Damien Valentine 00:31
Damien Valentine, use the Machinima. Luke, you. You. Hello, and I'm Damon Valentine. This is a now for something completely machinima. I'm joined by my co hosts, Phil Rice, Ricky Grove and Tracy Harwood. Hello, Hey there this week. Oh, first of all, happy New Year with January, Happy New Year. But we're actually recording this in December, so we're still in the past, but Happy New Year to all of you listeners in the future. Ricky, this is your film. He's chosen for us. What is it? What have you got for

Ricky Grove 01:14
us? Well, as you know, I've made a commitment to go through the Machinima archive@archive.org and choose some films that I think are interesting. The last one I did was the internet is for porn. Well, we're going to really radically mix it up with a film that was highly impactful on the Machinima community when it came out, called still seeing bring by then president of the Machinima Academy, Paul Marino, who, after a few years working with machinima, went on to work with a major game company and but his film was created inside of Source Filmmaker, including the face poser software, which is included as part of that. And before I let Tracy do her background runner, I'd like to mention a few things. I was inspired to make this choice because Valve dropped a 20th anniversary edition of Half Life two on November 16 of this year, and it was a major update, because they not only fixed lighting issues and texture issues and some minor bugs, but they included episodes one and Two of Half Life two and the Forgotten Coast episode. They're all part of the package and another almost three hours of commentary a new documentary. They also integrated Half Life two with the Steam Workshop. And for those of you who know the Steam Workshop, it means that you can, you can take models, weapons, creations by users, and integrate them into the game through Steam Workshop, which is really, really great. I also started playing Half Life two again and just loving it. Re experiencing that wonder, being in that incredible Creation. But most significantly was I started working with the Source Filmmaker again and learning it again. And although it's fallen out of still, people still use it. There are many, many excellent tutorials, including the original valve tutorials on it, and it's much less intimidating now than it was when it first came out, when it first came out, people who, if you didn't know what a 3d program was, it looked like, I always like to use this analogy, sitting in front of a control panel for a jumbo jet. You know there, there are so many dials and switches and knobs and readouts that you have no idea where to begin, but that in that that factor, that first factor that turns people away, if you're diligent, it becomes much clearer, because it's built on the same structure that most 3d programs are, and that structure has a logical and intuitive progression. So I started working with it, and it gave me an appreciation for this film pick, because very few of those tutorials were available when Paul Marino made this film, but he was well aware of how to make, how to create, using 3d because he had worked with Unreal and several other programs. I'm sure he knew 3d Studio Max and others. So it gave me an appreciation for his technical achievements. On making this film. So those are my comments. If you want the 20th anniversary edition, it was free for about a week, but now it's not. It's 999, and well worth it, because you get the Source Filmmaker with it. You get the SDK, which allows you to create levels. It's just a wonderful package, and the visuals have improved, and I highly recommend it. We'll be sure to include a link to it. So Tracy, can you take over and give us a little of the background on this film? And Paul Marino,

