Phil Rice 00:44
Hello and welcome to And now for something completely machinima, the podcast about machinima, virtual production and related technologies. My name is Phil Rice. I'm here with my co host, Tracy Harwood and Damian Valentine. Ricky is away, but he will be back with us, I believe, in our very next episode. So today we are going to cover two films that were picked for this month, one by Damien and one by Tracy. We're going to start with Damien's pick, and before he begins, I just want to give a little preference here that a preface that the creator of this film has a challenging to pronounce name, and we have decided to we this is not the first time we've used AI on this show. We, of course, used it famously a few months ago for AI generated Ricky that did not go well, but I think we found a more appropriate use for it, and that is to help us pronounce this creator's name. So we're going to make use of AI whenever we need to pronounce his name, which the creator's name is.

01:55
Key. Okay,

Phil Rice 02:00
so again, the creator's name is

02:02
tomosis key, and

Phil Rice 02:06
anytime that we need to say it, we're going to let AI help us with it, because it's a challenging to pronounce name. So Damien, with that, why don't you kick

Damien Valentine 02:15
us off? So last month, part of the news was it's a rock song for the video game, Deep Rock Galactic. And this was done officially. There was an actual machine in a video, but it got me thinking, and this game is very popular, so I wonder if anyone's made anything with it. So I went onto YouTube, and I found all kinds of stuff. There's some narrative videos. And then I found some people have done, they've actually composed songs about the game, and they put them to videos, shanties and things like that. And there was a song I actually liked a lot, but the video that accompanied it was perhaps not the most entertaining video to watch. So I kept looking, and then I found this one, which it's kind of got a nice balance between song and video. So it's geek rock, galactic we all live together by

03:09
steps to Moses key, and

Damien Valentine 03:14
I was quite impressed by the way that he was able to blend the lyrics of the song with the video. Now, I'm not sure if the song was composed by fans, because there's a lot of fan composed songs, and then there's some that other songs that are related to mining and things that have been brought in and just put to footage for the game. But I just really like this one, and it the game's about dwarves in space, and there's something about the way the song is sung makes you feel like dwarves could have sung it. You know, at the first Hobbit film, where you see the dwarves doing that song in Bilbo house, it has that kind of tone to it. And I thought that's very appropriate for this game. And, you know, I just liked it. I thought this is gonna be my pick, because we never touched deep rock galactic as a actual machinima source before. So I thought I'd share with you guys. What did you think? Well,

Phil Rice 04:11
what can you tell us about this game? Damien, deep rock galactic, what is, what is the did you already mention that? And I missed it? Or No,

Damien Valentine 04:19
I didn't really. So the idea is one to four people, you've all played dwarfs and the different character classes that have different specialities, like one's good at digging, one's good at getting up in Thai places and so on. And you work as a team. You go, you get set down to do various missions on randomly generated maps. So every time you play it, you have no idea where you're going to go. So even if you're doing the same type of mission, it's a very different layout. And so you go down and you've got to collect a certain number of minerals and then or items. And it depends on what mission you're doing, it's all very dark, so you have flares to light. Up the room, they die up very quickly, and you have to minor stuff. But to make things interesting, the planet below is infested with bugs like aliens and Starship Troopers, that kind of insect, and occasionally they'll start attacking you, so you have to hold your ground and fight them off. It's a lot of fun. It's not like, even though they're bugs, it's not a gory game. They explode into slime and stuff like that. But it's not. It's not, it's not like Starship Troopers over the top, Gore or anything like that. But it's kind of got that same atmosphere, and it's a lot of humor in it as well. The dwarves come out with a random dialog based on what you're doing. And I play it, I play it. I played it quite a bit with some friends, and we always have a great time doing it. Yes, and it is quite popular. Again, it's the community around it. And obviously some creative people, if they've gone and started writing songs about it. And I don't know how someone came up with the idea of space dwarfs, but it kind of works. And as you play it, you can you collect minerals, and you can upgrade your you spend them on upgrading your cosmetics for your character and different beards and different armor. You can unlock different weapons and and so on. So yeah, it's just just a fun space shooting first person shooting game.

