Damien Valentine 00:44
Hello and welcome to another episode now for something completely machinima, I'm Damian Valentine, and I'm joined by my co host, Tracy Harwood. Ricky Grove, hey very and of course, Phil rice, hey there. This week we've got another interesting film, and it's yours, Phil. So what have you chosen?

Phil Rice 01:01
Yeah, so I want to thank the YouTube algorithm for this one, because I I'm not exactly sure how it ended up in my feed. This is called ridiculous ties made by someone named fins low. It was made about nine months ago, and my understanding is, is that this was made in Blender, but made by extracting the actual Half Life one models. I know it. I know at least the character models. That's the case. The sets look very authentic to the game as well. So everything, ultimately, was animated and done in Blender, but it's very faithful to the half life one esthetic. I'm assuming that's a stylistic choice. I mean, this could have been made with, you know, less boxy models and whatnot. But the whole point of this is that it's, it's set within that world. Most of the audio, I would say 95% of the audio clips that we'll hear are actual audio snippets of things that are, you know, audio from the original game, right? There's, there's a couple instances where the the scientists yell some things that I know for a fact,

Ricky Grove 02:18
they used AI voice recreation for that, I would

Phil Rice 02:22
I don't know that for a fact is that, is that a fact

Ricky Grove 02:24
that's credited in the video? Okay,

Phil Rice 02:25
yeah, it makes sense, because they they blend perfectly in. They've got plenty of samples there to create a nice clone. So that's a neat use of that tech, I think. Anyway, this the story. Basically, it follows kind of this. I want to call it like an alternate universe version of Gordon Freeman going into the lab, taking part in this experiment. And then things go horribly strange, and marks,

Ricky Grove 02:55
marks brothers, type of

Phil Rice 02:58
wrong. Yes, it's like Marx Brothers with like Quentin Tarantino, levels of violence basically marry those two ideas together. I found it mesmerizing. I'm a huge fan of that whole franchise, and I have particular fondness for that first game, and memories of playing that first game, even though it does not hold up to the story depth that they did in Half Life two. But I just love that original game. Maybe it's just the context in which I originally experienced it. I've played it through so many times, so yeah, just about every line that was repurposed for the dialog in here, I I would have these flashes of scenes where I saw that used. Sometimes they would reuse those samples for a scientist. You encounter the same scientists throughout the whole facility as You're escaping. They all have the same voice, or same couple voices, and yeah, these same sayings. Valve was very clever with the way they originally implemented those where there was a kind of a randomness to the way that they would be triggered, and they created these audio snippets in such a way that they could be pieced together any number of different ways to create this very absurd yet strangely plausible dialog between these NPCs, way ahead of its time for doing something like that. I've never seen a game do that prior to that, because

Ricky Grove 04:25
what it did is it made you feel like these were real people who you were engaging with, like a novels, complaining

Phil Rice 04:32
about banal things like we all would, right? You know, so it this. This seats itself within that. I'm particularly familiar with these audio clips because, okay, so this, this, this will betray how old I am, but basically in my earliest days of machinima, and right around when this game first came out, there were other games that were kind of, you know, out of the quake explosion that came up. And one of those. Games was called Kingpin. And kingpin was a game that was set in like a very urban setting, and it was, I think, banned in some countries, or it got a lot of controversy, because every other word was F in this, f in that, and just tons of all the NPCs picture, the half life scientists, but they're all just, you know, cursing like it's good cursing a blue streak. Yeah, right. And there was a website that I followed at the time that was, I guess you would consider it a blog before that term was used, called Old Man Murray. And it was this satire news site, gaming satire, news site with really, really good writers and talented and to satirize what kingpin had done, they extracted all the audio files from Kingpin and then edited together all of the instances of cuss Words with no repeats, and put it and then released it as an mp three, and it's about a three minute long thing, and it's just nothing but the cuss words. And it really it was beautifully done to illustrate the absurdity of how over the top it was, well, around that same time period was when a lot of the talk of, I think that the the the old legend of being able to watch the Wizard of Oz while listening to Dark Side of the Moon. And there's this strange synchronicity between the audio of that and the video from the film. Well, it was that had long been legendary, but now it was the internet era, and there were actually ways to to do that digitally and share the experience of that and things. And so people were playing around with that idea. So I took that notion combined with what old man Murray did with the kingpin audio, and decided that I was going to make an mp three that consisted of the dialog. I took all the dialog files from half life one loaded them into a Win app playlist and then opened up Windows Media Player and played Dark Side of the Moon while random clips from half life one would would play in a shuffle order. It's just absurd. So I got really, really familiar with these, these dialog bits. So anyway, the film is just, oh, I called the name for the project, by the way, it was half like half life pink pin. I never did release it anyway, ridiculous ties. Just this is so my kind of humor. It's so all. It's so strange. It's so cartoonishly violent

