Ricky Grove 00:42
hello, machinima fans. This is And now for something and completely machinima, we're doing our fifth season. Very happy to be here with my friends, Phil rice, Damien Valentine and Tracy Harwood. This week, we'll be looking at a film pick that I made, and I'm really happy to share it with you. I've been as I usually go around the internet looking for interesting films. I happen to as it as it happens. You know how it is when you're when you're surfing the internet, something leads you to one thing, and some another thing leads you to another place. And I ended up at the archive.org Now, archive.org has got a lot of bad press recently, and you know, the opinions are divided on it, because they had books that were complete copies of books, and they were making them available for rent. Well, the publishers got upset about that, sued them and won the lawsuit. So the bad press for that part of it might be deserved, we don't know, but they do many, many other things that are great for the community. Wayback Machine is terrific, but one of the things they have, which I really, really like, is their machinima movie archive. It was started in 2004 by Henley Henry low wood. The name of the archive is they got game project. It's part of the Stanford Humanities Lab, and it's a an effort to archive machinima in order to further academic study. Of course they'd have to use the word academic because it's a university. But I think it's more than just academic. It's an archive for people who want to watch great films and want to see what the history is. Now, originally, I thought that the archive contained mostly classic machinima. Now I call it classic machinima, the Machinima that was made before the big change over@machinima.com and then after that. I call it modern machinima. It's just my way of breaking it down. But no, that actually starts, uh, let's see. It goes from 1996 to 2023. Was the most recent one that was added to it. It has, let's see 2787 films in the archive, which I think is just extraordinary. I did some research to find out other archives on the internet. Obviously, YouTube has quite a few of them, but there's no real effort to to organize them with any sense of quality to them. I think this is probably the best one on the internet, and we'll be sure to include a link to it in our show notes, but that's all preface to my choice, as I was going through the list, I found a film that I remembered coming out in 2004 it was called fake science, and it was created by in a week, by a company called Dead on cue. Let's see the guys involved in it, Michael Holocaust and Ben Brian Mayberry did most of the post production on it, and they made it in a week. It won the Best Visual Design at the 2002 machinima Film Festival. And I thought, Well, hell, I'll just give it a rewatch. And I just fell in love with it again. I It consists essentially of six scenes. They call it an avant garde film, but I'm not so sure avant garde is the right word for it. It was created in the original Half Life engine engine, and it consists of six scenes in which the camera starts at a folks a point, and then continuously pulls back to reveal more information. And then there's a crossfade, and then it starts in another position and continues to pull back. Eventually, towards the end of the film, you pull back in a very, very wide shot to see these. Sort of unusual, abstract buildings. Scientists play a big part of it. Essentially, the theme is science has created television, which is the scourge of humanity. That's sort of the theme of it. It's not a particularly original theme, but it's a relevant theme for modern day. But the thing is, the music is, let's see. They went by Kiernan. 54 is the music is part is 50% of what makes the because it's sort of ambient electronic, and it adds the sort of science fictiony feel to the whole thing. The overall effect is both comic and serious too, because it's quite like I said, the theme is anti technology, in a way which is ironic, since they're using a form of technology to actually express what they're trying to say, but I was just fascinated with it and loved it. I remember being very impressed with it because it was completely unlike any other film that was coming out at the time, which were mostly realistic efforts to to recreate stories, either that they back back plots in games or recreating favorite movies or favorite television scenes, or television shows. Red versus blue being a prime example of that, but, and it wasn't as popular as red versus blue, but it had an impact on the Machinima community at the time, and that it showed that you could create something different if you just worked at it. It was probably somewhat hard to set up all the models and set up the camera position. I can understand why they chose one particular shot, because it would be easier to create the camera effect at that time. And I have a theory, which Damien shot down before we started the podcast, but I have a theory that the the pullback in effect is in film, it provides the ability to reveal things on the side, but it also moves away from it. And it's a sense of moving away from something that is dangerous or something that is threatening, whereas a push in shot move towards something that is more you get more information from you you're interested in. It's secure, it's safe to move in on it. So in a way, that shot actually fits with the theme, because you're pulling away from this dangerous technology, this dangerous thing that's occurring, you're getting away from it, at least that's my theory on the whole thing. I loved it, and I'm going to dedicate myself for the next several months to exploring the archive. So my choices will be films from the archive. Going ahead, you guys cover the modern stuff pretty well, so I thought it might be good to look back. So that's my take on it, and I'm really interested to hear what you guys have to say.