Phil Rice 06:20
It's not the first of this genre that I've heard of. This idea multiplayer squad game, and you're sent somewhere on a mission. There's a random element to it. There's another game that I don't know what the title of it is, but I've seen my son play it with his friends, and it's more of a horror themed game, like it's very much about jump scares. This, this one looks a little bit more of a lighter tone. Yeah, more emphasis on just, on just fun and and the colors in this video are just gorgeous. It's a, you know, for a mining game, you don't really think of, you know, colorful environments, but this is just, it's beautifully rendered. I assume that this is all just footage from the game without enhancement, and it's gorgeous. The the particle effects and fire effects and explosion effects and stuff are very crisp. And, I mean, it's a, it's certainly a good introduction to the to the what, what to expect from how the game world's going to look for someone who's like me, who had never even heard of it. So I really admire that about it. It's nicely edited. It's not trying to do more than it's trying to do, you know, like it's, it's, it's just a nicely edited set of scenes. And the song is great, yeah, it's, it does have that. That's exactly what it made me think of is not so much from the movie, but from reading The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and The dwarves as they're going through these caverns, and they tend to to break into song. And of course, in in Tolkien's book, it's just the song is just written out, you you see the whole thing. Sometimes the song goes on for pages, and it's like, What in the world's he doing here? But that was what he did, you know? So, yeah, it evoked that, that spirit for me. And, yeah, it was just, it was, it was enjoyable. I liked it a lot,

Tracy Harwood 08:32
yeah, well, me too. I liked it a lot. I think it's a great edit of the of the of the of the game. Again, like Phil said, I know nothing about this game. We've never seen anything created with it before. Um, did, of course, mean I had to do a little digging. Um,

Damien Valentine 08:54
very appropriate for this game indeed.

Tracy Harwood 08:59
Um, well, okay, so it's an edit to the Futuna theme song Warframe, which was written and composed by Keith Power, who also wrote music for films like Avengers and Thor, as well as TV series like Hawaii Five Oh, so it's not create a community at all. It's professionally created. It's a real foot stomper, actually, with with, you know, really great atmospheric and cinematic components which kind of mix orchestral and choral music. And it and, as you both said, it really evoked, for me, this kind of like work a day, feeling getting on with the job, hard labor and so on. But it makes a lot more sense when you look at the Warframe rendition of it in terms of what the words mean, because there's a backstory to that, which is clearly not. Are so much relevant to Deep Rock Galactic However, having said that, I think it's really quite interesting how the approach that's been taken in this film is very similar to the Warframe video, because there's lots of hammering in that as well. It's all about manual labor. It's all about a generation being indebted and all of that sort of stuff. And this game is all about dwarves and aliens, and you know how hard these little guys kind of work. So there's a kind of a similarity, even though there's nothing really in common between Warframe and Deep Rock Galactic there's a couple of things that I picked on which I thought were intriguing. For example, there's a few, you know, you've got a few sort of introductory scenes into the film which were mainly kind of zooming and panning, mainly panning to the right, like, like we would normally expect, but then about the third or fourth scene in it pans completely the other way. Um, so it's not, it doesn't seem to be going forwards. It's kind of like going backwards. And actually, when I was looking at it. I wasn't expecting that. I was thinking, Oh, it's a story. It's going forward, this kind of thing. So it just didn't follow a pattern that I expected in the way that the camera moved. Now, ordinarily, I probably wouldn't have paid so much attention to that, except for the fact in this it was a really clever way of grabbing my attention right at the beginning of that movie, and because clearly I had no idea what was going on other than well, just got no idea what was going on. I didn't realize these were dwarves until a little bit later on. They looked like people in spacesuits were just sort of wandering around, a strange kind of bar like environment in some in some respects. So, yeah, that was intriguing, I thought the way, the way that my attention was grabbed by that one sweeping shot, which just went in the reverse direction to what I was expecting. I guess I was especially attracted to the vibrant colors, like Phil said. I mean that I again, I wasn't really. Had no idea that this game exists, but it's beautiful. These, this lovely emerald green and these gold colors that you see in the in all this, all the scenes, it's very eye catching. Very, very interesting, I think to look at made me wonder why we don't see more in it. Maybe we should look out for more machinima in it, or maybe it doesn't really lend itself to machinima creating, I don't know. I just kind of wanted to see more from this world. So, yeah. The other thing that kind of caught my attention was just how well edited it was to the rhythm of the music. So every time there was a beat, you know, the scene changed. I thought the timing was was consistently well done throughout the whole thing. And that's something that's actually also evident in the Warframe video that you will see as well. So yeah, maybe want to have a look at what else this guy had been doing. Because I thought, if he's creating stuff of this evidenced quality, I suppose maybe he's got some other stuff gotta say, Damien, this is probably the only thing of the hundreds of videos that he's got on his channel that I would actually sit and watch.