Tracy Harwood 05:31
I absolutely can. Yes, um, I'm still seeing Breen actually, was released originally on the fifth of March, 2005 by Paul um under in his moniker, Ill Robinson, he was part of the old clan, of course, if you remember the old clan. And then during the lockdown, he actually found the 480 P version, which is also released on his channel, and that was the broadcast version that went out on MTV two sometime after it had been released. But yeah, let me give you a little bit of the backstory, if you like. So you know, I'm going to start a little bit before this film was released. It's basically as the Machinima movement began to evolve in the very early 2000s Paul who, as you said, Ricky, was heading up the Academy of machinima Arts and Science, which, which, for those of you that don't know, was, was basically a community formed body created to support the developing world of machinima, machinima as it as it was at the time, and also to recognize the great many number of people that were finding machinima and wanting to use. And so AMAS, as it was shortened to, was basically a a sort of a community body that was there to support people and celebrate the medium as it was, as it was growing so in June, 2002 with, with that, sort of, with AMAS, sort of, well, you know, in train and what have you Paul announced the first annual machinima awards to be held com and this was organized with Hugh Hancock, who was one of the the two guys with Anthony Bailey that came up with the term machinima. And also Katherine Anna Kang, I don't know if you remember Katherine. She was the is the wife is still the wife. I think of John Carmack, who was one of the co-creators of of Doom. Anyway, the success of that festival was such that it is basically what really drove public interest in machinima, resulting in many, many appearances at film festivals and events and lots of media coverage. And by April 2004 Paul announced he was writing a new book about machinima, which would basically intended to serve as a as an industry Bible for emerging filmmakers, and was intended to cover the the latest technologies that were were coming out for filmmaking using, you know, 3d engines, as well as sort of celebrate its history and who the major players were and where he thought the Machinima movement was going at the time. So there was a huge amount of excitement about that in the community. And then later in the year, by september 2004 the Ottowa Film Festival had agreed to create a machinima award. This was a, you know, this was considered to be a massive endeavor. It was the first sort of formal recognition by a major international film festival to give formal recognition to machinima. However, the festival itself, you know, it basically ditched its celebration of machinima and snubbed the community in the award ceremony by actually not presenting the dedicated machinima award. And the jurors cited the reason for not making the award as as being the standards of excellence were not fulfilled. But what really burned people at the time was that the community was, you know, largely ignored the the medium was very poorly explained, as was its potential for filmmaking to that festival's audience. So it pissed off everybody at the time during that festival, Paul and a load of other machinimaters that were, I don't know if Ricky, if you were in the audience at the time, but a whole load of folks got up and and left during the the award ceremony, and then there was this kind of massive backlash from the community in protest of the jurors decision. The following day, Paul wrote on the community website machinima.com that at the very moment where machinima was about to make a monumental step towards respectability, it was belittled by the people who are either ignorant of its importance or extremely threatened by its future. And when I talked to Ben about this, Ben described that as the beginning of an absolute firestorm of anger and disappointment, which ultimately led to the Ottawa Film Festival creative director trying to apologize for the handling of the Machinima award, but I think ultimately it was seen as a bit of a watershed moment for machinima. And fundamentally, it's what galvanized Paul into new action, and it's this new action that led to, I'm still seeing breen. on the seventh of December that year, 2004 Paul wrote his very first blog, web blog post about machinima and half life two demo recording. And then on the 26th of January in 2005 he and some of the crew from Rooster Teeth, Matthew Ross being one, and Bernie and a few others hosted a machinima panel discussion at the Sundance Film Festival, which was basically some consolation for the disappointment they'd experienced at Ottawa. The forerunner for I'm still seeing breem was the Machinima made as a piece of material for the Sundance presentation, and it was primarily created to demonstrate it as a commercial medium. And it was a music video in made in Half Life two, obviously, with G Man lip synced to the word words of so cold from the music group Breaking Benjamin. Now the release of I'm seeing Breen was was made more widely a little bit later via Paul's own web blog, and that was on the fifth of March, 2005 but it was actually later updated on the 21st of March based on feedback and tool tips from the good folks at Valve. And as you said, Ricky, he used face post poser and Vegas video and one or two other bits and pieces, and it was made to be played using Windows Media Player nine plus or the divex player. And thereafter, Paul and others undertook a bunch of public engagement events, including at Harvard and at the Performing Arts Center in New York for the Aggie movie convention, and it was by June that year that I'm still seeing Breen was shown as part of the season two premiere lineup on the MTV two's video mods television show. It's also worth commenting a little bit about on the MTV two channel and how that came to be, actually, because it was initially there was a channel called, I don't know if you remember this 3d TV, which began to emerge with a focal interest on machinima, beginning with this group called, I think 3d ITV in about February, 2002 so there's A lot of interest in machinima way back then, and it was seeking to become a dedicated machinima TV station. And although it never really gained ground, what it did do was stimulate a lot of interest as well. This this time, particularly in music videos. Well, by mid September, 2004 so this is a you know, around about the the time that everything was gearing up for Ottawa an MTV side channel MTV two aired this new series called Video mods, which aimed to show the convergence that was really becoming evident at that time between film and music and comic books and games, and it was really encapsulated by everything that machinima was about, and video mods was described as being a dedicated show for machinima music videos drawing on games such as Sims, two tribes, vengeance, blood, rain and various others. And its executive producer was a guy called Alex Coletti, who is still these days, a well known music producer with various Emmy wins and nominations behind him as well. Now that show aired for two years from the 18th of september 2004 and actually was produced by a guy called Tony Schiff, then of Big Bear entertainment, with a pilot for the series having been underwritten, believe it or not, by Electronic Arts in december 2003 and it featured SS x3 its Sims and Need for Speed games. So there was a bunch of games that they were particularly keen on showcasing there. But what they produced, I think, wasn't so much machinima. It wasn't so much music videos celebrating the music with game based stories, but basically, these were advertisements for games set to popular music, which, you know, some hadn't even been released to the market at the point that they were used in that show. And. Um, I won't say a lot more about that, because if you want to read about that part of the story, I mean, we've written bits of it in the pioneers book, and Tony actually did an interview with us about all of that and the MTV show. So I can, I can point you in the direction of the relevant bit in the book if you wanted to read more about that. But I think it was super interesting when we did do that discussion with him, but, you know, he he was very clear that at the time, he struggled to actually get film producers and the CG industries to listen to him about the potential and impact of machinima, which is really, you know, that whole thing was a lot of kickback from the established industries at the time. And in some senses, I think why that's super interesting, just reflecting on it now, is because, you know, we're just seeing Sam Crane's recent successes with his machinima production called Grand Theft Hamlet reaching all the same touch points that you know, Paul and others reached back, back in those very early days with very similar kinds of content. It's, it's interesting, because it's almost 20 years to the day that those early successes by Paul were, were, were first celebrated by the Machinima community. So that's all I wanted to say on the background. And I think it's a super interesting pick. It's very timely, I think. And, yeah, I'd be really interested to hear what everybody thinks

