it's on par with like GTA five with the right shaders. You know, it's not not photo realistic, necessarily, but it's close. And the physics are the big selling point for people who like this game because the physics of how the cars maneuver, particularly when the cars bump into each other, or things and, you know, keep,

Ricky Grove 02:31
keep tiptoeing. Phil, yeah,

Phil Rice 02:33
there's, there's parts where it's, you know, the physics are a little glitchy, but it's certainly this is basically what I think everybody who played GTA five wished that the driving and crash physics were like in GTA five. Like cars get smashed, they roll over, parts fall off. It's astonishing. And the sound is is very well done in this game as well. All the sound in this video is sound from the game. There's nothing added. And you can, you can basically, to me, the most interesting part about this, this film, is the game itself. And I wanted to use this as kind of a way to introduce it to people, because it has, this is a term we haven't, maybe haven't used in the entirety of this show, but it's a term from back in the old, old machinima days. This has recamming built right in. The closest thing I can think of to that in modern games is the the director mode in or the the rock star editor in GTA five, where you can, you record some events that happen, and then you can go back and change the perspective of the camera. And that's how a lot of the GTA five Machinima is made. You know, where it's not just the game perspective, behind the car, behind the guy, you can, you can go and change all that. Well, this game has that, but it does not have the very short clip length requirements that GTA five has that makes it pretty challenging to film longer scenes in there. And the cam replacement ability in this recaming is spectacular. Mean everything from right behind the driver's seat to right behind the windshield to any perspective along the road from any car at any angle you can think of, this can all be done, and it's all a well. It's technically a mod of the game, but this game has a ton of mods that are right there available through, I don't know if it's considered Steam Workshop or not, but they're they're freely available mods, I I want to say that they're implemented more like mods are in the Fallout four game, where it's right there within the menu of. Game is where you can actually activate mods and download them and install them and all that. And this, this is similar. It's got a menu in there, and you could select which of these. So for example, one of the mods is by default, these cars have no occupants. They're just vehicles. But you can add a mod that puts these orange crashed crash test dummies into the drivers and passenger seats of the vehicles. And so you can imagine, with the right kind of freeway crashes, that creates some mayhem. I think you can opt I think you can choose whether or not the occupant is wearing their seatbelt or not. It seems like in this video, a lot of people were not wearing their seatbelt because they really go flying. So this film is basically a couple maybe I can't remember if it's two or three different scenes of an accident on the road, but you get for the first accident in this video, I want to say you get about 10 different perspectives of the same events from different vehicles and and points of view on the road to really dissect what happened, what the consequences were, the whole cause effect. So you get to see the same scene play out from as if there were 10 or 12 cameras all around, on vehicles everywhere. It's fascinating. And the other part of this that's fascinating to me, particularly on the first crash scene, which is one where, at the end of the day, this a truck up on a bridge that's carrying a bunch of logs, and one of these huge logs falls off the truck. The way that he chose to edit this, the order in which he showed the shots, has a sense of narrative to it, in that you don't immediately from your first viewing of what happened here, you don't see all those consequences. It's kind of revealed. It feels like that it was chosen to wait to reveal the, you know, the real big impact moment isn't revealed until, like, maybe your third or fourth viewing, or your third or fourth perspective, where this log lands on a vehicle, and then, you know, chaos ensues. So I just found it. I just found it fascinating. There's there's certainly nothing I would say compelling about the story of this video, necessarily. But when I watched it, I thought, I wonder how they made that. And was really surprised to learn. And then I actually watched some tutorials in this game of people actually doing the process of creating it. It's all within the game. It's basically like a really hyper version of the rock star editor for this game. And probably the only surprising thing about video and the game is that somebody hasn't yet modded a thing where the occupants look like actual people. But maybe there's some reason for that, because this is this video. Here is one I would not want to see with people who responded to physics the way that these dummies did, because it would be a very graphic, nasty mess. So anyway, that's my take on it. I was fascinated by the tools behind this. I think Tracy did a little digging to a little bit more research on the game and why it was created so but I'm interested to hear what you guys think of this one. You