Damien Valentine 13:51
Ivan. Look just who else he's done.

Tracy Harwood 13:52
Not much I have. Well, you know, maybe he'll say that he's done quite a lot, but actually not much on the in terms of what we might review on this show. Okay, but really interesting pick.

Damien Valentine 14:04
yeah, I hope we see more from Deep Rock Galactic. There were other music videos, and there were some there was a narrative video that I watched it, and it was very well done, but I felt it's a little bit too long. It dragged things out a little bit too long. And I thought, let's go with one of these music videos. And, yeah, okay, so this song isn't specifically written for this game in the end, but there are songs out there that are because the lyrics do reference things that are in the game. And I thought that's nice that they've done that. So actually, when I discovered this video and the others, when I've been playing my friends, we now listen to those songs as we're playing to get into the spirit of it. Well,

Tracy Harwood 14:43
I can see that that would achieve that. I mean, that's it, yeah, yeah. That's clearly what they're intended for, isn't it? Yeah. Well,

Phil Rice 14:51
we'll be sure to keep an eye out for for more videos in that game. And also, we'll keep an eye out for more videos from.

14:59
Just in case that steps mossy ski decides to make more videos

Phil Rice 15:08
in deep rock galactic so

15:11
yeah, actually, steps are sunyazhiski,

Phil Rice 15:16
if you're listening, we would love to hear from you more about the inspiration of this video. So for you viewers, if you want to check out the work

15:26
of steps to mosqui, just

Phil Rice 15:29
go to youtube.com/ski, and yeah, you can see more videos made by the director who's, if you didn't get

15:44
the name, it's Moses key, great.

Phil Rice 15:50
So I think we can now move on to Tracy's pick for this month. Tracy, why don't you introduce it for us?

Tracy Harwood 16:02
Sorry, I got composed.

Phil Rice 16:08
We haven't had we haven't heard you say, Yeah, this episode, Tracy, can you

16:16
can't even say it. Nosky, that sounded just like when I say it, when I say yes, all right,

Tracy Harwood 16:32
okay, yeah, oh, you

Damien Valentine 16:39
gotta have a lot better things to do on this one. Oh, yeah.

Tracy Harwood 16:46
Oh, I'm sorry. I've lost it.

Damien Valentine 16:59
So, you know, you go to you too

Phil Rice 17:01
forced? Was it? Was it too forced, saying it 12 times in one paragraph, that wasn't unnatural? Was it,

Damien Valentine 17:10
Phil, you know, last month, you were saying, maybe we need new intro at some point.

Phil Rice 17:16
That's right. And now for something completely

17:18
stupid,

Phil Rice 17:25
other related technologies. I'm your host.

17:28
You've got

Damien Valentine 17:32
completely red. Oh,

Phil Rice 17:41
it. Oh, this will be fun to edit.