Ricky Grove 16:29
of it. Sure, watching it several times made me think, reflect back on the time when it was first released, and I thought, I think this is a keystone moment in machinima, because, as you pointed out in your background, or Paul's motive, was to create something that would challenge the judgment of the sort of establishment from the Ottawa Film Festival. And I think he succeeded brilliantly, because, in truth, he wasn't trying to answer them, he was trying to inspire the community. And at that time, the community, this was the first phase of machinima, where it was just forming, and people were very interested in the medium because it was accessible to them. They could use their game to create stories that they thought were fun and interesting. And Paul showed him how. And one of the things he he decided to do was create a music video. And I personally think that a music video is one of the most perfect forms for machinima, because it solves several problems that a beginning filmmaker has to address when they make a film, which is, where do they get the story material? What do they do about dialog? How do they get the footage from the game? So you get two of those problems solved already, because you pick the song that you want to do, and you already have your script, because the song does the script. So basically, your work is to try to find the images within the game and to animate them. And Paul was very skilled at the time, so he used the animation program. Here's the figure. You can choose when you do Source Filmmaker, you have access to a whole range of characters. You could choose whatever character you want you and also you can choose your location. Now he was smart because he didn't want to do full body animations. He just wanted to do facial animations and facial and head movement. Because that what that did was that lessened his job. He didn't have to do he go in and do the whole body reacting to something. He could just do the face. So with the head animation, he used a technique called pose to pose, which means you you go in and you set a key, a key, for the first position of where you want the head to be, and then you move forward in the timeline, in the actual time, and then you move the character to the second position you want its head to be. And the program interpolates from the first position to the second one, and it makes the move automatically. But it still requires, even though you're doing pose, to pose, you have to make sure that those poses are smooth. So it's quite a quite a job. The lip sync is taken care of automatically. And then within the Source Filmmaker is a program called Face poser that allows you to adjust the facial expressions of the character. You can do general ones, or you can do specific ones. And Paul didn't do a lot of changes of the face, because I think he was trying to just get the job done, because he because, in addition. To doing the head, he had to choose the sections of the get the actual game Half Life that he wanted to edit into the story, which was basically the entire half life two story. In fact, I think overall, the film that he created is something that I wish we'd see more often, but was particularly evident when the machinima first started out, and that's the film as a celebration of the game itself. And I think that the biggest impact on that on the film today, you can still be impressed by what the film does, how it looks, the fantastic music, by Breaking Benjamin. But what it does, it celebrates the film, because it follows the film story from the earliest parts to the very end, and it makes a kind of social comment, the same social comment, it reinforces the social comment that the game has, which is individual freedom over corporate alien invaders. You know what I mean, which could transfer, transfer to the ideas which are still in evident today. I mean, I've been watching the foundation adaptation of Isaac Asimov, and it's the same thing. It's individual freedom, people struggling and in working with each other to overcome this massive corporate organizational structure. So I loved watching this. I haven't listened to Breaking Benjamin in a while, so I was thrilled to listen to their music. Their music is just fantastic, and it provides a kind of emotional grounding of the film as well the facial animation. He didn't do much work because it's a bit hard to do that, but he did enough in order to satisfy what the film, the the music, lyrics required. But what it most impressed me was the video editing of the various locations and the rhythm that he was able to take from the the song. You know, because the song, the song has a specific rhythm to it, and then reflect that in the video editing. So it just showed me how talented he was and why the film was such a had such a big impact on the community. I remember watching it, and it was like a thunderclap to me. I remember thinking, My God, if I could just make something like that. And then the thing, great thing about Paul, he says, Well, you can, you can do that. So I love this film, and I'm very interested to see what you guys think of it.