Phil Rice 08:12
Very glad you reminded reminded us of this, this film, Ricky, because I remember it from when it came out as well, and being wowed by it and some of the effect of this film, it's very easy to take for granted how comparatively easy it is to do effects like this with modern tools for them To have pulled this off when they did. And there's little to no post production involved with this, all the effects which the end result is something that looks strikingly different from what half the half life engine would spit out of its own accord. So there was a lot of work to get the engine itself to spit this out, essentially. So it's a remarkable technical achievement, technical achievement for its time. And, yeah, it's an effective message, I think, in that it's not terribly on the nose or insistent, there is a an openness to have different interpretations of it. And I think that's one of the beauties of it, yeah. So, yeah, these dead on cue. They maybe don't get, they haven't, over the years, on this show, gotten as much mention as some of the other machinima pioneers. But Brian, and I can't remember now his his cohorts name, but yeah, they were, they were very innovative and and I. They didn't release a large quantity of things because they I kind of put them in the same category as like Friedrich Kirschner from that time that he might not have been the most prolific in terms of quantity of releases, but every one was this exquisitely crafted thing. And I think that's the that's the approach that they took, was, we're not just going to crank stuff out. We, you know, there's, there's going to be a lot of meaning and a lot of depth and a lot of and something innovative. There was a lot of pressure back then. I don't mean negative pressure, but there was a, you know, there was a space race of sorts, but it wasn't for the kinds of things that we might find machima makers chasing today. For you know, for comparison, there was very much a focus on innovation, because this, this was all very new, and it was, it was a pretty exclusive group of people who had the skills to be able to do this kind of thing back then, and the kinds of things that that filmmaking teams like dead on cue did, frankly, make me a little bit embarrassed of what I did. You know I mean, and I'm not being like, down on myself about it or anything, but it's just it. I mean that as the highest form of compliment, that there was a real skill set and a determination to figure things out that I don't know that that's lost today, but it's, it's not, it's not the main thing people focus on nowadays, you Know? And I think maybe because some of these problems of how to do things have been solved by the work these guys did, you know, so now there's, there's not as much reason to worry about that, but probably the same is true if we're using the space race analogy. The same is true for, you know, the, you know, the SpaceX is working on issues related to space travel and whatnot, but they don't have to redo everything that the Apollo programs did. Right, right? They're building on that. These guys were the Apollo astronauts of machinima, and they were taking real chances and and doing things that. Again, it's really easy to look at this and go, Well, that doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to make. You know, try tying both your hands behind your back and then doing it. Yeah, that's what they were dealing with. So I'm really glad this is not a movie that I had thought about in quite a while, maybe just because it's not in my face or whatever. And this kind of came along well before we did the machiniplex effort, where we were kind of trying our own hand at archiving some of the great works. And I don't think that this one ended up in that collection, but it would have fit right in films, for sure. It's a wonderful piece. So I'm really glad Thank

Ricky Grove 13:01
you. Really marvelous analogy to the Apollo program. That's great. One thing that I think can be said is that there's, there's something to be said for limitations for an artist, I remember there was a brilliant set designer at my university, and we had a WPA made theater that had no, what they call the fly system above the stage, where you could drop stuff in, you could only hand carry things in, there no mechanicals or anything. And this guy was a Yale trained designer, and he was brilliant. I remember, in taking his class, I asked him, I said, Well, how can you work in such an awful theater? And he says, because I really like the limitations it challenges me to come up with creative ways to solve the limitations problem. And I think you could say the same thing for early machinima filmmakers, it's hard to create some of those shots, but the but finally, getting them right. It's such a great pleasure. When you work out the technology today, as you say, it's much easier to set up a camera and do a pullback shot, that's what, 510, minutes. Now, I may have taken them a couple days to get it right in those days. So I think there's something to be said for limitations, and I think they dead on cue. Really faced it with great creativity and great energy and great thought too. There's a lot of thought that went into the film.