Tracy Harwood 17:47
I'm so sorry. I completely lost it. My Pick's a little more serious than that one, I have to say. This is called Hell's reach part two, and it's a warhammer 40k story by a guy called Richard Boylan, and it's a little bit older than some of the ones that we have reviewed of late. This one's a 2017 so it's seven years old already. Now, at the start of this, this, this creator is actually an avid Warhammer fan. He's been playing this game for years, long before he made this video, 15 years or so before he made this video, and he's used the voice over from the audiobook Hell's reach, which you know, it's kind of, it's almost completely unrelated to, well, it's not really unrelated. It's created separately, if you like, to what, what he's done with the film and and the and Warhammer itself. He's so he's a filmmaker by by training, and he's also a video game developer. He's based in Montreal, in Canada, but actually, at the time he made this as a fan film, it was based on his experience as an Army vet having served in Afghanistan. That's how he came to be a fan of Warhammer in first place. Now, as a filmmaker, he's produced a TV series, and as a game dev, he's he's worked at in EA as a cinematic designer, and he was self employed for a couple of years, and still is to a point, but super interestingly, he's now working for games workshop as an in house director, and no doubt that is based on the massive success of this incredible Warhammer series that he created. Currently, it looks as though he's working on a series called Angels of Death, clips of which you can see, not so much on his channel, but elsewhere on YouTube. Now we've only reviewed episode two of this. There are, in fact, 10 episodes, if you, you know, clip it all together, it's, you know, it's episodic, but if you clip it all together, it's over two hours long. I'm not sure I could watch two hours of this. The footage was, was generated in Warhammer 40k space marine. And what he's done is he's used game assets and animations as the foundations for the visuals, but then he's enhanced some of these kind of additional effects and editing in post production to sort of achieve this cinematic quality that you see in the video. He's used blender and Adobe effects to to achieve that. There's also clearly some quite intricate modeling and texturing and and also probably rendering processes employed. And I think he's, he's used things like custom shaders and lighting techniques to kind of create this sort of dramatic and immersive effect that you kind of see in this animation. But mostly, I think quite a lot of what he's done is in, is in post processing and compositing as kind of also played quite a crucial role in what, what you actually see. What caught my attention with this, when I when I was looking for a film this month, was actually the esthetic style. It's not one we see very often with machinima. With this, it's got a kind of a hand drawn, colored, almost graphic, graphic novel kind of approach. It's quite minimalist and and, you know, I say it's black and white, but it isn't black and white, it's kind of grayscale and white backgrounds. So it's got this kind of minimalist yet, yet quite detailed, almost sort of scratchy look to it in places, it's really hard to make out what the features are and what the focal elements are, that are, that are seemingly being referred to in the voiceover at times. I think in many ways, it leaves a lot to the imagination, which is great if you know a lot about Warhammer. And I, I totally confess I do not. So this is going to be something that probably works best for the Warhammer community, and those are kind of interested in quite experimental ways for telling stories. The bit that makes it hard to watch is the continual juddering. I'm sure Phil you are going to tell us what the name of that technique is, but it's a continual almost like, you know, flipping through a paper book at speed, where you've got slightly different, out of sync animation or drawing on each page, it's kind of continually moving. And I watched is this one about nine minutes long. Nine minutes is about as much as I could take of this continual juttering of the image. Having said that, it's, it's, to me that kind of juxtaposition between the deliberately grainy quality of the video video and the kind of esthetic richness of the voice over, which is this audio reading of Helsreach. I thought that was quite an interesting strategy. Now Hell's reach was was written by a guy called Aaron Dempsey Bowden, and the version that you're hearing in this video was narrated by a guy called Jonathan Keeble. What impresses me is how, the how, somehow, there's kind of this intricate relationship created between the film, the book and the narration. I know, when I mentioned it to Ricky earlier, he thought it just didn't work. The more I thought about it, because initially I thought, No, I don't think it works either. But actually I think it does work weirdly, I think this. There's something, maybe the voiceover is dominant, I don't know, but there's something that kind of knits all these three things together in a really interesting and kind of compelling way. I wouldn't say complimentary, necessarily. But it's certainly compelling in the way that it's put together. It's a really gritty and dark story, which is why the graphic style choice was was made by the creator here. Keeble's voice is very typically English in its in its style. There's this kind of rich Palmer to it. It's almost Richard Burton ish in style. It's, it's quite a perfect English accent, really. It gives over the impression of being this kind of esthetic of a leading soldier of war, maybe a king or a Lord of some sort, perhaps this kind of do you remember how Burton used to narrate some of those kind of second world war films? It's got that kind of feel to it. Boylan has added to the reading with them, with background music and ambience battle sounds, things like clashing weapons, you know, roar of engine, screams and all of that kind of thing. And I think without that sort of secondary sound level, which isn't, you know, you can't hear that on the audiobook, it probably would have been a bit too sterile. Yeah, I think it's a really interesting approach to, you know, to a machinima. I don't think I've seen anything quite like this before. Actually, no idea what you guys think. What do you what do you make of it?