Phil Rice 22:53
Yeah, this, this film. Damien, you're muted. So I'm going to take advantage of that and go ahead and go. This film came was released right around a time when I was returning to the Machinima community after having taken a break for a few years. Savannah, yeah, so I had, I had, I had been involved in the early days before the Machinima term was around, and I don't remember if I had been introduced to Paul and Frank and ILL Clan guys at that point or not, but we knew who we were. Communication was very different back then, right? There were no zoom calls or things like this, so I'm trying to remember the degree of our interaction, but I know that I was very aware of and their work in the Quake engine. And I had attended the predecessor to what would later become those AMAS the Machinima awards, and they just called them the quake Movie Awards, and Hugh would emcee them, and it was all on mIRC chat, so there's no audio at all. It's just and you got to understand, if you, if you've never done the picture picture, if have you ever watched the comment thread on a really heavily populated live stream on YouTube where it's like scrolling by almost too fast to even read what was going on. So how they, how they got anything done with with that, I don't know. But you know, all the, all the the intros and speeches and whatnot that would normally happen at like the Oscars were happening there, but all just in this, this chat thing. So yeah, then I took a break for several years and came back. And, of course, during that, that time off, that's when the Machinima term had gotten coined, and the whole movement had kind of solidified, and Hugh had already launched the machinima.com website, and this was one of the first machinima films that I saw having come back. And yeah, so talk about a leap forward, having not seen any of the any of the gradual progression that no doubt, went on between those, I don't know, three or four years. But to see this, it was, it was stunning, and it was, it was also encouraging and surprising to me. It's like, Oh, I know him, Paul Marino, right, so. And it was a very different type of film than I'd seen, than ILL Clan had ever embarked upon there. They were more of a they were like the Monty Python of of machinima. You know, they were comedy troupe. And they did sketch comedy, basically, and that that played into a lot of the strengths that that Paul and Frank and some of the others had as entertainers before coming to this medium. You know, they were already, had already established their their talents. And I know, In Paul's case, had had won some, some tangible awards for that work before ever sitting down at the game of Quake. I think so. Anyway, it was, it was, yeah, it was compelling and interesting. And here's Paul, and he's the, the president of, of, you know, the Machinima Arts and Sciences, and there's festivals going on, and it was just, it was mind blowing. And to me, this film sits right in the center of, I've come back, you know, I've come back to my hometown after being away for a few years. And whoa, look what's happened at this place. It was that kind of feeling, right? Oh, yeah, it's, it's it, when I watch it, whenever I watch it, it, it kind of evokes that, that sense of awe of this thing that had sprouted up while I was away. So I'm trying to remember some if there's any technical details that I remember about because I had lots of questions about how to do this? Which I'm sure he fielded plenty of those questions. I believe that one of the things that came up was, hey, why the G Man? Other than the fact that, okay, the G Man is probably the most interesting face in the Half Life series. And one of the more interesting characters, you know, he's is because he's so shrouded in mystery, and he's kind of he was the video game equivalent of the cigarette smoking man from The X Files, you know, almost deliberately so, I think. But one of the things that came up was, of all those characters that you have to choose from, to pull from the stock of ones that are available in half life, two, not all of them had the animation bones to do proper lip sync and and to do facial expressions at all. So, you know, you have, you have models in there for the different scientists and for Barney, the the security guard and all them. But they weren't, they weren't as detailed the bone structure there to do even things as simple as eyebrow movements and eye squints and stuff like that, the G Man was the one they invested the most. That valve invested the most detail in that. That practice is still true today, by the way, if you, if you, you know, pull up certain characters from even GTA five, if it's just some random pedestrian, they don't have the detail of bone structure, same in red, Dead Redemption, two, they don't have the same detail as the lead characters. Do you know who are taking part in cut scenes and who are actually doing a lot of speaking and being seen up close? So that's that's a lot of what informed that decision, what I liked about the film the most, and still do, is the the fact that, of all the things, of all the statements, I feel like Paul was making with this, one of them was in response to the criticisms that machinima had had been given, what's the most vulnerable shot to take part in for a median that's been criticized for its quality, and that's a close up. And frankly, close ups were not something machinima was known for prior to this at all. Right? You didn't do that. You wide shots, please. We don't want to see him up close. Or all these flaws and imperfections and just low resolution are made apparent, and the fact that he just boldly built this whole video around a close up of a face that doesn't, it's hard to convey how revolutionary that was at the time, right? Because it's, it's, it's not terribly uncommon nowadays, but ironic,

