Ricky Grove 00:44
welcome machinima fans. My name is Ricky Lee Grove, and I'm hosting this episode of A now for something completely machinima. I'm here with my pals, Phil rice, Damien and Tracy Harwood, hello everyone. Hello. Now, last week we did fake science, which was a classic machinima. And this week, we're going to have a really interesting film that Tracy chose, which I think will bring up an interesting topic of the growth of machinima tools. Because this is a fairly modern one, Tracy, you want to share the film with us?

Tracy Harwood 01:19
Absolutely. This is called Forbidden Planet children of the Krell chapter one, and it's by Philip Brown, whom we probably know better as Biggs trek is somebody from the older days of machinima, as well as the one that we were talking about dead on cue last week. It's actually based on the original Forbidden Planet movie of 1956 and it's an animated, stylized sequel, is how he's described. It set immediately after the events of that film. Gotta say, I don't remember the last time I saw that film, so I watched a few snippets of it, and I and it brought it all back. I probably knew it off by heart. I would have thought it's been written and directed by Biggs, who's clearly a massive fan of the original film, created an iClone, and he's used things like character creator, Audacity, Sony, Vegas, acid, Adobe, Photoshop. I mean, all sorts of different tools have been used in this, and he's also worked or used content from a whole load of folks in the in the community as well, which is was also great to see. He's used voice overs for more modern tools, 11 labs, sound effects, and he's used various different sources, including free sounds and also a bunch of old CDs for special effects, as I believe in. I really love this. I you know, it really reflects that kind of 1950s sci fi genre, all those kind of crazy blurbs and bleeps that you remember in the film, everything from the way the starship looks, you know, the classic saucer shape, and the way that the characters talk in this sort of almost clipped, clipped way, very sort of correct clipped way, I'd say English, but it's not English at all. It's got a very homemade feel to it almost feels like a puppeted film. It feels like you should be able to see the wires holding the the, you know, holding the starship, yes,

Ricky Grove 03:31
yeah, kind of thing, but sort of Marionette, the Marionette Theater, yeah, it

Tracy Harwood 03:35
feels a little bit like it should, you know, you should be able to see that kind of thing, because it's got that kind of feeling to it. And the way that the, you know, the characters look as well is very, very clearly stylized animation. It felt a little bit sort of Captain Scarlet and the mysterons and sort of Joe 90 and various others in that kind of genre. For me as well, I really love the storyline to it. In fact, I got so into this, you know, it's 14 minutes long, I just lost the sense of time. And I was really ready for the next bit of it. I wasn't ready for it to end when it did. I just, I just wanted the story to sort of carry on and this unnamed planet that they kind of landed to. So I really can't wait for the next episode. Biggs, you better get on with it, because there's somebody that's very keen to see it. I think much of what you see in it, though cleverly, isn't really a direct copy of the original, which is interesting because it's, it's closely linked and closely inspired, but not that close that you kind of think, well, that's just a ripped off character. It's just re saying the same thing that the old character did, because it isn't doing that. The only thing that I thought was a bit closer was Robbie the Robot, and particularly when you kind of got the sense of the Rolodex brain ticking, you know, clicking over that you you remember. From the original film. So I think that was a particularly interesting part of it, of how the characters themselves have been adapted slightly. I think there were some really great references to the original film as well, which made you want to go back and have a look at the original film. For example, the fact that's great, yeah, exactly. And I mean, it was a real love letter to the original film, wasn't it? You know the references to to Dr nor Morbius and the plans left by the alien computer system for Robbie? You know what happened to Quinn on Altair four, and all those kinds of things you really want to remind yourself of the details in the original story. Yeah, I just gotta, I've probably got to dig it out and watch it completely. I didn't watch it completely. I'd also completely forgotten, when I was digging around with it, I'd also completely forgotten that Leslie Nielsen played JJ Adams. I didn't know that I couldn't remember, yeah, I only remember him,