Ricky Grove 07:44
and creative. I mean, very creative. How do you take you get that mass of voices? How do you create a progressing story based on those and still have the humor to come up with lines that in the game, we're in one context, but in this movie, are another context, which is funny. Yeah,

Phil Rice 08:06
I'm very curious about the process like because the lines do so perfectly match their new context that you know. How do you plan for something like that? You know what you okay, we've got this scene where one of the scientists gets knocked down and falls down. What line are we going to have him say? Or was it a matter of we've got this funny line where someone says, I believe I've been injured. And so, okay, now we need to construct a scene where that's used, and I don't know how it takes a really strange mind, I think, to to conceive of this and execute it, yeah, and it's executed very well, and it doesn't look like it's something that he has continued, unless I've missed something too, yeah. But I mean, frankly, it may have just been such a ridiculous amount of work that it may have tired him out doing it, but just wonderfully done. There are hundreds of audio snippets from half life, one between the security guards and the scientists and them hundreds of files each, which is just a little phrase. So how they did this. It's really quite an achievement, and it's strange and funny. I thought sure that my son, my son is college age, so I shot. I thought he would flip out over this. It's really hard to impress a Gen Z or, I have to say, like I played this form on the TV, and he's just like, that's pretty good. So I don't know if he's just at that age where it's like, it's not cool to admit anything dad brings to him is cool. Dad likes, yeah, I think that's my story, and I'm sticking with it. Yeah, you got to be numb to to not laugh at this, you know, yeah, the way, the way the filmmaker reinterprets Barney as this big fat bellied slob who's constantly eating, what is this a gun or something, and he points it in

Damien Valentine 09:55
his mouth. Crazy.

Ricky Grove 09:57
It's just so funny. God, oh, God, that. And then the the, you know, half life, the original Half Life has this, you know, pixelated, unround faces, that lends itself perfectly to comedy, because the cartoon element of comedy is so excellent, the simplicity of that so choosing, if you would have made this in half life two, it wouldn't have worked nearly as well as if in half life one. And of course, you don't have a Source Filmmaker for half life one, so you got to figure out a way to animate these characters, and so you transfer them to blender, which takes quite a bit of Moxie to be able to do that, and then animate them, and then put them back in either green screen or actually within the scene. I'd love to talk to him about the technical challenges in this, but it's just still, you know, there are certain films that within the first 10 seconds of watching it, you're immediately invested in it. Whereas other films take a while to sort of charm you into disbelief, you know, or belief. And this film, it wasn't, as soon as I saw the first thing, I was like, oh my god, this is so smart, and there's an extra level of humor. If you've played the game,

Phil Rice 11:22
yeah, rewards for someone. Lots

Ricky Grove 11:25
of rewards for that. Because you I memorized that whole first thing I know it backwards and forwards, and then to see his comments on that, he's just phenomenal. What my favorite film of the month, just fantastic choice. I