Tracy Harwood 29:18
Phil, you know that that first on the on the video that Ricky's shared with us, there's a bit of speaking right at the beginning, but that's the bit that had to be cut when it went on to the MTV to channel, because they didn't want that bit of it because of the IP to do with it. So some of the some of the impactfulness of that was immediately, you know, sort of halted from being shown on the on the biggest channel that it could have been at the time.

Phil Rice 29:46
You're talking about the intro where Breen is speaking, yeah, yeah. Probably had to do with the IP on the on the audio, I would imagine, yeah. But, but for, but for the course of the video, you know, the singing, all being done, being puppeted with. That G Man face on an extreme close up, yeah. And I just loved the audacity of that at the time of just wow, we can, you know, I remember thinking at the time, I have no idea how, but it is encouraging to know that we can do that, you know. And at the time. I'll admit, I probably attributed it to less. I failed to comprehend that this was, you know, Paul's message, like you said, Ricky, was this? You can do this. The tools are there. You this is achievable. And I looked at it as Man, that guy has got some skills that I I don't yet. I don't even know how to touch, you know, and I wish that I had been a little bit less low self esteem in my evaluation of it and just seeing the optimism that he was trying to portray again. Hey, these tools are it? Because, yeah, because of that, I remained heavily intimidated by Source Filmmaker for those those years and your word really, some really interesting people didn't approach it that way and created some amazing stuff. Zachariah Scott's another one that I think of, Hughes, who also went to work in the games industry, and he just, just did some amazing things in that he and there's several others, too many to name, but anyway, yeah, I love the film. And if there's any melancholy about it, it's that man. I wish Paul would was still making independent films like this. You know, let me love sure his fingerprints are all over a lot of video games that we've all enjoyed, right? So he is still, you know, he did still for quite a long time after that make stuff, but there's something really special about the hand crafted I made this for the love of it, kind of thing, or for whatever reason. But when

