Phil Rice 00:39
Hello and welcome to And now for something completely machinima, the podcast about machinima and related technologies, virtual production, whatever you'd like to call it. I'm one of your hosts, Phil rice, and today I'm with my co hosts, Damian Valentine and Ricky Grove, folks, hey there. Tracy is off. She's looking to be the first woman to Mars, but she'll be back very soon. So we, we will. We will miss her perspective dearly on these, these couple episodes. We will, will,

Ricky Grove 01:22
fact, oriented person. So you'll just have three stumbling guys. I think it was 2000

Phil Rice 01:32
Yeah, she provides a level of detail that is just extraordinary. So Tracy, we miss you. We're looking forward to having you back. Yep, this week we're going to actually, for the next few film The all the films we cover this this month we're going to be covering them kind of in a historical order. This is another one of those weird situations, particularly with Ricky's pick and mine, where, if we tried to convince you that we didn't plan and collaborate to make this happen. You wouldn't believe us, but we didn't. But Ricky picked a film that is, I mean, very much rooted in the history of machinima. It's actually about the history of machinima in some of the more exciting years of those early days, and I just happened to the pick that we're going to talk about today is called we are demo. This was actually made in 2016 but it's it was made using the technology that was used in that in many circles, forgotten art form that first emerged in the 1980s and then continued to the 1990s but it really hit its its peak in the 1980s on the Commodore 64 computer. And these are called it's it was called the demo scene. And essentially what these were and what made these different from how anyone is making movies today, pretty much is. This was all about coding. This was about creating a program that would execute on the computer and result in an audio and visual display, so a very different kind of skill set where you kind of had to have, I would think that the people that participated in that had to have a pretty, you know, firm technical background. A lot of them were, I mean, they were programmers, but also at least some kind of artistic sense as well. And these were often created by teams, not just solo creators, because there's a lot of work involved, a lot of experimenting. And of course, the computers were much slower, much, much slower at the time. So you would put together one of these things and then have to compile it and then see how it turned out before you'd even see a thing. It's all mathematical formulas, essentially. So, yeah, this came through to me. I think this is a first for the show where the pick the video that we're referencing and that we watched is on Twitter. Now maybe this is elsewhere. Maybe, maybe this same video is on YouTube or Vimeo or somewhere, but I didn't even look for it there, because I was just so delighted that we actually have a video coming from somewhere other than than the usual spots. You know, we've basically, we're always, it's 99% YouTube, and Ricky's been delving through the Internet Archive. That's another great source. And then Vimeo, you got to cut through a lot of other stuff to find machinima type stuff there. But it's there. This is the first time we've seen something like this come through on on Twitter. And I think, I think mainly because Twitter slash x, I. Lot of times what people are posting there is ultra short form. It might be clips. It might be little, little bitty demonstrations of this, that or the other, and then a lot of marketing nonsense, if you spend any time on that platform, you know, and more than its share of political nonsense. And yeah, so I have no idea how, how this happened to get delivered up to me, except that when I was working on a recent film of my own where I was kind of doing tribute to some older computing, you know, text adventure games and that that kind of thing, it must have informed the algorithm that that I used to Commodore 64 or something. So, yeah, this, this, it's called, we are demo. And this is basically, it's, it's something that's created in the exact style of how these demos were, which is, it's these, the demo scene is, is widely considered by those in the know to be the, the spiritual predecessor to machinima. It was getting, essentially getting the computer to do something that it that its creators didn't intend, and having it be, you know, some degree of artistic or fun or or that kind of thing. So I'll talk a little bit about this video and demo scene in general. Then I'd love to hear what you guys think of it. But one thing that I noticed watching this, because I did watch these back in the day. I'm trying to remember how I came across them, because there was no internet. Email existed, but none of us were using email then. So how in the world did I ever even see these things I don't know other than, other than I had fellow friends at school and such that. Had Commodore 64 and they knew people who knew people who could get them pirated games. This was all circulated hand to hand. It's crazy how it worked back then. But you know, you couldn't afford you the price for games back then was about the same as it is now. It's like 50 bucks for a title. So sometimes, you know, and nobody could afford that. So there was a lot of, hey, I you know, a friend of mine bought this game, and we figured out how to copy it here, try it out. And a lot of times the people who would create those pirated versions of the games were demo creators as well, because they used it as a way to kind of self promote. So it would often be centered around whatever their pirate teams logo was. It would be something related to that. And it was, you know, kind of like, I think it's inspired by the, you know, the the the movie production company logos that typically are on the front end of right of Hollywood movies, right? It's a way to put your stamp on it. So that's what these guys did. I think that's where a lot of the early demos came from. And then some people took that up and actually did it for its own sake. So you got a floppy disk, basically floppy disk, yes, literal floppy, like the bendable kind, the five and a quarter inch floppy disk, yeah. And then it, there were different types of copy protection back then. Like, I mean, I bought quite a bit of commercial games, and, you know, they were not copyable without text, without expertise, that was above my pay grid. But yeah, there was, it's a weird thing how that stuff worked. I feel the same way about like, rock and roll rumors in the 1970s and 80s. You know, you'd hear these crazy stories about Rod Stewart had his stomach pumped for this, and ACDC did that and and you wonder now, like, how in the world did that get around? There was no internet. There was no it's very strange. And yet that information, unreliable as it likely was, did circulate around the same thing with this, this software in these days. So yeah, it's, it's, it's a strange phenomenon. So what I noticed about this, watching this, this pretty authentic looking video from, you know, using that eras Tech is one an area where they did stay true to the time was the 1980s had a lot more tolerance For slower attention span, let's say so, a lot of repetition, a lot of loops, and you know, you continue to watch the same thing over and usually with the same music underneath it, with very little variation. That's it's funny, because I'm not a young kid or anything, but that's even for me, it's a. Little grading. It's a little bit, you know, look at your watch kind of okay. Are we moving to the next thing? Yet, it's funny how that works, because I think if I had watched this back in the day, I'd have just been entranced and and would have thought of it as short form, right? And, yeah, the pacing needs are different back then. So it's kind of impressive that they were able to to emulate that faithfully, not modernize the style too much. The other thing that sticks out to me as a musician is something I remember from trying to compose music on the Commodore 64 and that is the very interesting limitation, first of all that there was a specific sound chip. It was called the SID chip that was part of this, the Commodore 64 sound. He's very, very, very distinct sounding synthetic noises, essentially, is what the palette was. And this, every sound in this pretty much is from that I think there may be some noises that I don't recognize from back in the day, but maybe they've learned some new ways to get that sound out, but but one of the interesting things about it musically is that it's limited to Commodore 64 was limited to three notes of polyphony, and what that means is that only three noises, no only three sounds, can be playing at any one moment.

