Damien Valentine 00:41
hello and welcome to another episode of now for something completely machinima. I'm Damian Valentine, and I'm joined by Ricky Grove and Tracy Harwood. Hello,

Ricky Grove 00:49
good to be here.

Damien Valentine 00:52
Yeah, as I mentioned last week, Phil is doing hurricane cleanup. He's completely fine. You don't need to worry about him. He he's just incredibly busy at the moment, but he'll be returning to us next month, which we greatly look forward to, because we miss it.

Ricky Grove 01:06
Yeah, I miss his comment. He always brings a great perspective to everything that it's different from the three of us. And then I miss him dearly,

Damien Valentine 01:15
absolutely, yeah, and I'd very much like to have heard his thoughts on this film because it's made by one of his favorite in one of his favorite games. Yes, yeah. So we're going to be talking about the film called The loss. It's made in Red Dead Redemption two by avid Red Dead enjoyer. I checked out his channel, and he's got quite a few films made with Red Dead Redemption but I decided to go with this one. It's actually the first one that I discovered, and it's, for the most part, it's in black and white, and it kind of has that old western vibe to it, which I think the black and white really enhances. And there's a couple of color moments which I was quite intrigued by, because normally in a film, if you've got flashback that's in black and white, but the main film is in color, but this is reverses that the flashbacks in color, but the film is in black and white. So I quite like that

Ricky Grove 02:10
as a ingenious twist.

Damien Valentine 02:12
The plot of the film is about this lone gunman who is is on a one, one man revenge quest. You don't really find out what he's avenging. It the flashbacks a little bit vague in that regard, but he's obviously out to looking for justice or against whoever did him wrong. And I was very impressed by the way it was shot, some stunning camera work and some action sequences. And I remember from previous discussions with Phil and from iriki about how difficult it is to make films in Red Dead Redemption, indeed. And yeah, which is why I'm kind of sad that Phil's not here to share his experiences with that with making his own Red Dead film. But you know, this filmmaker has done an excellent job despite those difficulties, and I was very impressed by that. And I thought, well, this is going to be my pick for the month. So I thought, well, here it is. What do you guys take?

Ricky Grove 03:18
Well, one big follow up you can finish, because you usually have a lengthy dive down in it, and so I don't want to be the person after that. Fair enough. I'm a big fan of westerns, and I do miss Phil's presence here, because he knows the ins and outs of how to shoot in Red Dead Redemption and the difficulties that the filmmaker had and trying to get all those shots. As a fan of the Western, I've watched many, many, many westerns, and I read a lot of Westerns as well, and I've read quite a bit of the history of the Western. This is a film made by somebody who knows the Western and they know the tropes. The story itself is not particularly original. You could see the lone gunman figure seeking some sort of vengeance or retribution in countless western films. What really stands out is the ability for the author, the filmmaker, to draw you into the story and the beauty of the cinematography of the film, the choices that were made, the editing style, the quickness and the slowness of editing choices all the way through, they were very impressive. I found myself, as I mentioned my last one. We talked about engagement. Despite the fact that the story was, I wouldn't say it was cliched, but it was fairly predictable. After that first gun gun battle. It's really great. It's very much. From the good to bad and the ugly. Three bad guy, gunslingers, are waiting at their train station for the person to get off, and then they have a big gun battle and all of that, this guy kind of tricked them, and then came up and they had a gun battle. And it was just masterfully done with echoes of good, bad in the ugly. So I think this filmmaker knows western films very well. There were many sequences I love the flashbacks and color that gave a richness to everything that was so well done. The only problem with Red Dead Redemption is it's better in mid shots and wide shots than they are in close ups, because in order to get to make the game playable on your PC, they couldn't spend an amazing, an enormous amount of time texturing faces, because most players are not going to see the people in close ups. They're going to see them in sort of mid shots, away from them, in interacting with them. So when they did face shots, the faces were somewhat clay like which is always been a personal problem for me. But because it was a convention, I knew what the convention was I accepted it, and it was fine, but I think that could have been improved. I don't know exactly how, but I wish they could have done something with it. And the last thing I want to say about this excellent film, which you must see, everybody must see it. Red, red redemption deserves to have more people making films in it is the music choices. There were two choices of music in it, one classical and one sort of Western with a organ featuring prominently in it. I had trouble with those because they pulled me out of the film. But I want to hear what you guys thought about them. And I think there could have been different choices than Chopin and the other pieces of music that I think would have fit better with the the the ambience and the look and the landscape of everything but, but I'm eager to hear what you guys have to say. So those are my thoughts.