Damien Valentine 11:40
couldn't help laughing all the way through it. And I think using the half life one models is perfect for it, because it if they'd used the half life two models, it wouldn't have had the same thing. Like you said, Ricky, Phil, you had a question about how they managed to pull it off. There was a, it's not a machinima series, but it was a YouTube I used to follow. He knew Star Trek The Next Generation incredibly well, and he would remix scenes from multiple episodes into these things where the characters were the complete opposites of what the characters and the show. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. It kind of like Captain Picard. He's a warmonger and things like that. Brilliant. Yeah. So people kept asking him how he was so good at it, and he was able to produce so many and he I remember reading this from the comments, he said he would he had seen this show so many times. He knew the scene so well, especially certain episodes he'd watched many times, and that's how you are able to remix it because, you know, well, I need this bit from this episode and this bit from over here. And this is obviously what this guy has done with this Half Life video, is he knows that dialog so well he's able to think, I can make it work if I swap this around and do all of that, which shows an incredible dedication to, you know, the game and to making this film, I can see, maybe I can understand that must be a huge amount of work, and maybe that's why he doesn't, hasn't done another one. But I really enjoyed this. It brought back a lot of memories of playing that first game. Yeah, obviously, none of this actually happened in it, but here's a very different take, yeah, kind of maybe wish this is what had happened in the game, because I was laughing, and it just starts off and you start and then just goes to such an extreme that you don't expect it to go that far, right, right? You don't start it, yeah, but it's not, it's done perfectly. It's not, it doesn't go too far. And, yeah,

Ricky Grove 13:36
I love the fact that that this humor and story are subversive, which connects back to the original machinima community, which did many subversive reworkings of game related stories and characters. Yes, and it's it's really great to see that sense of rebellion and sub subversiveness alive, especially through humor. And I think the first machinima community were at their best using humor as opposed to drama, because drama was harder to do. You had to get actors who could actually create emotional states, and that wasn't always possible with people who didn't have some sense of what acting was about, whereas in humor, you don't need any of that, you know what I mean. So the subversive connection, I think, is just such a pleasure, and it gave me different levels of appreciation for what this filmmaker had created. Well,

Tracy Harwood 14:34
what I loved about it again, you already said it. So the guy's sense of humor. I mean, what a, what a, what a brilliant filmmaker this, this chap is from his, from his, you know, right from his comments on the description of the video to, you know, things like he said, I think I'm supposed to put tags on here or something. I don't know how YouTube works anymore. That just kind of really set you up for what you. Were for what you were going to watch. But actually, the whole of the edit of the film was in the same dry, witty style as the description on the on the first part of it. In actual fact, it's a meme inspired by El Toro 64 Russ is short, which is about the scientists favorite and least favorite words of which ridiculous ties is one. And then when I look, I looked up ridiculous, ridiculous ties. There aren't really that many films about it. So the whole thing is actually a meme of half life characters doing stupid things, I think. And of course, you know ridiculous ties in this that's everything that you see is to do with a ridiculous use of a tie. So I think that's really what the what the theme of it is. I think it's pretty clear from his videos that he just enjoys making machinima, but he obviously knows quite a lot about half life, and he's also, I mean, this is a style of humor that you rarely, rarely see carried off so well. I think it's, it's just, it really is just very well done. I think it's one of the video funny, funniest videos I've seen for such a long time that I think I started laughing pretty much right from the beginning or all the way through, right, yeah, right to the very end. I mean, that little sort of, you know, scene where he was dodging one of the scientists right at the beginning, where he then did a sort of a spin and got away. I mean, that was just brilliantly, brilliantly well done. I mean, the continuous stream of jokes, which I think, I mean, what can you say about them? I think they are set up primarily through timing delivery, rather than anything specific that's said. I think the whole thing is about the you know, the timing of it, because there isn't anything that you can specifically pinpoint as being the ultimate ridiculous part of it, right?

Ricky Grove 17:00
Yeah. Well, there's one moment in the middle where suddenly the the whole nature of the background and the the black light,

Tracy Harwood 17:09
yeah, purple light, yeah, which is quite, quite a resting

Phil Rice 17:13
vault that vaulted the level of strangeness, for sure. Yeah. Certainly