Phil Rice 11:30
And so a chord, for example, if someone strums freaky, gets his ukulele and strums a chord, there's probably at least three notes in that chord, maybe more. And in modern and then you figure in modern music, there's, you know, often, there's guitar, there's bass, there's drums, there's keyboards, there's all these other sounds. Well, in the Commodore 64 days, only three total notes that includes percussion, that includes any chord that you want to be heard. And bass is pretty, pretty critical. So how that would end up manifesting very often is how it is in this video, and that is the percussion was often one track, one of those sounds. And you know, so that the equivalent to the kick drum and the snare and the the hat and any sound effects that are percussive would that would be that would take up one of your notes. So now you've got two notes for the rest of the music in this track. The second note is pretty much taken up the entire time by the bass line, because it's, it's a kind of a Tracy, you know, dance music sounding kind of thing. So now you've only got one note left for all the other musical stuff that's going on. And it's very interesting how creative the people that did music, that composed music in this time, how creative they were, because if they needed to do a chord, they would instead do a really fast arpeggio, and arpeggio, not to get too nerdy with the music terms here, but arpeggio is you're playing a chord, but only one note at a time, so dude and they would do it really, really fast, and the result would sound Cordish. Now it'd have a very strange feel with a lot of motion to it, but that's how they would squeeze in more notes. Is that they weren't cheating. There were still only three notes sounding at any one time, but one of the notes might only be for a couple milliseconds, yeah, as it's moving all over the spectrum to create this broad sense of sound. And if you, if you listen to any of the music from that era, which the best place to do so is from from video games to that era. There are some just classic, wonderful, interesting music pieces that were the soundtracks for games that a lot of gamers from that era, they identify that music with the game. Like, instantly you know, you remember those themes, and they were all composed with that very strange musical limitation of three notes so and they seem to have adhered to that in this as well. I can't tell, I don't know a lot about this is where we really miss Tracy, because I don't know for sure that this was actually rendered on a Commodore 64 or or a Commodore 64 a faithful emulator of one, but it sure looks like it was and it sounds like it was again. There are some sounds in their music, uh, selection there that I thought I'd heard everything that that SID chip could do. And I like, I don't quite know how they did this, so maybe, maybe it's not 100% faithful, but it's billed as such. And, you know, there's a whole world of people who would call them on it if they were cheating. So I have to think it was, and that that I just didn't, didn't fully understand everything about, you know, I. Think that's probably a pretty safe bet. But hey, I don't know everything in the world, right? Yes, yeah. So anyway, yeah, it's an interesting look at an art form that, really, there's no modern equivalent for today that I can think of, because it's not quite a music video, it's not quite a movie logo. It's not quite anything. It's, it's really, it's one of those art forms that it. It's a demo from the demo scene. There's nothing else quite like it. Yeah, it's, it doesn't have a whole lot of meat on the bone. If you're looking for narrative or anything like that? No, not on this one, you're not going to find anything like that. This is more. We've talked about films that we've encountered like this before that. It's really think this one's best to think of more as a painting. Yeah, for lack of a better comparison, this is, this is a an artful display, and it's not really trying to be anything more than that, and and it feels like whoever created it if they, if they weren't demo creators from back in the day, they, like us, look back on that with admiration of that was a time of real, real interesting innovation with with limitations. Machinima has always been about limitations, right? But that was severely limited in terms of computing power, and in terms of what the what computers were even capable of at all, yeah, and it's, it's, it's, it's very interesting stuff. And a lot of this stuff was done by what would be classified as amateurs. You know, it's one thing to look back at that time and go, Oh, wow. There was some, there were some really interesting video games that were created by teams of professionals, by, you know, highly skilled, highly trained people. This is more of, you know, people outside of the scope, I think a lot of times of that the the cadre of people that were creating video games who had skills and brought them to the computing world and did some things, yeah, really unique and interesting with it. So what did you guys think?