Damien Valentine 26:42
Well, I think we've discussed before, and none of us know anything about Warhammer,

Tracy Harwood 26:46
yeah.

Damien Valentine 26:50
So I know there are lots of Warhammer books, and obviously Hell's reach is one of them. I think the so the audio book version, I thought the narration was excellent, and the way you did different voices also excellent. Just some of the audiobooks, you just get the read this like someone's just reading the book pretty dry. And then other narrators, they'll do different voices for different characters, and that makes a lot more fun to listen to. And obviously this is one of the latter. I I didn't like the flickering of the animation that much. I like the idea of doing it make it look hand drawn, but I think whatever a filter or effect was done for this was too much. So I had to look to see some of the later videos and the styles changed. It's still got that hand drawn look, but it's different, and it looks much more watchable. I didn't watch it because I didn't watch any of the chapters in between, and I because I don't know anything about Warhammer, I thought I'm going to be completely lost if I jump to chapter nine, but it's nice to see that he had realized maybe that was a little bit too much, and he toned it down. So that was a good thing to see, because I did find that it was really hard. I found myself watching it at my second monitor out of the corner of my eye, so I could still get an idea of the character movement, but it wasn't flickering in my face for the whole nine minutes, and I was just listening to the story rather than watching it, which is probably not the best way to watch a video. But yeah, I suppose all I can say about the actual rendering and video, because I don't know anything about why. I think about why I don't know how accurate is. Well, I guess it must be pretty accurate to the book, because it's got the narration of the audiobook. The other thing I can say is, with air to the Empire, I've had a lot of people say to me, why do you just use the voices from the audiobook? And it's not any approach. I've wanted to do the audio. The narrator for the audiobook is very good, but I like having actual individual voices for the characters. Now, the way this story is told is narrated, as well as having the character voices. And I think that works. It's still not an approach I would like to do, but it's interesting to see someone else do it. And apart from that flickering on the filter, I think you did a pretty good job of bringing this story to life. And I was, I was because, you know, I actually started watching, well, how is this machinima? And then, of course, look in the description, he talks about how he made it, which was very helpful, yeah, because I first thought was gonna be Tracy. Why could change my film? It's not machinima. Well, then, yeah, it's more the filter over it that disguises the fact, and maybe that's the point to make it look hand drawn, rather than something that's made with the game.

Tracy Harwood 29:50
Yeah, I got the impression it was more about what can be the esthetic associated with dark and gritty and. I kind of, I think this creator had had that style in his mind long before he came to the to the video game. So I think it was a it. I think that's how it was basically put together. It's kind of interesting actually as well, because when the author saw the author of Hell's Hell's reach, saw these videos, he basically said, what was interesting about the videos was that they perfectly represented what he had in his mind when he was writing the book, which is a kind of it's an interest. That's what I mean about there's a quite an interesting relationship between these three things, because they weren't done with each other in mind, but they have connected, subsequently, very interesting. Now

Damien Valentine 30:59
you just mentioned that you could imagine taking a still from one of these videos and putting in the book as an illustration of

Tracy Harwood 31:05
absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Phil, what did you think?