Tracy Harwood 07:25
Yeah, now I, like you guys, really miss Phil's input onto this, into this as well, because he's made a couple of brilliant Red Dead Redemption films that play with very similar approaches, I think, to ones that have been used in this. But I think what, what first struck me about this was the the center Ricky, this is you, the sentimentality in the film. And by that, I don't mean so much in terms of the characters and their portrayal of emotive roles such as the loss of the brother, but I mean between the director and the genre of film, the older Western and the cowboy lifestyle, I think that that sentiment is what struck me the strongest with this. And there are very many signifiers in this and and it begins with that steam train, which is the, you know, the first the sound quality for that steam train is just outstanding. I don't even know if that's in the game or whether that whether that's something really That's brilliant, that's absolutely amazing, to the gunfight of the Okay Corale kind of bit, to the to John Wayne Searchers, you know, standing in the doorway, there was that kind of bit in it, to The music and and I also thought some of the references to the Virginian, you know, the TV cowboy played by James Drury, you know The Man with No Name, kind of thing, though, that that, that to me was the sentimentality in this, not necessarily in terms of what you saw on the on the screen. Obviously, there's no dialog in this. Again, we had a film last week, also where there was no dialog, no dialog in this either. We have reviewed things in a similar vein in the past. Phil's obit a couple of years back, was another such example, where somehow the actions in the behavior portrayed by, as you said, Ricky, these clay like characters still conveys a story, right, with the with the, I don't know some it's, it's maybe that through the stance or the movement somehow. I mean, it's very, very interesting how you can get a sense of. Story with just that kind of stilted movement. I think

Ricky Grove 10:03
you, you have to credit the filmmaker, because the filmmaker sets up those shots Absolutely,

Tracy Harwood 10:08
absolutely, which is why this,

Ricky Grove 10:11
you could take this film and put it in the traditional western films, and it was fit right in it, it wouldn't be Monica's films. Anthony Mann, many other film Ford, even John Ford, it would fit right into

Tracy Harwood 10:25
indeed it would. But I gotta say, without that one line of introduction on the description of the film, I'm not wholly sure I would have been able to grasp exactly what this was about. Because, you know, when at the beginning with the arrival and that, that the dominance of that train scene and the sound, I got lost in that a little bit, because I was expecting something to be connected to that. But it wasn't really until the middle of the film that it seems to suggest what's going on and that, you know, we've got our bounty hunter whom, by all accounts, had previously been in town and discovered that his brother had been murdered, which then seems to have set him off on this kind of manhunt, resulting him to sort of search them out and then lead them back to the town. And I think if you think about, or at least weighs my interpretation of it, think if I thought about it too much, you'd realize it's a bit of a recursive plot, and it kind of ties you in knots a little bit, because you don't know where, ultimately, when you you're reflecting on, you don't know where the beginning or the middle or the end actually was in it, which is, but

Ricky Grove 11:40
but the thing is, is that if you're a Western fan, you know that so, so they don't give you the setup right off the bat. Indeed, there's a filmmaker named Bud Bodeker Who did about five different westerns, and they all had that element into them. You don't really see how the beginning connects until a certain key moment occurs, and then you suddenly get it. So if you're a Western fan, you recognize that definitely,