Ricky Grove 08:33
will make sure as to why. No, I'll start. I'm curious as to why the filmmaker made the films the first place. I mean, yeah, you've got all the tools to do something that has to do with the accidents. But what motivates you, if you think of machinima filmmakers doing thing because they're passionate about something, or because they're really interesting, a story that would imply that the guy who made this film is passionately interested in car crashes, which is fine. I mean, we all have a right to be interested in what we want to be interested in, but it's a curious choice to do that. Secondly, I want to say, given that, I think that there are two things, two aspects of the technical qualities of the film that allow you to watch these things without having the response that a normal person would have to if these things were realistically presented. One is they're not people, they're crash test dummies. So that gives you a sense of detachment as to what happens to them, and some of the things that happen to them are pretty horrific. You know, the second is because there's no story, there's no empathy for the character. So you don't go, oh, that's Don and his wife, Sandy and their two kids, Ted and Tina. Them coming back from their vacation video, and suddenly there's a log that crashes through their windshield and wipes all four people out. You don't have any of that, so that gives you a sense of detachment to watch them, and that I'm grateful for, because I am a person who was in school when they showed auto safety films that were deeply realistic. I remember one film called really graphic ones. Yeah, wheels, wheels of tragedy, in which the the professor put it on in a sort of he was giggling when he put it on, and it showed real traffic victims with real traffic injuries, making horrific sounds because of their their injury, a guy with a broken back screaming in the most unearthly scream you could ever hear, real people with no arms, real people crushed in cars. And the goal was, is to try to impress upon teenagers the fact that this is serious. You need to wear your seat belts, or you're going to get crushed like this. Now, I came from an era in which they actually showed that to kids. They don't do that now, thank God, but it gave me a perspective on crashes. And having been in some crashes myself, I know what that feeling is. So again, I wonder what the point of the filmmaker, what he's trying to say about his films? Perhaps it's in a genre or in a thing where it doesn't make any difference what he whether he's trying to say something or not. He just wants to create films. Recreate crashes because they're spectacle to it, and it's weird and it's dangerous and violent, I don't know, but it made it hard for me to admire or get interested in the film because of that. But nevertheless, I thought it was a very intriguing and interesting choice that provided possibilities for filmmakers. I'm just not sure I'm with what this filmmaker did with the possibilities.

Phil Rice 12:05
And I just ask, because I've I had that same question, and is there a case to be made for this being weirdly educational? And here's why I say that, because after, in the aftermath of the accident, after he's shown it from all these different angles, then the camera goes around to, you know, still shots of of all the cars, and shows what the supposed outcome was for the the occupants, you know, whether or not they were injured or unharmed or unalived, as they are fond of saying nowadays, and that's morbid, but I don't know. Part of me wondered, does he, in his strange way, think of this as an educational video? I'm not sure what the value of that education is. I mean, we all know, if you, you know, get in a crash on the freeway, or if a log lands on your vehicle, it's not your best day, but I don't know. Yeah, is there educational?

Ricky Grove 13:05
I think it's possible, but I don't think it's possible with another filmmaker, because, as I recall, all three events were events that weren't because of somebody's bad driving. One of them was a huge hole in the ground. Another one was a wheel comes off of a truck and causes somebody so I don't think if you're educating somebody or you're telling them that Be careful, because anything can happen on the freeway, and most people already know that. So

Phil Rice 13:42
yeah, maybe the better if they were going after education as an aim. Maybe the better approach would have been okay. So you show this horrific simulation, but then you go back and say, Now, here, if here's what this driver had done differently, yeah, yeah, and they did. There's no sign of that at all. It's very it's more of fatalistic, right? It's just yeah, this happened, and there's nothing you could have done about it, yeah, right, yeah. That's pretty morbid. I

Damien Valentine 14:13
thought about that too. Is why is this made? Because it wasn't. It's definitely not a comedy. I could do something people you know that video watched comments ago where the cops are going up in the building and falling off. That was, yeah, more comedy, but you kind

Phil Rice 14:26
of get the feeling of a kid at play there, right? Or maybe some of the stuff that's made in Gary's mod, where they're just playing with the physics and being silly, silly. There's, there's no element of that here at all.