Phil Rice 06:06
dude, he was so cool. He was wasn't

Tracy Harwood 06:09
he completely forgotten that. And obviously, Dr Morbius, Walter pigeon and what have you, yeah. And then, of course, you know, you start digging around, and you suddenly realize that, and reflect upon this as well, what a massive impact that original film had on science fiction cinema. You know, it was the first science fiction film to depict humans traveling faster than light. So, you know, you got a Star Trek reference in there. You've kind of got different planets orbiting each other and different solar systems. And this, this robot character being a character, rather than just something running around. You know, there was a lot of interesting things that were going on in this original film, and I love how Biggs has picked up on some of the the detail of it. But I especially liked the electronic soundscape that he's designed for his version wonderful,

Ricky Grove 07:07
absolutely wonderful soundtrack. I've got the soundtrack on LLP on vinyl, and occasionally pop it out to listen to it. Just remark, remarkable. Yeah.

Tracy Harwood 07:18
Well, okay, that's my that was my pick. What did you guys think?

Damien Valentine 07:22
Okay, I like you realize that I haven't seen this film, the original food and planet, in such a long time. I remember first time watched I must have been about six or seven years old, and the creature, and it scared me so much that I had nightmares. But then I watched it again. I was a bit older, and I loved it, and I've seen it a few times since then, so I think I need to go back and watch this again. So I watched this and and then I thought I need to. I didn't have time to watch the whole film then, but I watched the trailer on YouTube just to get a feel for what that was like, to remind myself what was the visual style of it fresh in my mind, and I can see that big track has done a really great job of recapturing that atmosphere. I think the stylized look for the characters is a good choice. It was something I thought about doing for air to the Empire, but it turns out I am absolutely terrible at creating stylized versions of real people, so they didn't look anything like how they did. So I have to applaud Biggs check for his skill there, because you look at the characters and you look at the how they did in the original film, yeah, I know that it's meant to be. So that's a good choice, because you're trying to create actual, realistic versions of the characters. That's also really hard, and if you get that wrong, it looks really wrong as well. So yeah, star is a good choice. And yeah, I do applaud the skill at recreating those characters. I really like the story. I want to know what happens next. So like you, Tracy, I want to expect to hurry up with that second episode, because I want to know what's going to happen, although it suppose it's me time to catch up on the original film as well, so I can remind myself I got a rough idea, remember what happened, but have it, you know, fresh in my mind. So yeah, this is a really great choice, and I really liked what big strikes done with it. So

Phil Rice 09:04
yeah, I too have had, when i i started watching, and I thought, oh yeah, I've seen, of course, I've seen the original of this. Well, I hadn't. I saw Robbie the Robot, and I was thinking of Lost in Space, which is which contains a very similar, if not the same, robot. I don't know if it's intended to be the exact same.

Ricky Grove 09:27
No, it's a What? No, it's a completely different design, although the outline of it is the same, yeah,

Phil Rice 09:32
this, it was similar enough to where, that's what I saw. And thought, Oh, I've seen this. And I loved I grew up watching the old lost in space as a kid. So I thought, okay, cool. And so I enjoyed the you know, his rendition, and thought, Okay, I really want to go back and re watch the original. And the original is on Tubi T ubi.com which is a streaming service that offers movies for free. It's ad supported, I assume. It's available in the UK. It's definitely available in the US. So if you want to go see the original, it is currently on to be and it's definitely worth watching. And as I watched it, I realized, okay, I haven't seen this. I haven't seen this somehow, in spite of the fact that I'm, I'm one of the world's leading nerds, I just hadn't seen it, and I loved it. I mean, again, Leslie Nielsen was the lead as dashing as you will ever see him. You know, everyone knows Leslie Nielsen from police squad and the Naked Gun movies and stuff like that, where he that was kind of his act two or act three of his career, right? But, yeah, he was quite, quite a good leading man, and dashingly handsome. And he's opposite Anne Francis, who was a, you know, just one of those beauties of the day. And, oh, it's just wonderful, wonderful movie. And, and it's, it's a 50s movie in every way, like there's moments of cringe for a modern viewer, which, like, they're, they're talking about this guy's daughter right in front of him, like, like, like, their their tongues hanging out, you know, like, like in the cartoons, you know, right in front of her dad, and he's just like, Yeah, I know, right. She is pretty hot. What's happening here. So there's that aspect of it that's just really entertaining to me, but, but then it's just a really, it's a nice, I don't know if it would be considered a hard sci fi story, but it's a good sci fi plot, and there's an interesting sense of mystery to it. And then, yeah, basically, it appears that that Biggs TRex movie picks up right after the events of that. And you're right, Damien, I think the stylized characters was a really good choice. Stylized is very hard to do as you know, as as, as we both know, but maybe, I guess, the advantage would be that it's a little more forgiving if it's not exact, that like, like you mentioned, Damien, you could tell who was supposed to be who. And if there's a there's a risk that if you do the characters that are supposed to look exactly like their real life counterparts, that if you don't get that just right, it almost trips off the uncanny valley effect. Right, right, right. That's a tough choice to make, because Damien, you know from experience that doing the once modeled after real people are tough. That's really hard, but maybe there are more tools built into the iClone pipeline that make that a little bit more straightforward to achieve with things like the headshot plugin, right, where you can actually take a photo and map it onto the model that without tweaking, that doesn't get the job done completely by any means, right? It at least can get you part of the way there, right,