Damien Valentine 14:34
Yeah, I want to add on to what Phil said about the technical side of things, because that's what there's that scene where it pulls back down along a city street and the windows are flashing in time to the beats of the

Phil Rice 14:45
music. Yeah, that really jumped out to me too Damian, and I was

Damien Valentine 14:48
thinking, well, that must have taken a while to tightline up. And so I think about the game so the ear, I thought, wait a minute, did they even have animated textures when they made the actual game? Because that must have did. Really tricky to pull off. And I started thinking about, you know, yeah, that's a huge amount of work. Even doing it now, getting the timing right would be tricky, but then you start thinking about the limitations. Like, yeah, that is very impressive. So a few things like that did stand out to me. I have to admit, this film got released just about a year before I got into machinima, I completely missed it. So this is the first, my first time. Oh, wow. So I want to thank you, Ricky, for introducing me to it, because I was very impressed by it, especially once I had that realization of, yeah, they put a lot of technical work into this that you just don't even think about now. Or if you do think about it, you're not thinking about in that kind of level, because you can animate textures. Games do that, and icon can do it. And, you know, any modern game or platform can animate textures quite easily. You still have to put some work into getting the timing right, but right it's possible. Yeah, it's really hard to follow up on that, but that's one thing that really stood out to me, and the other thing, I'll add

Phil Rice 16:03
something to that real quickly before you move on the from what I remember of animated textures of the time, because they were there in like Quake two as well. But the closest thing I can think of to explaining how they worked would be how GIF images work. If you know what those are on the web, it's a fixed frame rate, very, you know, basic resolution, and it just and then you can put that texture on the web and it will animate. You don't see them used very often nowadays, because with high bandwidth, people could do all sorts of other animations with with style sheets and scripting and things like that. But in the early days of the web, that was the way you animated. The texture was, it was a CompuServe format, I believe, is what originally came up with the GIF image. And there were something similar to that, that was in this era of games. And it was, it was very fiddly to work with. And, yeah, it took some, know how, again, you can go right now you could Google in five seconds and find a site where you can just build a GIF in a few minutes, you know, right? That was not there then. So, yeah, it's, it's little things like that. That, again, they look easy now. Man, they weren't then,

Damien Valentine 17:24
yeah, yeah. I think there's as you're pulling back every so often. There's some code numbers up here. I look like binary, but then there's some other numbers in there as well. I actually paused it and tried to see if there was actually a secret message in some of those. And I don't think I got it quite right, because it's coming up with ASCII character that it may make any sense, but I thought maybe I need to give that another go, just in case I haven't got this right, and there really is a secret message in there, because I like that kind of stuff. And if they actually hidden something in there, and no one's actually noticed until now, I was quite, I quite like that idea, so I gotta go back and check that out.

Ricky Grove 17:59
Let us know whether you figure it out. Yeah,

Tracy Harwood 18:04
I'm not sure that there is actually Damien. I didn't okay. So I've got a little more background on this one from, actually from from the time when Ben and I were writing the pioneers book. We interviewed Brian buddy Mayberry, and I've got some information from that, but also a little bit more on the background of the film as well. They formed the studio. So Mike keglenick was his handle in the community, and Brian buddy Mabry and they formed their studio in 2000 and actually, as I understand it, this film was made using the spirit of Half Life mod add on, and I believe you needed to have that mod installed before you could play the film, even with a divex player. Although quite why that would be the case, I'm not really sure, but that's that's my understanding. And then within their studio, there were other folks involved, Ricky, you've already mentioned, Daniel Kyrian, 54 O'Neill, who was their lead audio engineer, and he's the guy that wrote the music for the film, which was called, I think they did you say they won't, or they weren't, or they they weren't, they won't, they won't, it's they weren't, they weren't, they won't,