Phil Rice 31:14
Yeah. So it's so eerie to me that you would invoke the name of Richard Burton, because we did not discuss that, and that is exactly who this narrator reminded me of, like precisely I see his face when I'm hearing this. Really bizarre that, yeah, the this is an audiobook that would be very enjoyable to listen to, for sure. It's just wonderfully performed. Just wonderful. And yeah, I too, as someone who does listen to audiobooks from time to time, I do enjoy the ones where it's more of a performance than just a read. That was actually, I recently, finally got on Spotify this earlier this summer, off of and yo, they, you know, audio books are included. And yeah, most of them are, you know, you open up. It's Oh, George Orwell, 1984 I wouldn't mind hearing that again. I've read it, I don't know how many times. And yeah, it's just like, like, I paid my neighbor to just come sit down and just read. He's never done this before, but, you know, I'll read it for you if you pay me. It's like that quality. This is the other end of the spectrum from that, for sure, just wonderful performance. Yeah, you know, I'm glad that you mentioned Damien that the visual style changes in the later videos, because while you guys were talking, I went ahead and jumped forward to one, just to get a an idea of it. And oh my goodness, what an improvement. Because, yeah, on this, this part two that we focused on, he must have been kind of still figuring it out, right of how he wanted to do it, or maybe, maybe he responded to some feedback. But yeah, the the the the effect. The I don't know if there's an official name for it either, but I would call it juttering as well. And that attempt at a like a pencil drawn filter. Yeah, that. It's too much of it, first of all. And secondly, there's a there's a repetitiveness to the pattern that our eyes can pick up on, even if you can't dissect it and say exactly where the repeat begins and ends, but you could sense it. And that really is very, very distracting. Like, I totally if it was based on the part two that we we looked at No way. I would watch two hours of this. I'd listen to it probably, you know, it's really good, but I wouldn't watch it. But you jump forward to like, number seven. All right, now we're cooking, you know, it's, I think even later in the later episodes, even then it's a little too much the the Be. And here's why. Okay, it's not just that I don't like jitter effects, or don't like manufactured, hand drawn effects. Maybe I don't, but that's not why. The reason is, is that this filmmakers use of high contrast is just brilliant light and shadow, the fact that it is almost pure black and white, but you're right, there's a little bit of grayscale to it. I would wonder what this footage looked like before he applied that filter. Yes, I thought that because it, it, I think it almost could work as pure black and pure white. I mean, it's, it's really an achievement. Whatever process he did use to get the footage. Uh, to have that such distinct separation between the light areas in the dark and the the framing of the shot and shadows. And, you know, always, always, every single shot, conscious of if, if this character's in front of a light background, I've got a dark, you know, it's a darker form of the character. And if he's front of a dark background, the character is lighter, and just it pops. And you can get that sense of pop in the later episodes much better than in this one, where it kind of get kind of mushed into a dark gray, and then the juttering just makes it harder to appreciate, but there is some absolutely masterful understanding of composition and light and shadow, just brilliant. Yeah, I'm very curious about the process that was used. Like, it would be neat to see a making of where he shows us. Okay, here's the game footage, and then here's after I ran it through Blender, and then here's after I ran it through Adobe and breaking that down. I don't know if you know, if a magician doesn't give away their secrets, I guess, but you know, as a creator, I'm, like, really curious about that. But even this isn't even about those techniques as much as it is about the original shots, had to have a masterful understanding of that to know how to capture the footage such that he could do that with effects later like that, that contrast is not done With effects, not solely, maybe the maybe the effect helps separate the extremes a little bit you turn up contrast that can do that, but it was shot with an understanding of lighting that made that that possible. And, yeah, even through all the muddled juttering The details on the costumes and the faces and all of that. It's, it's really remarkable. So, yeah, I'm left with a sense of, in a perfect world, I would I could watch this without any of the juttering and hand drawn effects at all, like, that's what I'd really want to see, because I think that the richness of detail would really come through well, because I think it's there, you know, I think it's there in the original footage. And then then we could maybe appreciate a little even more the amount of design that went into this. Now, how much of that was his design and how much of it is that that level of detail is in the game assets, I don't know. And I don't really care either it's there and it's shot really well. So, yeah, I don't know. I found myself, maybe because the techniques were so in our face that I, I really didn't even give any thought to the fact that I don't know anything about Warhammer other than the one or two films we've covered over the years. And we, I think at one point, Tracy, you did a deep dive, and we kind of got a general sense of the overall landscape of that world, and I don't remember any of it important, you know, any of the details, but I never really got to the point of engaging with the story at all. I don't know if that's a I don't know if that's necessarily a drawback of the film or not, but because technique was so loud, that's really all I could think about when watching it, but I found a lot to admire, and I'm really encouraged having just now three minutes ago or so, jumped ahead to to see a later one. I wouldn't have been compelled to do so just from watching this first one. No, I wouldn't. I would have just said that's not for me and I'm and actually, my original comments today were going to be, this would have been better as a short. Just do a short. I could tolerate this for a few minutes, you know, probably not as long as this episode like you Tracy would. But, you know, give me a four or five minutes of this. Alright, I could do it if all the other stuff is up to stuff like it is okay, but two hours, no way, no way. I just it. I physically couldn't endure it. It's, it gives you a headache, you know, the later episodes, not, not that way at all. So, yeah, I don't know if you're if, as far as recommendations go, if you're wanting to watch this, you don't want to skip the first few episodes. If you're interested in the story, or you'll miss it. So just be prepared for a little bit of an endurance test. But it gets better for sure. Do. Looks like it takes him about four or five episodes. Uh, five is still pretty I'm just jumping here to see six is a little better. Okay, six is where it really lands. So, yeah, you got to get halfway through it before this movie, before it's watchable. Okay, it's not unwatchable, but it's, it's hard to watch best way to watch it.