Ricky Grove 31:56
he and several other important people left the Machinima community, and they did leave it. They went on to professional careers with major game companies and went on to do fantastic things. It. It was a problem because one, it argued against what Paul had been saying for years, which is Machinima is a art form, and the fact that he left it sort of counter to his argument, in a way, but completely understandable. You got a life, you got a family. You've got to make money. You got to move on to something that is not a bunch of amateur people gathered around a website with question. You need to move on to something that is part of the commerce, part of what's going on. So I understand it, but his action had just like you selling machinima.com it had an impact on the community that was far more than what they expected. Because when Paul left the leadership, the drive for the community was lost, and although Hugh Hancock tried to take up that role, he was more interested in creating films on His own and His own film company, which is why he sold it to begin with. He needed money, and he wanted to be able to make films. So he wasn't the person to take over that role, because he had self interest, his own personal motivations. So that's why it sort of faded out. But before, I before. I don't want to dominate this, because you guys have got things to say. But I did want to point out that one thing that I very much enjoyed about this film is that it had he Paul was very canny and a very smart person, and he had a message to say, because that first part was Breen talking about a suppression field that the aliens had created to stop people from procreating. And then the song comes, which argues against the notion of of group think, and and, and the lack of individual, uh, power. And then at the very end of the of the video, you've got the G Man finishing the song, and then there's a very fast cross fade into Breen, yes, and then it finishes. So in a way, Paul was trying to say Breen is the same as the hat as a G Man. They're both trying to guide and control a person's faith and a person's freedom. And I thought that was very smart, and I only caught it through watching it again. Now I missed it entirely the first time, so I that's I just wanted to share that with you guys. Now

Damien Valentine 34:55
I haven't got my stuff on mute. I.

Phil Rice 35:00
I saw your lips moving, and I thought, oh, no, well, I

Damien Valentine 35:03
can never repeat what I just said, because I was just so perfect. So when this was released, I was still very new to machinima. I released my Buffy inspired series about three months before, and I was trying to figure out what my next project was going to be doing, and obviously it was a Star Wars project. They moved on to some Star Wars games. But I remember I watched this, and I thought, I want to make something like this, not a music video, but just the way that the character looked and was animated, and the face moves, and the way his lips moved with the song. I was so impressed by that I obviously heard of and played Half Life games. I didn't know anything about making machinima with it. I didn't know anything about the Source Filmmaker or how complicated it was. I've just watched this video. I was so impressed by it, so I thought, I want to do this. So I looked at no winter nights, which is what I used before, and of course, the characters that they're just polygons with textures on there's no, yeah, I don't think even their eyes don't even blink or anything. So that was not going to happen. Then I looked at the Star Wars game that I was tinkering around with, and the face is slightly animated, but nowhere near the level of this. So I thought this is way beyond anything I could ever do. So now, looking at it again, I've still got the understanding of the Source Filmmaker, which I still haven't actually used, but I know more about it from hearing from you guys talking from other people in the community who have used it, I can appreciate how much work must have gone into into this. And Rick, you mentioned how the face movement is very subtle. That's perfect for this. Like you don't want those exaggerated Sims face movements,

Phil Rice 36:44
especially it being in a close up, yeah, yeah, subtle is actually better, yeah, it's not theatrical. So yeah, I agree. I'm

Damien Valentine 36:53
sure that if Paul Marina had wanted exaggerated face movements, he could have done that. Exactly how to do that. He just knew that was not right for this video, which is good also the machine with the tools I'm able to use now, like icon, they have the ability to make these Facebook so I can now make what I originally couldn't do when I first saw this, which is nice to think about when I was watching this again, it still holds up perfectly. I mean, obviously the video quality isn't as good as what we can do now, because that's what the technology was at the time. But that doesn't matter. It still looks good, even if it's a little blurry and grainy, and the animation is still great. So it's one of those films that, yes, it's an old consumer film now, but it holds up really well. Yeah, and Ricky, I'm really glad you chose it, because I could appreciate it more. Obviously, I really admired it when it first came out. And it's like, I want to do this, but I don't know how to, and I never be able to. Now I can, and I can appreciate the work went into it, which I just said, but yeah, I started to add anything else that you guys haven't already covered, and I wasn't really aware of the author. I'd heard bits and pieces about some kind of machinima snub, but I think it happened before I joined, oh, it's