Damien Valentine 12:46
and with the images available from when the film was made, you know, the cameras weren't that good, so you're not going to have high quality photos

Phil Rice 12:54
of the Yeah, I don't think there's a photo set out there of Leslie Nielsen from every angle you

Damien Valentine 12:59
could probably get from Naked Gun, but then he's going to look a lot older than

Phil Rice 13:03
a little bit different, right? Yeah. So, yeah, I just loved this movie. I wasn't particularly close to Biggs trek at the time, but this, this film, started up a conversation between he and I, and we've been interacting on I found a new friend, basically, I guess us Phil's have to stick together. But yes, it's, it's, it's just a wonderful achievement. He is actively working on the next chapter. Is Not, not delaying at all. He's working on it right now. So, and we, none of us, have mentioned yet, but the response on YouTube to this has been incredible. Wow. Well, north of 40,000 views. And this is a film that was released, what, six weeks ago, maybe, yep, a little over a month ago. I was just astounding. And I don't think anybody's more surprised about that than him. He's very humbled by it and also is taking it as motivation to continue so well, that's

Ricky Grove 14:00
great. Yeah,

Phil Rice 14:01
it's very exciting. Bigs trek we know from back in the day, most notably is I clone picture that he did, Haunter of the dark. Is that what it was called the Lovecraft, right? Right? You were involved in some of the production on that. Yeah? That was just a that was just knocked our socks off at the time. And so, yeah, he's been at this a long time, and has really, really gotten to know his way around the iClone tool set. And this is, this is really good stuff. It's not perfect, but what it gets right is just so good, and it definitely nails the vibe and the theme, and he makes use of those sounds from that era that are just just wonderful. So yeah, just, the only reason this wasn't my pick is Tracy beat me to it. So great. No, it's fine. It's fine.