Tracy Harwood 12:08
definitely, that's what I mean about the sentimentality between the director and the genre. I really like the black and white and Scratchy style of it. I thought that was great. Fitted in perfectly with that sentiment and the overall feel. I, you know, when I was looking at it, I wasn't really too sure what those color sections were about, or what they were there to portray, or indeed, kind of how they fitted into the black and whiteness of the other sections, because they had a kind of different style to them. They were kind of running free. And in the end, I kind of thought, well, maybe what they are is a memory of good times with the much loved brother that was no longer there. That was very sad. That's what, that's what you thought. Yeah, okay, because I wasn't too sure exactly. But then in the end, that was, I don't know. That's what I sort of concluded from it, but, but I wasn't sure that was really what he intended. The sound I did, like you, Ricky, I thought it was a little bit disjointed. But actually, what disjointed it for me wasn't the music so much as the distant cows and dogs and the hammering and such. And I guess they weren't as good as that steam train and and and the editing that he'd done to its movement. I mean, there's a little shot right in the beginning where something happens in the in the film, and you get two puffs of smoke from the from the the train, just bang on cue. It's really well done. That bit was really well done, the movement and the animation, and what it was was was incredibly well done. But I suppose what disappointed me about it was it didn't ultimately have much of a role other than perhaps to set the time period. And in fact, I think I got so wrapped up in that, in that train at the beginning of the film. It brought back something which I remember, you know, coming across many, many years ago, when I worked a little bit of insight. I worked on a magazine called steam world. And I don't know if Rick you might well know this story, but apparently, Kirk Douglas, in his cowboy acting days, was a passionate train fan and would often go off with some equipment on set to record steam trains in his downtime. And for one of the issues of steam World Magazine, we once put this cassette recording. I think it was either a cassette or a video, anyway, of all these different trained steam train sounds, which he'd apparently recall recorded from his, you know, his years of being on all sorts of film sets. And I can remember listening to this and thinking, the hell's that all about? Why on earth would he do that? Yeah, because I was sort of slow trains, you know, chuffing, and then these faster trains, you know, that kind of thing, and then bit of tooting and what have you. But I remember being hugely surprised that that magazine completely sold out every single copy. Wow, which I couldn't, yeah, why? I don't know. I actually tried to look it up to see if I could find a link to the magazine and see if you could get any copies of that old cassette. I'm sure I've still got it upstairs in the actic summer somewhere. It's probably mid 1990s but that train sound took me back to that, that kind of memory of how people love to record the sounds of those beautiful trains, and I've no doubt that that's if it's in the game, that that's, that's the sort of source material that would have come from somebody, somebody's archive like that, as it would be original sound, I'm sure. Right anyway, back to back to the film. There's this kind of this early shot, which, to me, sort of actually indicates a bit of anachronism for me in terms of style, and given that its aim was largely to present an old style Western, there's this one shot, where, where? After this main character has killed these three folks at the train stop, the camera then sort of goes up in the air and jumps over the buildings and then comes down into the main street, you know, a little way behind our cowboy riding out through the town from this really high perspective, and then the camera sort of drops and follows him down down the street as he's as he's riding through and it's all one wide sweep. Well, in my memory of seeing hundreds of Westerns as well, you wouldn't have seen a shot like that. I thought it was a really interesting shot, but you would not have ever seen a shot like that. You'd see lots and lots of different cuts, lots of different angles, probably from, you know, high up on the buildings, but never, you know, way up over the building like that. So I thought that was an interesting, an interesting approach, and a slightly, you know, something that you've almost never seen with a with an old style cowboy, um, which I thought was an intriguing strategy. Um, we've often seen, I mean, we've often sort of said, haven't we, how things done with machinima are things that can never be done in real life. Well, I think that's a classic example of, oh, yeah, using the game can you can be used, you know, you can use it to do things that you could never do in real life. And that, that was a that to me, because of what, of what was going on, and because of the love with the genre was so evident in this that jumped me out a little bit, which is kind of intriguing. And then again, I was thinking, you know, Phil made another Red Dead Redemption film where he actually played with the with the genre and with the glitch in the game itself. Not that this is glitch, but, you know, he sort of played on what the game was capable of, which is, do you remember that one that really sort of comedy short, where, where that horse and rider were sort of riding up into the air, and then suddenly it all breaks, and it drops, right? Remember? Well, he made fun of the the sort of thing that you could get in the game that you couldn't get anywhere else. And I, I guess it's, it's probably worth remembering that you're not just talking or not just thinking here about film, but also how game has unique properties that you need to integrate as well. Um, but overall, I love this. It was really, really good fun. It did raise a few questions for me in terms of, you know, can you always be faithful to a genre with a with a, you know, using game mechanics? I guess I'd be really interested to hear what you guys thought about that, whether you picked it up or whether you it didn't jump you out or