Ricky Grove 17:10
I hope you'll be able to cut in a clip from the film for our YouTube audience, because it is such a unique visual and sounding, music sounding type of film that I think it would be much of what you were talking about would be revealed in a clip. So I hope you will able be edit something in usually

Phil Rice 17:36
what what I've been doing in past episodes is like, while we're talking about a film, I'll overlay just the visual. But for this one, you're right. I think I'll make an effort to, let's say, right here, we're going to take a break, and here's a clip of this film that I've been talking about you.

Phil Rice 18:51
Okay, so now you guys have the idea of of what this is like, exactly. If I'm not able to do that, Ricky, then that's going to be a really awkward pause in the episode. Should I blame you? But

Ricky Grove 19:02
it'll be funny. It'll be a funny. Pause, sure, which? Sure. Hey, I love to work with you for comedies. Comic. I

Ricky Grove 19:10
wanted to mention that in my years as doing being a computer journalist, computer graphics, technology journalist, I attended many SIGGRAPH conferences. And SIGGRAPH is the Big Daddy conference for all things computer graphics. You know, it's where technology related to computer graphics and computer rendering, graphics cards, software, hardware, all kinds of things. And every year that I went there was that they have these special groups that they offer, that SIGGRAPH offers, where they'll give you a meeting space, if you're like minded, and you set it up, you just submit it, they check it, and then they approve it. Friends of Friends of SIGGRAPH. Of birds of a feather. I think they call it every year that I went, it was almost 10 years there was a demo scene meeting. Now, I never went to one, yeah.

Phil Rice 20:12
So that would have been like the the early 2000s and I remember 2008 for sure. And I think that was maybe the third year you'd gone, and then you kept going after that too. Wow. Scene then,