Damien Valentine 40:30
It's kind of like I did just watch out the corner of your eye to listen to it until it gets to the point, yeah, or

Phil Rice 40:35
maybe, like, squint, or something, I don't know

Damien Valentine 40:38
Anyway, I can relate to it, because Heir to the Empire, when I look back at those first few chapters, you

Phil Rice 40:45
changed production techniques along the way, right? Yeah.

Damien Valentine 40:47
And the software itself had a massive upgrade on the characters, which made meant I had to, you know, recreate all the character models. But I can look back and think, Well, that's not this look cooking as good as what I do now. And it's the same with this, this film, and I get it, you learn more software changes. You get feedback on what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong, and you you learn from all of it. So I do. I am glad to see that he's doing the same thing, and he's learning to improve his craft. So,

Phil Rice 41:16
and that's one of the one of the advantages of Tracy, you referenced this, I think, in our, our look back episode of the fact, uh, this phenomenon of creation going on in a community, yes, you know, in Reddit, or in in discord, or in these, these types of things, where it's not just some guy laboring away In a room alone, and then throwing out there, there's, there's a feedback loop that he's tapped into, and then he's, he's listening to it, I think, pretty clearly, which he doesn't have to, you know. But I think you know that, that that's something that pays for itself, you know, because you're getting valuable feedback from your audience and and can adapt your production. And then they see that, and they're encouraged, you know, because they kind of makes even though all I've done is give feedback, perhaps, but they feel part of that feedback, the feedback loop, and so they feel like they're kind of part of the creative process, too. And they are, you know, feedback is part of that. So, yeah, that's, that's, that's a great point. It's definitely an ambitious undertaking, because you're right, Tracy, what are the, what are the examples of this that we could find that are out there? It's it's very it's very rarely done in any medium, but particularly with machinima involved. I don't think I've ever seen it done this way. It's a type of technique that I would expect out of someone maybe like Tom Jantal. I've never seen him do this thing, but it's, it's like that type of artistic daring, I think, and and Tom has that understanding of light and shadow that would be required to pull this off, if this was just a muddled gray mess or typical game footage without that attention to lighting, I don't think it would translate to that effect well at all. It would just be a gray, muddled mess. So there's, there's real craft underneath this. And, okay, I don't like the icing, but I sure love the cake, I'll say that. Yeah. So great pick.

Damien Valentine 43:45
Yeah, what

Tracy Harwood 43:47
great picks we've had all month. All very different

Damien Valentine 43:50
from each other as well. Yes, very interesting.

Phil Rice 43:55
And and three out of the four of them, we didn't hate car crash. So anyway, yeah, good stuff. This is a pleasure, as always, listeners, viewers, we'd love to hear from you, so drop us a comment. Let us know what you think. If you know anything more about Helsreach or 40k and want to educate us, or just have some comments about this film, maybe, maybe you know a little bit more about how they might have pulled this technique off. Let us know in the comments or drop us an email at talk at completely machinima.com my name is Phil, and on behalf of my co hosts, Damian and Tracy, we wish you a great day, and we'll see you next time

44:38
bye, bye, bye.