Damien Valentine 14:36
So the impression I got was He's showing off what the games physics are capable of doing, because this is a driving game. I actually thought this was GTA five when I started watching it. And then as I watched, no, wait, GTA five doesn't have some of these things in it, so maybe it was Modded. And then I looked at descriptions, oh, so it's a driving game. The impression I got was, this is a new game. I. And this creator, I don't know if he's involved with the game or he just likes playing it, but he wanted to show off the physics of the game and to show how the cars move when they're crashing, and how the, you know, the things happen, like the logs bounce off. It kind of flies up in the air and bounces off of the bridge. And of course, you got hits the car underneath and how that impacts other cars. Like each crash progresses, like from one minor thing, and it gets progressively worse as you watch from each perspective, and then that unlocks the next person who could see it happening and how they're affected by it. It feels like this is showing off those physics and also the filmmaking tools of the game. I don't know if it would. I can't really think of any other reason for it than that. It did make kind of curious, what the game else? What else the game can do? Do you just drive around crashing to see what the physics can do? Or is it a proper driving simulator, where you normally you just play it and you're driving around sensibly. Or would you race? Or, or what? I need to check that out, because I was kind of intrigued by that, but I wouldn't want to make crash videos like this, because it's just why, like you said, Racine, I got no real desire to do that, but

Ricky Grove 16:19
I did, what if it was in space and the spaceships were crashing into each other like Star Wars, crash, crash, baby.

Damien Valentine 16:28
Now you might be onto Star Wars dash cams to do a video where the rebels are attacking the Death Star, but every time one of the pilots crashes into it, rather,

Ricky Grove 16:41
he flies out the window and rolls. Yeah, yeah, there we go. So, yeah, yeah, this sort of Rube Goldberg thing where you got one, in fact, it's another thing, and that causes another thing. It causes another thing to but

Damien Valentine 16:55
yeah, I mean it, it's the filmmaking tools for this are obviously quite powerful for the way that it was shot, and I can appreciate that for the most part, the physics in the game were pretty good, from what we could see in this video. Obviously, there were a few things that were not right. You know, it was interesting. It wasn't really over the top as well, like, you know, some cyberpunk videos when the game first launched, and the physics are really heredity broken. There's a video I saw someone driving along a bridge and saw their car goes flying in the air across the city like that was funny, because it's so unrealistic, because

Ricky Grove 17:32
really unrealistic, right? Yeah, I wonder if, I wonder if this fits in with the idea of that, like that police video that we watched where somebody is just playing morbidly, playing with people, and are just crashing them together and seeing, you know, which ways they can make the most horrific damage occur. Yeah,

Damien Valentine 17:53
so it's maybe curious about the game, but I don't you know. I can appreciate what the video is showing about the game that's more than the actual content of the video itself. That makes sense. That's my thoughts on it.

Ricky Grove 18:07
Alright, open that door for Tracy, because she's been growling behind it for the last 10 minutes.