Ricky Grove 19:27
didn't, didn't affect me at all. My idea is, if you're going to do a film in 2024 inside of a game, and if you're going to be true to the genre, you don't have to be true to the cinematography of the genre. You can be true to the look, the feel, the mood, the landscape, but you don't necessarily have to limit yourself to that camera on a tripod approach that was so simple and easy for early westerns. If you have ability to make shots that are different than do that it didn't. Pulled me out of it at all. In fact, that was one of the things that I really admired about the filmmaker in this film, is his use of camera movement. That one shot you talk about was such a marvelous but because he used it to do something very modern, which is the character starts moving in one direction, you pass through a number of architectural and landscape elements, and then they appear at the end of the shot, having gone through it in real time, I always thought that added to the realism of the despite the fact that the camera shot was unusual and not what you would see in normal westerns, it was quite revealing as far as the realism of the situation, you know, so that didn't make any difference. I mean, the music was more of an issue.

Damien Valentine 20:49
Yeah, the I agree with you, Ricky, about the the camera work, because obviously, when those questions are made, they probably didn't have the camera technology to do a shot like that if they made a Western now, yeah, they could do that.

Ricky Grove 21:01
They got a drone that run a drone over it, and it'd be fine, yeah?

Damien Valentine 21:05
So, yeah, I just see this is a filmmaker using the technology available to him, which is this game and the camera controls in it, to tell the story he wanted. He's it's not he didn't jump out at me, because I think it's just a way to put his spin on it

Ricky Grove 21:23
right. A more intriguing question would be, because Red Dead Redemption is so hard to film in, how did they he manage that shot technically, inside of the Red Dead Redemption engine, I think there was probably a lot of work in order to make that shot, and many other shots as well in it. So it'd be fascinating. I wish we had the filmmaker here. If, if you happen to hear this and you want to respond, we'd love to hear your thoughts about how making the film was, in fact, come and be a guest. We'd like to talk to you about it. The last thing I want to talk about is the music choices. And I don't want to belabor this, but I think for one thing, the choices were, how they were mixed was were a little strange, because usually background music is background. But the problem with this is it was mixed in the foreground. So when the Chopin Nocturne came on, it was suddenly it filled what the film was about. At that moment, it became the music and everything went into the background, whereas a better mixing of it would be more gentle in not taking away the action of the film. Also, that Chopin piece has been done in countless film. It's so very, very French, and it pulled me out of the world, even though the mood of the piece was right for the scene that it was in, I think another music choice would have been better, because it would have matched the American, Western element of it. And then the second piece with the organ, again, the mixing was all up front, and the organ was so predominant in it and it was building up to a big action scene that it just seemed to be inappropriate. The organ has a kind of symbol in Westerns of being either connected to religion or death, I think, and neither one of those. I mean, death was certainly there because the people were dying left and right from the filmmaker, from the Gunslinger, but it didn't, somehow, it just didn't work for me. I think there could have been better choices that would have integrated with the soundscape, and that would not have been, would not have been so so discordant to me. But even with that, it did not remove the pleasure of the film. It pulled me out, but I still came back and immediately re-engaged. So maybe it's just my own particular choices in music. But still, this filmmaker deserves great accolade for the care and their obvious sentiment towards westerns, as Tracy pointed out. And I'm really hoping that they'll respond and that you go to their channel, we'll have a link to their channel and watch other other films?

Tracy Harwood 24:42
Absolutely.

Damien Valentine 24:48
Yeah, Tracy, you gonna say something? No, no,

Tracy Harwood 24:50
I was gonna say you had an honorary pick this month, didn't you? Are you gonna Yeah,