Ricky Grove 14:52
I worked with Phil brown on Haunter of the dark, and I can tell you that he is a very detail oriented. Person. He likes to get things right. He's a thoughtful filmmaker. Honor. The dark was a wonderful experience. I was inspired to work with him because he did it another Lovecraft shot in the movies, which I liked a lot, like, I'm sorry, but the title of that particular film escapes me. I'm sure Tracy will be able to figure it out, but I wanted to work with him, and turned out we could, and the result was something that I was very proud of. I'm glad that he's he did this adaptation. My favorite thing about it was the script. I thought that he was he knew the original film really well, and he was able to come up with a plot that that really caught the style. As you all have pointed out, the style is stylized version of it. I think was an excellent choice. I do have a couple quibbles. All of you have covered the positive things about and he just, by the way, he deserves the accolades he's getting for this, because he's been working in machinima for a long time, as you point out, but there were a couple of things that kept me from enjoying it as much as the rest of you, and that was the textures on the models had that clay look that has always bothered me. It's always kicks me out of a movie, and it's a I clone had that problem from the very beginning, these clay textures that were smooth and uniform on every person, and they finally got around it, eventually by doing headshot and coming up with better ways to texture it. But Bigg's use of sort of his stylization approach, brought back the same problem with textures and also animation, at times, with jerky. Now I know part of that was his stylization, but the jerking of us, of it got in the way sometimes for me to stay in the story, I I didn't have the same experience you Tracy had of time not passing. That doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it. I did enjoy it very much, and I'm really happy to see it, but I kind of wished he had done some color grading for this to overcome the texturing. Da Vinci resolve the film editor that Phil and I use has some really extra default color grading schemes, and I he probably didn't edit the film in DaVinci Resolve. But I think color grading would have helped avoid that uncanny valley. For me, texture look on the characters. Also, at times, I think he spent too much time on medium shots throughout the film, as opposed to wider shots. I didn't do a count of it, but it because I wasn't involved in the story. I paid more attention to the details of the shots, and I thought he could have been a little more create on his camera work in it, but then again, he was trying to ape the 50s stop so they didn't have a lot of camera different camera point. But I was really glad you picked it. I enjoyed it. I'm glad to see he's getting his due finally. And congratulations to him for Biggs. I think that's great. Last thing I want to say is that Lisa and my wife, Lisa and I have a little joke from Forbidden Planet in the middle of the film Morbius, I think is the name of the guy stands on a big bridge in the middle of the huge area that he's in, and he points down, and he goes 500 miles, then he points up, but he goes 500 miles. And I always come up to Lisa and I say, 5000 miles, 5000 miles. And she says, No, stupid, it's 500 miles. It's a little joke that we do because, yeah, because I got it wrong. So now I always get it wrong, but that original film, and the final thing I want to say is that if you make a sequel to a film that leads you back to the original film, you've done the right job on it. Yeah, yeah. And cop copyright issues are interesting, because that was one of my first thoughts, is that he might have copyright issues. But from 1929 to 1963 the copyright standard was, if you didn't renew your copyright in that period of time, it became public domain, right? So I think maybe for midden planet didn't renew their copyright on it, which allows him to be able to do a sequel to a major I'm not sure that, but I think that's why he it's still staying up on YouTube. Oh yeah,

Phil Rice 19:53
thanks. I wanted to add a couple things. Ricky as well. On the the color grading. It's a very good idea. Yeah, for well, for bigs, or for anybody who's working with iClone, in particular, if you don't use DaVinci Resolve and maybe feel like, well, I don't really know what I'm doing with color correction and color grading and stuff like that. IClone has some and I'm not sure how they're pronounced. Is it Lutz or Lutz? L U, T, or stands for lookup tables, Lutz, but it was Lutz i Okay, Lutz. Particularly, there's a whole set of them that I think, if they're not part of the default package in iClone, they're a reasonably priced add on that you can get that will basically apply those film looks right within iClone, and they are stunningly good. And there's a lot of variety there those presets that you were talking about Ricky that are in DaVinci Resolve, if, for some reason, you're using another editor, and, you know, don't have access to those, or if you're a little intimidated by DaVinci Resolve, because it's not a it's not easy. There's, there's a learning curve with division resolve. It's completely doable. It's achievable, but if you just try to dive right in and download it, okay, now I'm going to color correct it may not be immediately intuitive what to do. You need to watch some videos and have people show you, but that's an alternative for specifically for people using I clone that. There are some LUTs built right in that are quite nice, useful for that.

Damien Valentine 21:22
I want to add to that, you can import your own LUTs into icon. So if you find some free ones online, you just import the file.