Tracy Harwood 18:14
Oh, my God, let

Ricky Grove 18:15
us have a trace. Well,

Tracy Harwood 18:16
I came at this, I just thought, oh, Phil's picked a nice GTA for us. That's cool. So I didn't actually read anything about it at all. I just started watching it. And I started watching it, you know that just sort of, you know, I was in that that first car, yeah, this is a nice freeway drive, scenic country, beautiful mountains, something I might do myself. And yeah, then what you saw was some idiot coming up fast on the inside lane, cutting through the traffic. And I thought, yeah, how many times have I seen that happen in real life? It goes completely crazy. And I was actually in that car watching this, you know, just sort of just just sort of taking it all in. I got completely in, into it in that first sort of minute. What happens then? Well, the driver's words, that causes this crazy chain of effects. One truck drops some of its load, some kind of TV or something, off the back of its, you know, a back of its open sort of truck, bit that causes a blowout as a lorry hits it, then that lorry hits a barrier and spills some of its load over this parapet onto the freeway below and hits a car. And most cycle runs into the back of that and then others swerve to miss the crashed vehicles. I mean, oh my god, it's, it's, it's a crash fest, and you're still sat in the car. And the video is from every one of those vehicles that were involved in that kind of chain of effects. It's absolutely nuts. And actually, because I was in that car. Are with him. It's really scary to see how these kind of accidents really happen, because that is how they happen. And as I was sort of watching it, I was thinking, Oh, my God, this is a public service information video for drivers who clearly have not got their feet and hands connected to their brains properly, because it was that idiot that caused all this that he's, you know, long gone now he's not even affected by the sort of mayhem that's behind him. So that's, that was kind of my opening thoughts by about two minutes into this video. And how long is it? About 12 minutes, you know, by two minutes in I was absolutely exhausted for, you know, just thinking about what was going on and just how much damage this bloke had caused. And do you know what I was thinking, that's that was a bloke. Yeah, that was a male in the car, and he would be, what about 25 years old? And then I thought, I don't remember seeing an image of a person in the vehicle. And I actually went back at that point to have a look at who was in that car coming up on the inside, to see whether I was right or not that it was a, you know, a youth driving stupidly. And even when I did that, I still couldn't see an image of the driver. But this, this image in my mind, of a boy racer doing that just couldn't get rid of. In fact, when I thought about it and when I was looking back through it, you did see real people. They weren't all Crash Test test test dummies, that the older person, there was an older person driving the SUV that got crushed by that falling log. You saw his face, and God knows who the motorcyclist was that got totally mangled. I mean, the body count in it, in that first crash was was shocking. I think I just sat there in horror. What was going on. And then through the whole film, it was just horrifying. At three minutes, there's another scenario. This time the wheel drops off a vehicle and causes mayhem, and then there's another body count, and then at six minutes, there's another one, and then a few minutes later, there's another one. I don't there's about five or six different scenarios in this they're not all the same thing at all, but every one of them becomes more chaotic with in terms of the repercussions or crash test dummies in those vehicles, you know, by the end of it, I realized that actually, I probably don't even want to drive on a freeway anymore, because there sure are a bunch of morons on the roads. And very evidently, from these depictions, it's the ones that are just driving normally, who are paying attention, who are law abiding and such, that are actually going to come off the worse from these idiots that are just doing such stupid things. And there's all of this went through my head, right? And then I thought, hang on a minute. It's just a game, right? It's not anything, but a game that's being showed here. And I was thinking actually pretty much most of the way through it, this is GTA. But then I thought, like you guys, this isn't GTA. This is, this is not what you see when you watch GTA. So I started looking up this guy, and this is a creator who has actually made this game because he likes watching Real Life dash cam crash videos on YouTube. The game, as you said, beam ng dot drive is something that he describes as a soft body physics engine game, he says the game is like watching satisfying, realistic accidents without hurting or damaging anyone. And he also says the game helps educate viewers about basic crash scenarios. And then he goes on to describe a whole different set of crash scenarios, T boned, distracted driving, dangerous overtaking. And then he says drivers should keep in mind they need to always be a defensive driver and always avoid road rage. Well, I didn't see any road rage in this. I just saw stupid driving, really. I have to say, by the end of it, I was really quite relieved it was over. It's far too realistic in its portrayal. That kind of was, you know what? It made me question why I thought it was too realistic. I mean, the editing, of course, there's no music, there's just sounds of cars being driven from the different vehicle perspectives. There's road noise, there's indicator noise. It was the indicator noise. I think that got me into that first vehicle, just sort of, yeah, you know, then being driven all these vehicles, being driven from different vehicle, vehicle perspective. There's no speaking the Ricky, you're right. There's the crash test dummies. Do time, kind of take you out of it a bit. But not all. The drivers are actually crash test dummies. They are actually, well, they don't. Some of them didn't look like the yellow the

Phil Rice 25:07
one you're talking about, for example, in the SUV, it's the light reflecting off of the dummies. It makes it look like flesh colored, but it is. There is no mod that puts people in the cars.