Tracy Harwood 17:17
did, yeah. I mean, yeah, the ridiculousness of the science scientist characters like a tribe, yeah? Well, I thought they, I thought they were, it was, it was, it was really intriguing, but there was some cracking lines in it. Oh, good. And the one that made me laugh, I mean, the one that got me to start with was, do you know by who ate all the donuts? I mean, that just got me going right at the beginning. That just was brilliant. And then the one that really made me laugh was I never thought I would see a highly trained professional, let alone create one. That's brilliant, That's so clever, that's absurd. It was great. I could come out with that myself sometimes, and then right at the very end where he says, you know, you repeat yourself. Sometimes, the wit of that, the wit of it right the way through, was just so well done. And the fact that it's using just the NPCs and their lines primarily is so smart, so smart, very smart. You've got to ask how that was done, really. I mean, I wonder if you know, Phil, you were saying that, you know, all the lines were extracted and and then maybe stitched together to something. I wonder if that's how this one was actually done as well, where just the lines for this character were extracted and then something just formed from having a little I

Ricky Grove 18:34
think it was more intentional than that. I think he's so, if you allow the fact that there were many other smart things that he did, I think you have to entertain the possibility that he deliberately organized. He went through the lines and chose the ones that he wanted to complete the narration. You know what I mean? Yes. Yes, exactly. And the thing is that having a big background in theater farce was one of the styles that you had to learn and you had to work on. And in farce, there are certain routines that were originally created in Italian pantomime, and they were called lazzi. And today we call them shtick, so comedians know certain stick things like the banana on the floor, the slippy, flippy four, you slide out and you fall on your back, yeah, even in 2024 if that's done correctly, we laugh because it's a stick. Well, he included many he's knowledgeable about comedy because he included many stick pieces in the thing, yeah, that or that are not original, but were used in such a unique and strange way, exactly in the midst of violence. You know what I mean? Well,

Tracy Harwood 19:53
go ahead. Well, I was gonna say the the one that, the part that sort of struck me was when the when. When you saw the escape scene and the movement of some of the characters, when they sort of dropped onto their hands and they sort of galloped along like sort of zombies, in that kind of a more modern stick type thing, isn't it? From more contemporary zombie films, I mean, such a lot of weird.

Ricky Grove 20:21
She's creatively combining classic shtick with modern, subversive farce and comedy in a way that is unique and original. When we talk about originality, oftentimes people go say, Oh, nothing is ever you can never create anything new because we're only reusing, well, I don't agree with that. We're not talking about absolutes. We're talking about creativity, which takes two different things and puts them together in unique way. And that's what this this filmmaker did. He took these his own awareness and knowledge of humor and weirdness, and use these elements, combining them with cliche and in a totally unique way. So in a way, this film is an original film. Yes, unlike many other films of machinima films we see that are literally interpretations. In fact, I would argue that still seeing Breen is not as original as this. Phil,

Tracy Harwood 21:23
yeah, I agree with you. I agree with you. I there's a question, though, and I was curious on this because it because this was a little little weird, and maybe you've got some other thoughts about how this was, how this was done, and why it was done, and it's the quality of the models used and how they were used in contrast or alongside different levels of pixelation and and it almost was a deliberate sort of, I'll use this really strange, wide, pixelated, sort of distorted image in the in the foreground and something else that looked A little bit different in its pixelation in the background, and yet the characters were the same kind of more rendered type quality. So he deliberately made some choices, which I I thought were a little bit, I don't know, they were a little bit jangly against each other, I think. But I actually, in the end, I thought, no, he's done this deliberately. This isn't just poor quality stuff that he's extracted and not, you know, not rendered it out to the same level as everything else. These were deliberate choices he'd made. And I think it was, I think in the end, when I was when I was sort of reflecting on it, I suspect, because what he was actually doing wasn't so much taking the rise out of half life, I think he was probably taking the rise out of the animation and the game experience in general, rather than anything specific to do with the with the game world or the role of these NPCs, just simply because of the way that had been filmed. And I suspect that that was also partly why that color filter may have been applied as well, because that that was a really curious choice. It was sort of more like, I don't know, five nights at Freddy's, kind of deep purple with all those kind of

Ricky Grove 23:15
well he did. He did edit it with DaVinci Resolve, which has a L, U, T color gradient. So he could have easily used color gradients, you know, average color gradients that are given to you in DaVinci Resolve as part of how to color grade the background. Yeah, well, but that's a great observation. I miss that

Tracy Harwood 23:38
guys. It was just one of those things that it was a little different and added to the humor in many ways. It was just a, you know, just a laugh, very subtle, very well done this. This is a very gifted person having made this, I think, I mean, it's an absolutely brilliant choice. Phil, I loved it.