Ricky Grove 19:30
they won't. That's right, excuse me,

Tracy Harwood 19:33
yeah, that's right. Also, Jenny boo hollow Holocaust was the lead camera operator. And then somebody called Brian Lego Man. Thomas was also one of the dead on cue team, and as was somebody called Glenn Whirlpool seal, who was the lead modeler. So there were a few of them involved with it, although I believe it was just Mike and I. Brian, primarily on the on the on the Creator side of this particular film. You've already said it won Best Visual Design at the 2002 machinima Festival, and that award was presented to them by Tim Willets of id Software. And it was also nominated for Best Sound design and best technical achievement, although it didn't win in those categories. It's worth commenting here that this was actually the first iteration of the Machinima Film Festival that took place, and it took took place at QuakeCon, and it was actually produced by Anna Kang, who who was the director, the producer, whatever, the director of Fountainhead entertainment, which was kind of indelibly tied to id Software at the time, because she was married to John Carmack for years, as you probably know, and and this event was also Sponsored by Nvidia, who were keenly interested in machinima in those very early days. And at that same event, Epic Games unveiled its matinee tool set for Unreal Tournament 2004 and also Fountainhead released machinimation, which it was using in in the development of a really big film that it attempted to make, which ultimately it never really I don't think it ever finished the film, and I don't think the tool which animation ever really took off, either. But what was particularly important about that event was that it was covered by CNN, the Dallas Observer, The New York Times and what have you. And, and basically, was a sort of a key inflection point in the history of machinima, and this particular film was one of the key ones that was referenced. These guys were interviewed for many of the new stories that went that went around out of that particular film festival, they then released another, so that would be in the September, I think, of 2002 they then released another version of it a few weeks later in November, which they said was an improved version of it, and it was called fake science remix. And I think that was to just do, to do with the smoothness of the animation, and I'm not sure which version of it is in the archive, because it's, it's the same film, I believe, but just one has slightly improved graphic quality, I believe. And then a year later, in november 2003 they released a dem version of the film, which could be played inside how half life itself. So there were three separate versions of this film. And like you said, it was a it's a strange kind of you know, story about TV taking over the world, I guess, in some way, an all powerful television which which destroys the world, but the spirit of man lives on. Well, I didn't really get that through that film, if I'm honest, it's kind of had a bit of a 70s vibe to it. For me, somehow, I suppose the thing to say is, it clearly, you know, it predates YouTube by what three years would the subject matter of that sort of period of time, the fact that it was TV, would that be sort of a relevant inflection point at that period of time, rather than, you know, the current, you know, dominance of AIS and robots and all that kind of thing that we get played through various films. So it's kind of an interesting subject matter. I think. Then, when Ben and I were writing the book, we were lucky enough to get a chance to talk to Brian, and in that interview, he explained how they got on board with machinima.com which they said was almost at the very beginning. They found the website machinima and Hugh, I would I would imagine, through Brian's Google food training, which was sometime in the early 2000s and then he said he and Mike were best friends in high school, and they were passionate about games, and they were developing this mod for Half Life, which they said had included an overly elaborate story. And as they were developing the mods, they figured out that there was much more to be interested in. They were much more interested in telling stories through cinema than they were in actual playing the game. And from there, what they started to do was use the old world craft valve, Hammer Editor to make a movie. And then in the summer. Of 2002 machinima.com announced submissions for this first film festival which was going to be hosted in their hometown, which was mesquite in Texas. And fake science was a result of this kind of three day weekend effort, is what they described it as. They also said they developed it as a music video, and they said it took every bit of their creative and technical muscle to make it, everything they knew in order to create it, which I think is amazing. Yeah, he said. Brian said that the fake science is one of the defining moments of his career. Really provided him with the confidence of knowing that their creativity isn't his, and Mike's creativity could have valid outlets. And as I said, this was pre YouTube years. They they they were involved with with machinima, they were involved with the community, they were involved with the festival activities, and they said that allowed them to network with the community, bearing in mind just who I've just said, was active in that community at the same time, you know, the the games devs themselves, Nvidia, unreal, and what have you, epic, and what have you. And Brian was particularly proud of being able to follow, follow it up, the film up a couple years in a row with teaching young people at some summer Tech Computer camps in New York, which he said enabled him, he felt, to philosophically pass the torch to the next generation of machinimaters. No, that's great. Which was, which is a lovely thing to have said. And then he said that those first five years of machinima.com were actually what helped him forge his career path. It allowed them to explore their real careers within game development. For a time, he and Mike were able to work side by side as as pros. They created in game cinematics for PC, MMO, Star Wars, The Old Republic in 2010 and 2011 or between that period and then in 2013 Brian did similar work for the action game defiance, which came out on PS three, Xbox, 360 and PC. And then Mike went to work with Rooster Teeth, while Brian continued to make games as as a part time indie developer with his studio called steam burger. And as things stand right now, he's still working on his first indie game called Gone Camping. It's still not released. I had a look on Steam earlier today. It's still not out there. Mike, in the meantime, worked on Ruby at Rooster Teeth between 2017 and 2020 so both have gone on to do some really interesting things, I think. And then, interestingly, he says, of those early days in machinima. Brian. Brian basically says that he felt that the work that they did was something that average people won't remember. He said he won't they won't remember the wins, the losses, the internal dramas and the achievements of the Machinima community. What they'll remember is what they saw on the screen. And then he says examples of the of those struggles were quad God, hardly working, blood spell, mail room, male restroom etiquette film and many others are films that he holds up as particularly memorable for the for the struggles from those early days. And he says it was long before all the memes, all the viral stuff, all the streaming video, and that its impact has been absolutely colossal. I couldn't, I couldn't, basically agree with him more, really, the film, this film was uploaded to the archive in 2004 by somebody called gdb. I don't know who that is, but they he uploaded loads of films from those early days, including quad garden, Bud spell and what have you. And he was very active on the archive between 96 and 2005 and I don't know exactly when, how, how they got gained initiative. Actually started at at term with Henry 2004