Tracy Harwood 25:17
Fantastic. I'm glad to hear that. I mean, the superimposed body counts, the superimposed images. I assume these were superimposed, because at this point I was still thinking, it's a bit GTA like, I mean, there was, there was a, there was a bit where a mobile, mobile phone was shown on the screen, one of the, one of the, you know, the accident where the car bounced up into the road, the thingy, the wheel fell off the truck and whatnot. There was a mobile phone involved in that one as well. Then the things like, you know, the police or ambulance silence siren after each of the crashes. I thought it was interesting the way he used binaural sound where, you know, depending on where you were in that, in that crash scenario, you you heard things in different places in your headset. I mean, it was a very cleverly put together short I think what disturbed me more, because, let's face it, if you're a driver, anyone has probably rub a neck to a scene of an accident, because it's, you know, it's clearly one of the most dangerous moments when you're driving on a freeway. It's when you kind of pass an accident. Because God knows who's doing what you don't really you don't really know. But I think what surprised me with this is just how many followers these videos have got. And I clicked on bean ng TVs channel. It's got almost 400,000 followers, and the and the video views are in the millions and hundreds of 1000s, millions and hundreds of 1000s. And I looked at the comments and was not really surprised, or was surprised, I suppose to see that the inspiration for actually one of those accidents that we see in this video was a real life accident. That one where the car bounced up into the road. You can find that video, which was a dash cam video footage taken from a vehicle that that saw that happen. I think it was taken from a Tesla. It was a Kia car that bounced up into the road. And that is actually on YouTube, and that is one of the inspirations for that particular piece. I mean, like you guys, I said, as I was thinking about it, I was kind of questioning, does this kind of machinima actually have any benefit as an educational video? And then I was thinking, Well, sure, no one gets hurt, no one dies, but does it in any way celebrate idiocy? Does it encourage poor real behavior as much as it shows what not to do? And the point that very often, the one causing the accident actually survives, is something that comes through really strongly in these videos, the one uploading the film to YouTube that, you know, YouTube, they're a survivor, aren't they? So does this kind of thing not actually educate people, but does it encourage stupid behavior? And I, I kind of left this thinking, you know, maybe this needs some sort of viewer rating, because it's not really significantly different to machinima porn. It's still porn in its representation and consumption, and it's not about the act of behavior, but all about the viewer who's picking this up.

Ricky Grove 28:33
It's all about the spectacle.

Tracy Harwood 28:34
It's all about the spectacle. And as a driver, I have to say, I asked myself, What did I actually learn from this video? And frankly, nothing that I hadn't already speculated could happen. Because, thank God, I've never been in an accident like this. I've come close, but never actually been in an accident that is kind of catastrophic in the way that these have been portrayed. I know what's going to happen if I don't pay attention. Did I get a thrill from seeing those speculative things play out. No, I did not. Would it change how I personally drive? Probably not. Would I be a little more aware of others on the road? Well, I already am, and I'm continually surprised how dumb some of them are around here, for example, there are continually reports in the local press of car meetups on public roads, where idiots do tricks very much what you see in games like GTA and probably this one as well, where passersby are hit by those stupid enough to be, you know, doing these daft tricks in their cars and what have you. So if this kind of game takes that kind of behavior to another level, where accidents are deliberately set up on roads for real. I don't think this even counts as entertainment. I think it should be not viewable at all on these channels. Maybe, maybe there's a PSA here that it, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe it. PSA isn't actually the fact this video shows what happens in crashes, but illustrate that this is not a game at all, and that these kinds of games should not be listed on platforms. I don't know. Is that too much

Ricky Grove 30:13
intense? Is that too I think it is too much, because morbid curiosity has always been a big seller from the in America, from the beginning, you know, the the video of somebody committing suicide, literally suicide, had a billion views. You know, I'm not surprised that there are massive amounts of people who who want to watch this kind of thing. The the saving grace of it is, though, is a soft core. Crash, porn, not hardcore. Crash, porn, okay, and the fact and that you don't get that thrill of actually seeing people in there, that makes a difference too. But I'm for more freedom than inhibition for this kind of thing. If people want to watch that in this format, that's fine, but for me, I just don't understand. I have far more interesting things to watch and do than watch crash tests, watch crashes on the freeway. But I understand why it's popular. I think it should be there, and I'm glad you chose it, Phil, because it gives us an opportunity to debate these issues

Tracy Harwood 31:29
interesting as well. I mean, I'm not, I don't know. I just it left me quite sick. Actually, I

Ricky Grove 31:35
thought it would, yeah,

Tracy Harwood 31:36
you know, the image

Ricky Grove 31:37
of three of three punks beating a guy on the ground in my movie made you sick. I knew dozens of people flying around with their limbs crashing and twisting would just make you sick.