Ricky Grove 23:56
Yeah. Phil, do you have any ideas about that, about the difference between the background and the foreground. No,

Phil Rice 24:01
the only thing that I can think of is that blender, in its almost in its default state, is going to render better quality than what is shown here. So really the I imagine, it took quite a bit of effort to kind of tamp everything down to keep it looking in keeping with the low fidelity view of those models and half life one and all that. Like blender is such an incredibly powerful tool, it can do photo realistic stuff. So I imagine that must have been really quite the challenge to to force it, to supplement, maybe, maybe not, yeah, to not, not render things quite as nice as it can. I didn't really notice the the pixelation difference that you're talking about. It didn't catch my eye. So I'm not sure how to comment on that. There. May be points in this where there was some compositing going on. In other words, where the foreground characters are actually distinct from the background, and that might account for some of those differences. I think that the color change that happened when it went to like the black light thing that could conceivably all be done within blender without breaking a sweat. It can do that. But did he enhance this with some color grading in DaVinci Resolve? Almost certainly, almost certainly it would, because there is a there's a consistency across those scenes that typically is the sign of, okay, somebody paid, paid some careful attention to color grading. It's not impossible that this wasn't just straight out of Blender, but I have a feeling, yeah, he probably, he probably, you know, enhanced it with that.

Ricky Grove 25:53
I appreciate the fact that he didn't succumb to the temptation of using slapstick sound for for bits, because you could have easily done it would

Phil Rice 26:05
to make it almost like a cartoon, right? Yeah,

Ricky Grove 26:09
to, but also to those sounds were often used to cue the audience that this is funny. Know what I mean? You see them in Warner Brothers cartoons when they do that, you know, a road runner. He didn't succumb to any of that, so he kept a level of relative realism in the scenes, which I think adds to the humor. You know, although I do I would have liked to have heard a couple belches from Barney. Yeah, that's my that's my chief criticism. No farting or belching from Barney. Yeah, that thought the whole movie's flawed. I'm sorry. I take back my judgment, Kidding, kidding the pacing

Phil Rice 26:48
is, is what I keep coming back. Oh yeah, it's just, it's non stop. I mean, yeah, not all of it is shooty, murderous action, but, I mean, it drops you into something's happening, and then just it never stops that there's always something else happening that's relevant, that's that's, that's attention getting whether it's something as simple as coffee being spilled or Someone slipping in that puddle later, or just just, yeah, just wonderful, wonderful pacing.

Damien Valentine 27:27
Go ahead. Dami, so I think in the past, we've discussed comedy in some of the machinery films we've looked at, and getting the pacing right is very tricky when it comes to comedy, and that's one of the key parts of the delivery, because you get that pacing wrong. It's just it doesn't work. And so you're right. This the pacing, and this is perfect, does it? I

Ricky Grove 27:49
think for a beginner, I think for a beginner, trying to create comedy is a hard thing to do. I never really mastered it because I don't have an instinctive comic inclination. I can do it because I can recognize the rhythm and recreate the rhythm in line, delivery and schtick and all of that. But I maintain that there are some people who instinctively, they have a gift for comedy. They instinctively know what that rhythm is, all right, that's okay. And I think this is one of the people who has that instinctive gift, yeah, you combine that with skill and craft and a creative mindset, and you have a fucking gem, yeah, yeah. So don't try this at all kids. But

Damien Valentine 28:37
I think that wraps things up. Um, last week, I forgot to include the contact details. So if you have any comments on this film or us, or anything else that we've been discussing either this week or last week, please send us an email at talk at completely machinima.com and you can check out our blog. Paul

Ricky Grove 28:57
Marino, I want to hear what you think of this film talk at completely machinima.com

Damien Valentine 29:02
Yeah, you can find the show notes and everything else on our website, completely machinima.com and that's it from myself. Damian Valentine. Phil rice, thank you. Great. Tracy Harwood, bye, all the best. Bye, bye. We'll see you next week. You.