Ricky Grove 38:07
still smart. Yeah, still smart. So it's like a kid coming in to show their project that they worked for years on, which is pretty good to their mom and dad and they're patronized. Yeah,

Phil Rice 38:20
and their mom and dad invited them to bring it, yeah, and then treated them, yeah. That's that, I think, is what made it doubly tough. You know,

38:28
I've got it, but yeah, I can see I want to

Phil Rice 38:32
when you when you're done, Damien, I want to close with one thing. I don't want to cut you off, though.

Ricky Grove 38:38
Oh, Tracy. Tracy still has some comments to make. You have a couple

Tracy Harwood 38:41
more I was just going to add. Do you want? If you got more? No, I'm

Damien Valentine 38:46
done. I think I don't know what else I can add, because I just to buy this film so much, and everybody kind of covered it. So

Tracy Harwood 38:53
I also, I mean watching this again after I remember the last time I watched it, but I, you know it's, it still stands out as one of the most beautifully edited pieces of machinima that I've seen and and as a as a music video, it's stunning. It really, it definitely deserved to, to be a headline piece, for sure. And the fact that he created it quite quickly after Ottawa, which, which it was created quite quickly after Ottawa, I think is, is even more testament to to Paul's, you know, machinima chops, really, it was a kick in the ass for those guys at Ottawa. It really was. And the fact that He then got in front of the the crowd at Sundance on the back of that was even more, you know, more of an achievement, really, because the world of machinima absolutely was taking off. Ottawa made a big mistake in the way they, you know, dissed the community at that point. Big mistake. And it, it's unfortunate, really, because I think. It's held a lot of it held a lot of the community back for far too long. And I think, you know, a lot of the current interest in machinima in a more professional capacity would have got there a lot sooner. I think had, had they not have done that. And I think it was elements of petty jealousy, really, in many ways. I think

Ricky Grove 40:28
it was institutionalism. Yes,

Tracy Harwood 40:30
exactly. They were just kicking back at what they saw because they didn't fundamentally understand the significance of what they were being shown. And now

Ricky Grove 40:39
the fact that they chose the word excellence, yes, as a criticism is indicative of their mindset as

Tracy Harwood 40:46
well. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, the thing is, with the with the film these days, obviously it's not 4k and you know, the video quality isn't as great. It's quite interesting to watch the 480 version of it. Tis a little better than the one that you shared, but not massively. And then to think that that was actually the the the

Phil Rice 41:05
broadcast standard. That was the

Tracy Harwood 41:08
broadcast, yeah, exactly. It was the broadcast standard video that Paul actually found when he was having a bit of a clear out in 2020 and that's when he uploaded that. And as you rightly said, Ricky Phil, he'd got incredible animation shops. He won an Emmy for animation, which was awarded in 92 but also, I don't know if you're aware of this, he was, they used to do regular stand up comedies. He was a proper comedian that would go into clubs and do all of that sort of stuff. So he was fiercely good writer too, absolutely, absolutely. The other thing that I recall about Paul not having had a massive amount of contact with him, did a little bit, you know, did some exchanges with him and talked to him when we were doing the book, you know, during COVID, Ben and I, but hadn't spoken to him for a number of years since that, but I remember when we did the the 2000 film 2007 Film Festival, he had been a technical adviser to that as we were putting it together, and we started putting that together, probably during The period of time when the 2006 festival was being showcased in New York, because I think that's the first time I met you. Phil was there during that the course of that year, that's when EA began to entertain him for becoming the Creative Director for Mass Effect. And by the time we did the Festival in September, 2000 was it October, early October, I think it was 2000 and he was just about closing his contract to go and work on, work with the team at Mass Effect. And it was from that, that point, just after that point, I think that that's when he basically stepped away from his his role with with the Machinima community, not because he wanted to, because, but because they asked him not to create any more content, which would, you know, conflict with the agreement that he'd got with EA games at the time, so he was forced into that position, as were a lot of the other content creators, they were no longer able to create content that they could just put out there and showcase for the love of it, which I think was a real shame, because I think that's how these games companies Rob the community by not allowing just a similar thing. If you remember, when we were talking about the Sims the fixer series and the sims with Todd store camp, they did same sort of thing with Todd as well. When? But anyway, I just thought I'd share that little tidbit with you as well.