Phil Rice 31:51
Yeah, I wonder how much of that. It's a much more visceral response than than than I expected. And it's as you've been talking, I've been thinking about why. Why is that? Because, yeah, some of the stuff that we've seen, some of the stuff that's portrayed in in video games, generally. I mean, if you we've, we've, we've reviewed films where, you know, someone's head is blown clean off their body with a shotgun and Red Dead Redemption, or murders galore in GTA a guy with chainsaws for arms, which that one, of course, give you a visceral reaction as well. But this one, maybe this is even though this isn't gory or graphic in any of those ways. But is it because those other experiences are ones that most people haven't. They don't have any personal connection to that experience. Exactly most of them, yes, but almost everyone has. If they haven't been in a car accident, they know someone who has. So there's, it's, it's more of a there's a plausibility to what we're viewing in this video. And it hits close to home, if that's the right phrase, you know? So, yeah, that's interesting. I it didn't impact me that way, but, but I have had those experiences. I've been in car wrecks. I've seen, you know, I've lost people in car wrecks. But, yeah, I didn't, I didn't really get a porn vibe off of it. Um, I've watched, I mean, I certainly don't watch them on any regular basis, but I've seen, like, dash, dash cam videos of car accidents, and sometimes I've watched them be and I'll, I'll watch them with a sense of, I want to increase my awareness down the road. So it's like studying this, what led to this, and so that I can look for the signs, you know? And so in that sense, it's it those, those have been educational for me. This one, not so much. And I think it's because immediately I could see this isn't a real scenario, but the the idiot responsible syndrome, yeah, that's, that's the core of defensive driving. The defensive driving to me, when, the way I define it to both my kids, when I taught them how to drive, was your first assumption should be that everyone else on the road is a complete idiot. You're wrong, but that's what your assumption should be. So don't assume anything. Don't, right? No, you be cautious. That's what defensive driving means is you can't, you don't put any faith in the other people on the road. And so you, you know, and yet somehow you still gotta figure out how to navigate that in life and actually still drive. Because, of course, the safest thing is just to never effing drive, right? Yeah, just never get in a car, period. But

Damien Valentine 34:43
you still have to be careful, even if you're a pedestrian, because you want to cross the street, you've got to keep around the drivers. And

Phil Rice 34:50
awareness is huge. And for every video of crashes on dash cams, there are videos that you can see of like. Uh, near miss situations, you know, maybe a police officer has someone pulled over to the side, and all of a sudden they dive out of the way and a truck crashes into them, an accident, right? But they avoided it because of awareness, you know, yeah. So I think, for the genre in general, are there some who are going to watch it? It's for some kind of a sick gratification. Yeah, I think, of course, I can't remember who, at least a couple different Hollywood filmmakers have made films about people who had this almost David Cronenberg's crowd, yeah, Cronenberg is who I was thinking of this erotic fixation with the experience of being in that in a car crash, which that makes me nauseous, that film made me nauseous because I just And mainly, it was a nausea of complete failure to understand, yes, like, you know what I'm saying. It wasn't because it was necessarily, on its face, sickening because it's a fetish was so foreign to me that I it made me feel really weird inside. Yeah, it's not the only thing in the world that can do that to me, but so anyway, yeah, are there people who who will watch this or play this game to feed that fetish? Yeah, probably, you know, but