Damien Valentine 24:55
we'd have to go into it in quite a depth of that. It's another film that I found. It's called, I. The second base, the second best space sim ever made. That's the name of the video, and it's made with so we've seen videos made with Elite Dangerous that's actually the fourth game in the series. So this, this video I found is made in the second game, which is a 30 year old game, and it shows off the scale of of the game as it is, because it's it does something that many modern games still struggle to do, and that and the way it is, you have a spaceship on the landing pad, and you get a little bit of explanation of what's going to happen, and the ship takes off, and he turns out, and he flies away, and it seamlessly flies up into space and away from the planet Earth, and it gets smaller and smaller in the background. And basically the video is just showing off the technology of this 30 year old video game that was able to fit on a single floppy disk. And it simulates the entire galaxy, at least as it was known back then. There's a lot more that's known about the Galaxy now, and this huge game managed to fit one single floppy disk. I have no idea how much to put off, because I cannot imagine how you get that much data. Just the names of all the systems would fill it up. So I don't know how to do it, but it's there. And this is a it's not exactly a cinematic masterpiece, because it is an old game. The camera angles are very limited. It's not really moddable. So because modeling didn't really exist the way it does now when this was made, so the filmmaker was limited by the limitations of the game. But I remember playing this game a lot, and I was really excited to see someone made something with it. So I thought this is just gonna be my honorable mention, because I don't think it could do with a whole episode, but I still liked it, so I was to share it

Tracy Harwood 26:58
well. Thanks for that. I have to say, I thought it, I saw it, and I thought, is that a little bit of a joke again? That's going on here, because it's, it's, it's, it's 2d obviously,

Damien Valentine 27:11
oh, it's 3d It's all 3d It's,

Tracy Harwood 27:13
that's 3d

Damien Valentine 27:15
It's for 30 years ago.

Tracy Harwood 27:17
Okay, alright, it's

Damien Valentine 27:20
the very first 3d space flight simulator games.

Tracy Harwood 27:23
Is that, right? Well, yeah, yeah, it's, it's certainly got nostalgia for it. It's obviously a run through. It's not an edited film. When I was looking at it from my point of view, yeah, it's, you know, it's interesting when the Creator said, the graphics have stood the test of time,

Damien Valentine 27:48
maybe not, compared to the new elite, dangerous. Now, I

Tracy Harwood 27:50
think the person that made this has an excellent sense of humor. I mean, let's face it, if you were not playing games 30 years ago, this sort of thing will have passed by, for sure, I think, given that the real time aspect wasn't particularly central to the finished film because of the way that the you know, it's the it's the narration that kind of informed your your way through this. I know it was badged as a sort of a real time thing, but it could possibly have been quite a bit shorter to make the same points about the graphic quality and the other observations. Although I get the point was not so much to show the content, but to expound about the game and its expansiveness, which I think this does pretty well. So you know, if you're if you've got nostalgia for these kinds of games. I think this is a really interesting example of a run through with some some really dry, humorous comments on the way. Yeah.

Ricky Grove 28:54
I mean no disrespect to you, Damien and your choices, but I couldn't finish it. I just didn't find it interesting. And although I can see your and Tracy's point about there being a nostalgic enjoyment of an old game and seeing how that was done, it just didn't appeal to me at all. And I don't really have anything to say about it. I'm sorry,

Damien Valentine 29:19
fair enough. That's fair. I just thought it's interesting to see someone make something with such an old game. I'd like to see someone do something more than this, like a proper film, with this game. I'm not going to try it myself, but yeah, if someone were to attempt it, I would be very excited to see what someone could do with this whole game, because there is, it's a huge world, and this video kind of shows off the scale of it. So I think there's potential there. I just don't want to be the one that does it myself. I want to see someone else do

Ricky Grove 29:52
it. Well, if you could clone yourself, you could do it. But yeah, but yeah,

Tracy Harwood 29:58
it's another inch. Interesting choice. I think we've seen interesting choices like this made with with old, older games. But I think the the bit that makes them more interesting isn't so much, isn't so much the graphic quality and what you see, but the way that the story is woven over it by whoever's doing the narration. And the narration here was, was, was text based which, which was, was, was fine, but, yeah, I think that's where the work has got to come into using something like this. Yeah, yeah,

Damien Valentine 30:35
right. Well, I think that's going to be it for this episode. So thank you, Ricky and Tracy, welcome. We look forward to Phil's return when he's able to we hope you enjoyed these two films. If you do have anything to say about either of them, please let us know. And if you are secretly working on an elite two video that is going to be more exciting than this one, please do let us know about that too. Send us your feedback at talk at complete machinery.com and our website is at completelymachinima.com and we look forward to hearing from you. Otherwise, we'll see you next week. Take care and goodbye. See ya.

31:11
Bye. Bye.