Phil Rice 44:00
So my closing thing would be, if there's, if there was one, if we had Paul on the show today, and there was one technical question that I could ask him, and that would be, I'm curious how he pulled off. So I know face poser had, like a phoneme detection engine, where it could take audio and automate a lot of it, like Ricky pointed out, but in order for that detection to work, and this the same, this was true then, and it's just as true now, with the there's a function In iClone called acculips. That is a more advanced version, a very, very good version of that same thing, where you can give it audio, and it will do the phonemes. It's amazing. But if the audio is not clean, it, it, it really, really struggles. So like for a singing thing, you can't have, you can't just put the song. In there, right with all the instruments and everything and the vocal, and get it to get it to come out, right? It will barely, it will barely be usable at all. So there's a couple ways around that, and I'm really curious which one that he used, and maybe somebody in the if any of the folks from the old days are listening, and they know, let us know in the comments. But one way would be some kind of an isolation you can run an isolation filter on the song and kind of extract out. It's not perfectly clean, but it can pull out the lead vocal, for example. The Tech for that wasn't very good back then, though I know for a fact it wasn't. Nowadays, there's some AI algorithms that are quite impressive with that. They could actually clean out a song. They could split it out into stem tracks of all the instruments. It's not perfect, but, you know, it's certainly way better than what was available then. So that would be one way, and the other would be, and this is a technique that I have used, is you actually record us. You record yourself singing, saying or singing the lead vocal, but you record it in multi track so it you can isolate it as just a separate thing. And that's what gets fed in to face poser, to perform the lip sync. But then when you do the video edit, of course, you're using the real audio and muting that out. So I'm very curious. It's a very nerdy thing to wonder about, but as an audio guy, I

Ricky Grove 46:29
think that's fascinating. It's a problem you have to face. If you're going to create a music video in machinima, you're going to have to choose how to solve that. And I suspect it was the latter version that he sang along with the song, yeah, and then incorporated it into makes sense.

Phil Rice 46:46
And anyone who's looking to do that kind of thing, the good news is you don't have to be a good singer. You don't have to worry about, if you're in tune or whatever, you got to be able to enunciate the words that the singer is saying and in the right timing. So yeah, it's, it's, yeah, yeah, it's an interesting little, little tidbit. Great, great pick. I'm glad, glad you. Let us revisit this one with you, and

Ricky Grove 47:06
we'll provide a link to the Steam page on the 20th anniversary Half Life two release, which I highly recommend you check out, because you do get Source SDK, which allows you to create levels, game levels, so you can create your own sets and props. And also Source Filmmaker, which is a dedicated application that allows you that has camera movement built in facial animation, as we've been talking about, body animation and the Steam Workshop. So if you want to bring in stuff from Gmod, or stuff that people have created, maybe even in blender, and bring that into half life two, now Phil spec, which is going to be the next one. Next week, is shot in half life one, so it's going to be an interesting comparison from Half Life two to half life one. So I'm looking forward to that next week. Folks. Damien, you want to kick us

Damien Valentine 48:08
out? Yeah, when you mentioned your last thing, you got me wondering, yeah, exactly. How did he do it? I was thinking probably he sang along as well. And you're right, if you're doing that, it doesn't matter how you sound, because the only person is going to hear it is you. It's not going to go out publicly unless you release it. You're that way yourself. But yeah, this is a great episode to start the year off. Excellent pick, Ricky. It's nice to revisit still seeing brain. So that's it from me, from Phil Ricky and Tracy, and we'll be back next week for another film, take care and see you. Bye, bye, bye.