Ricky Grove 36:20
the vast majority, I think just watch it because, you know, we like strange, violent, exciting things. It's a spectacle, right? But I've driven on La freeways since 1920 so that's 24 years of freeway driving, and for about 18 of those years, I did it, 510, 12 times a week, back and forth, a half hour trip on two major freeways. And during that time, I came had close calls for accidents about a half a dozen times, and I saw about a dozen accidents. Never have I ever seen anything remotely like the spectacle that is contained in these movies, the action reaction kind of thing never. It just doesn't happen. It's usually one of those things where somebody's parked on the side of the road, somebody's trying to pass on the right. They don't see them. They can't stop they hit them. Somebody makes a lane turn. They get hit. Their car rolls over. It's a two car accident, or maybe a four or five car pileup, where people rear end each other, but nothing remotely like the spectacle of a huge log, flying over, hitting someone in another car. It's getting, it's it's a, it's a one in a million possible. It's happened. There have been huge, spectacular, but 24 years of driving, I have never seen or read anything remotely like that. Well,

Phil Rice 37:58
here's the thing with this, with this video, what's interesting is, like that scene that the log one is, of course, the one that really sticks to the mind, the only human driver in that scene was the idiot everyone else's computer controlled NPCs responding to that fly in the ointment. Oh, interesting. So he was that driver, rob the system, the system doesn't, doesn't do those things, right? So that's one element. Is he actually became the fly in the ointment to cause the chaos. But the second thing is, don't crash. I think these final destination level crashes, if you're familiar with that, absolutely, yeah, these level of cause effect crashes are probably as rare in the game as they are in life. He probably filmed hours and hours and hours of videos to come up with these few scenarios. You know, by just trying different things, making these, yeah, yeah, do it. And he this is a best of thing. I use best loosely, obviously, but you know, the most impactful, right? So, yeah, interesting. So we got

Ricky Grove 39:12
a we got an interesting engine that has a variety of things that you can do with it, with mods. We got a filmmaker who works to try to come up with the most effective way to express what it is he's expressing. We got a presentation that is massively popular. If you leave out the content, the actual content of it, it's a big it's a very important thing. We would go crazy about this kind of thing, wouldn't we, because it has those three major elements, so it's only the content that we object to. Only

Phil Rice 39:45
let me close then with saying what my third I mentioned that there were two things that stood out to me with this, but the third thing that came to mind when watching this was something I do with almost every. Game that I encounter, and that is, how could I make use of this, you know, like if I need a car accident as part of a narrative story in GTA five, for example, it would, it would look much more convincing in here than it would in GTA Sure, I couldn't figure out a way to do it, though, other than if, if I become a modder and somehow would figure out how to export a model from GTA five and import it into here, and it's like, Dude, that's above my pay grade. You know, I have no, no idea how to do that. You certainly can't do it with compositing, not in any convincing way. So I couldn't figure out a way to make use of this as a in that, you know, Tom jantal animation kind of way, and without human characters in the game itself, I don't see how you can tell much of a story, you know. So, yeah, I ended up, I haven't bought the game because I have no interest in playing it as a game, but if it was a effective way, I mean, it's the most convincing looking way to handle a car accident that I've ever seen in any game. And if I need a car accident in a movie, that maybe that would be useful. But I just, I can't figure out any way that I could integrate it that would be useful, you know, unless I'm just gonna film just the got it? Just the OJ overhead shot of his suburban being chased or slowly by police came really, really easily. Okay, trial of the century. Just have voiceover. People talking, no, no, people I don't know,

Ricky Grove 41:41
really liked it. Yeah, yeah.

Phil Rice 41:43
Thanks for your Thanks for your comments. It's rare that I'm I'm surprised. Usually when I bring a film, I kind of have a good read on what the reactions are going to be. More emotion than I expected from from from both you and and Tracy and Ricky, which is which is nice, you know, and I hope I didn't, I hope it wasn't too upsetting or offensive or anything, but that's that certainly made for a very interesting discussion. So thank you both for being

Ricky Grove 42:12
so honest. Phil,

Phil Rice 42:16
on that note, if you would like to block me, that's how you do it, but if you'd like to reach out to us with some feedback, we would love to hear from you. So leave us a comment wherever you're seeing or hearing this podcast, or drop us an email at talk, at completely machinima.com on behalf of my co hosts, Tracy Ricky and Damian, this is Phil saying, Have a great day. Drive safely, yeah and drive safely. Yeah, bye, bye.