Phil Rice 21:30
Oh, so LUT is as is it a standard of some kind then that? Yeah, okay, I was not aware of that. I'm not terribly well educated on color correction at all, so

Damien Valentine 21:39
I only came across it in the icon, and then I started looking, looking through. I thought, These are good, but I wonder if there's more out there. And yeah, it works. So I looked up. Oh, it's quite a common thing across video editing, right? But yeah, you can, there's, you go online, there's lots you can buy, and then there's free ones that people have just made to share. So you just find something you like. If you want just one of the free ones, you can just load the file. Just click the Import button, I think is, or wherever it is in icon, I can't remember, and just load the file. It's so easy. So, you know,

22:10
it's good to know, yeah, it's

Damien Valentine 22:11
a built in ones like, what we're looking for you can, you know, bring your own in. Color Grading

Ricky Grove 22:16
is all over modern videos and modern television and movies, and it's so easy to use, it's worth learning. And as you guys pointed out, it's fairly simple, but you can drastically change the mood or the scene quality by adding a lot to it. Perhaps Phil, you and I, we might should. We might get together and do an episode, a special episode for completely machinima on color grading. That

Phil Rice 22:46
would be fun. It would be a fun video episode, because we could actually illustrate some of what we're talking about. Yeah, that's right. Let's Okay. The other thing, the other thing I wanted to mention was the the clay face, because that's something that you and I both observed back in the day, I think in like the machiniplex times so early, you know, in the fairly early days of iClone, but when it was starting to evolve into, you know, more of a of an animation platform, and that was a common thing that we would see in films for icon. I know what it was for us when, when evaluating stuff for the expo and submissions with iClone, it was very common for them to have that Clayface thing. But at the time, what we had observed about what it was that was tripping that off for us wasn't as much the texture of the face, although I think, I think that might that's valid for for this film, but it was the the lack of eye movement. And in this one in particular, you notice it with the captain, the eyes are fairly wide the whole time. And there may be blood in there, I don't know, but not enough. And nobody ever actually looks by moving their eyeballs. It's all like this. And then there's not a whole lot of facial expression, too, and I don't think that that's that's as lacking in Phil's film, but that was a common thing in iClone, and I don't remember why, because at the time, I didn't use I clone. I don't know if it was just that I clone couldn't do that, or if it was that the people making films with iClone didn't think to do that, but it makes a big difference, and especially if you're going to do any close ups at all, you want a little bit of of realistic activity. There's no better way to illustrate that a character is, let's say, thinking, than with the way that they're moving their eyes, and not just eyebrows, but the actual eyes and variation on how wide the eyes are open. You know, between a squint, it can make an amazing amount of difference. You know, a super close up can show just we observed this in a film Team Fortress. Yeah, several episodes back, the one that was the make, the remake of the Carl Sagan thing. And it closes with this shot on the female astronaut, and all you see is from like the bridge of her nose up to here, but you could tell that she was that she smiled, even though you couldn't see her mouth. That tells you how powerful the the animation around the eyes can be to to convey things. And that's not just true in super close ups, but otherwise as well. So some of the clay face thing may, may be solvable by a little bit more attention to eye movement, which modern eye clone definitely can, definitely

Ricky Grove 25:32
does. Yes, they solved that problem. It's just quite well. Yeah, his choice in in stylizing the film brought back that particular issue. That's the only thing, sure,

Phil Rice 25:44
and that is an issue that he's, he's, he's not unaware of. So I'm interested to see you know what tweaks to the approach he might take in the next, next episode. Anyway, it was, I'm glad you brought that up, Ricky, because that is a common thing. And I guess the thing is, is in modern iClone there's definitely a solution for that. I don't know for sure if in iClone five, you could do that or not, but you certainly can now. Well,

Ricky Grove 26:11
obviously 40,000 people didn't have a problem with it. So I guess I'm, yeah, one of the few that actually do. But then again, our purpose here is to point out things like that. So I felt, no,

Phil Rice 26:24
no, I think, I think it's good, and I bet, I'll bet, he appreciates it too. We don't really, as filmmakers, we don't really get meaningful feedback as often as we'd like. People in a YouTube comment generally are not giving you a dissertation on how to improve. Yeah, that's true. It's a drive by shooting thing you know, as a filmmaker,

Damien Valentine 26:45
it's worth getting someone that you can trust to give you some decent feedback. Oh, and to show them, because when I was started using movie store, I showed one of my friends I worked with chronicle Samantha. She helped me write it. I showed her, I did a scene, and I said, What do you think of this? I'm going to use it for chronicle Samantha. I said, Well, that looks a huge improvement of The Sims, but your faces don't move. You got the mouth moving. But that was it. I thought, oh yeah. I didn't even think about it, but she gave me that feedback. So then I started looking into a movie storm, which obviously has much more limited features than icon, but it had abilities to still make Face Face movement. So I went back and redid it, and I showed a few days later. How about this? So that's much better. So you need someone who can do that. Yes, you know, and give you a kicking when you're forgetting to do something important, absolutely.