Ricky Grove 29:34
was when the archive was created. So

Tracy Harwood 29:37
somebody was active long before that on the archive then, and maybe they were just pulling it together. I don't know. It's quite interesting that there was an effort to keep the content there long before we recognized it as being anything. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think that's all I'll say about it. But it's really interesting. To have had the chance to speak to Brian about it, and you know how they came to develop it, and some of the things that were going on around it at the same kind of time, because that's what puts it into context. And when we're looking at things like, you know how epics unreal is developed today from that matinee tool, and you know, the likes of what Nvidia are up to and how they were inspired by the Machinima community in the development of their technology. I think it's really, it's, you know, it's one of those kind of groundbreaking films that was absolutely part of the original story of machinima. Yeah, great pick. It's a great pick. Oh,

Ricky Grove 30:38
man, I'm so glad you had all that background information. I knew you. I didn't know idea you had that interview in there. That's a marvelous and I didn't realize. I knew it was impactful, but I didn't realize it was that impactful, especially of the filmmakers themselves. That's just marvelous. Before we close, I wanted to mention that one of the advantages of the Machinima collection. They got game project is that it's fully searchable with keywords. So if you're looking for a particular film, you can just pop it in or see where they have it. You can also check by year. So if you want to go back and look at clusters of things that happened in 2005 you can click 2005 and all the films will come up, and all of the films look downloadable, so you can download them now, the quality for some of the older ones is not really high. This fake sciences was okay. Fake science was okay, quality. It might be a project for you, Phil, to upscale that. That that would be an interesting thing to do. But anyway, the

Tracy Harwood 31:43
Brian's actually got it on his channel. So there is, I've got a YouTube link that I can share as well. It's, oh, good. It's a little bit better than the Internet Archive version, but it's still 12 year old or also

Ricky Grove 31:56
Right, right, but, but there's a lot. We'll make sure we have a link to it. I urge anybody listening who is interested in machinima to go and check this. It's the best and largest archive in the on the internet, 2787 films from 1996 to 2023 so with that, we'll close this particular episode. Thank you all for your comments. I've always enjoyed talking to you. We'll have links and commentary at what's the name of our website? I forget.com, good lord, the senility is happening early. Completely machinima.com Also, if you have comments or you want to share something, a talk at completely machinima.com is the email address you want to go to. So thank you guys, and we'll see you next week for Tracy's pick bye, bye, bye.