Ricky Grove 27:37
Well, it's the eye stuff that point. Phil pointed us particularly essential, because as babies, all we do is lay in our mother our arms and look at our eyes all the time. So even though people may not know what it is, they're experts in being able to determine authentic eye real eye movement, and if you don't get that right in animation, it makes it really hard to make your characters believable.

Phil Rice 28:05
Think about this too. The eyes are fascinating because think about this. You can be standing in a room with someone across the room from them, and you can tell what they're looking at like. If you tried to calculate that with trigonometry or something, it would be really difficult to calculate, but we just can know instantly if we're talking to someone and they're looking at a spot of mustard on their chin, or if they're looking at my scalp instead of my eyes, or, you know, if they're looking at my ear or something like that. It's amazing precision these instruments, not just what we can do with them, but when we see someone using their eyes, we can, we can instantly calculate what they're looking at with with startling accuracy. So that's that's something to keep aware of in film, as well as you, as a director, you've got full advantage to use that, to manipulate that and make it really precise. So I'd like to close with a brief funny story. But Rick, have you got Sure? Please go right ahead. All right. So about three or four years ago, I had a local guy want to hire me to do some animated videos and his original they were training videos, or corporate training videos, and he had done them with this very primitive 2d animation that looked like something out of a 1970s PSA type of thing or something. It's like, I want to bring it into the into the modern age, and, you know, do some 3d animation with it. Well, the only tool that I had at at the time. This was right when I was kind of coming back for this current wave of my productivity. I hadn't gotten iClone yet. Well, I had iClone seven, but I hadn't learned to use it yet. So I decided to do it in moviestorm. And so I created, He gave me some tests to create, and I created some of these, recreating the action of these videos that he had done. But. With movie storm characters, and then I submitted it to him, and I waited for feedback, and I waited and I waited, and finally, kind of shook the tree a bit and said, so what? What do you think? You haven't told me anything. And he says, Well, I've showed him around to some other people that I'm working with, and they all agree with what I say, and that is, there's too much uncanny valley effect with movie storm. It looks too realistic. That's the first and only time I've ever heard someone say that about movie storms, yeah, yeah. I don't think I ever heard them say too realistic. So

Damien Valentine 30:39
yeah, do one of them again in icon, and just say, What do you think of

Phil Rice 30:44
this? It's tempting, but it was years ago, and I've, I lost the job, but yeah,

Ricky Grove 30:48
yeah, yeah, he may have just written you off as the uncanny valley guy, right? Yeah, I'm

Phil Rice 30:54
just way too advanced. I'm like, I'm like, the Ian Huber of machinima or something, right? It's like, real, yeah, it creeps me out.

Damien Valentine 31:02
You're off to Hollywood next, so you can't possibly afford you, of course,

Ricky Grove 31:07
of course. Well, that's it for this episode. Another really excellent choice, Tracy, I always enjoy the films that you pick and great discussion. Phil and I are going to do a little tutorial on color grading through DaVinci Resolve. So stay tuned for that. Also any relevant notes, links, maybe a little bit about Biggs track will be on our blog at, hey, I remembered it completely machinima.com and if you have any comments talk at, completely machinima.com is the email address to use. We'd love to hear from you. We'd like to respond. Perhaps we'd respond on air. It may not be a friendly comment that we would make on air, but we would make a comment. No, that's not true. I'm just joking. Well, that's it for the show. Thank you for watching. Thank you, Phil Tracy and Damien for your comments. I'm Ricky Lee Grove, and that's our show. Signing off, bye, bye. You.