Ricky Grove 20:26
right? And I suspect that they're still doing it now. So I believe that the demo scene, even though it was sort of supplanted, community wise, by machinima, I think it continues on, and it would be interesting to in the few future episode to find more current demo scene creations, to see how different they are. But it's still alive. It's still alive. But you're absolutely right. The the demo scene was a kind of precursor to machinima, and that it was a group of like minded people who wanted to use their computer to create a kind of nascent computer art, computer graphics art. In this case, it was done through a very difficult process, a very steep learning curve of coding, and nowadays, coding is made easier through software that will, if it sees you have have a repeated code, it'll suggest it, and you can paste it right in. But it is still a hard thing to do, so it'll be interesting to see in the future if we come up with some different demo scene recordings. I like this a lot. It's about nine minutes long, and you're right the the threshold for for tolerance for nine minutes of that is reached at about the three and a half minute mark, because a good deal of it is repetitious. And the point of it is is to, well, the main point is to kind of show off their skills, and to show off their and to add to promote their group. In a way, it's saying, Hey, see these skills that we have come to see, come to our group, and you'll see more just like it. And that's perfectly fine, but it sort of narrows the audience who will appreciate this kind of work. And we're the perfect people to to to share it. And I think our, yeah, I think our audience members are the perfect people to watch it, but not everybody is going to tolerate that. You know, I was thinking after that sort of point where I became a bit bored with it, I started thinking, well, who will watch this? And I don't think everybody will watch it or appreciate it, but for those people that do is very entertaining. It's ingenious how they because basically what you're watching is you're watching a series of low tech, low pixel graphics that intertwine with each other. Now today, we're we're we're used to having much more high quality graphics, you know, no jagged edges, no, no, the motion is clean and clear. We have all kinds of software for that, but in those days, they had to do things a step at a time. So it's fascinating to see how they were able to make smoother transitions between things and create contrast between letters, titles and messages and graphics and their transitions between them. And it was just ingenious, and up to the point where it becomes really repetitious, the marriage between music

Ricky Grove 23:59
which is absolutely unique. There's no other music like it in the world. The marriage between the visual and the music is compelling. Once it you reach that saturation point, it starts becoming discordant and repetition. Up to that point, it's absolutely fascinating. It's almost as if you were watching a Star Trek episode and they meet a they go to a planet that is highly evolved technologically, and they go to an artistic event. And the artistic event are these visual things with these bleeps and BLOPS and things done, done coherently. It's almost like a science fiction episode you'd watch about the future. I found that just fascinating, absolutely fascinating. It was a great pick, Phil, really interesting, and I hope our viewers and the listeners will take time to watch it.

Damien Valentine 24:54
So this book back. A lot of memories for me as well. My very first computer was an Atari ST and. Uh, and I do remember there were lots of these demo scene videos that would come on the magazine floppy disks. So, you know, you'd expect, I remember being confused. What's the difference between a game demo and a demo like this? Because, you know, I was seven years old, but I quickly caught on. I watched, I would watch them, and I would enjoy them, and I think I had more patience for the long running times back then I did now, like you two, but I still, I still made it through all nine minutes of this. And I didn't really, I think back then, I didn't really appreciate just how much work goes into making something like this. Like Phil you explaining about the three notes for the music. I had no idea about that until you told me just now. So when I think back, that's, yeah, I don't know how they figured it all out, but they did, and they made some great music choices with it. And, you know, composing excellent music. The visuals brought back lots of memories of video games from that era as well. There's that thing with the flying sources over the landscape. There's a big snake dragon thing, I think in one point, yeah, it's that art style, that sort of thing long gone now, because we've got more realistic graphics. But this was definitely a very nostalgic, nostalgic piece. And I also remember some of those demos I tried to modify myself, not very successfully, when I'm seven years old, that we're not doing, but occasionally I was able to alter some of the graphics. I'd replace an image, because the image file would be there, so replace it and that that would happen. So that's my very first modding I still got the Atari ST up in the attic somewhere, but I don't know if it even works or if I can even connect it to a modern display, because obviously the connections have changed. But this is a very nostalgic film for that, and it brought back memories of the old games used to play. And you know, the style of music that the games would have. So, yeah, it's a good choice. Phil, I've enjoyed doing it and listen, oh, enjoy watching it. And it kind of makes me want to, even if the Atari ST Upstairs there doesn't work anymore, I kind of want to get an emulator out and just see if I can find some of those old favorite games I used to play, yeah, just because of watching this.

Ricky Grove 27:25
But yeah, I'll seek out more modern demo scene stuff so we can maybe throw, maybe pick one for the future. It's definitely a

Ricky Grove 27:41
the community surrounding all of that is definitely translated to machinima, which is interesting because my pick is a documentary about sort of the peak period of machinima, 2003

Ricky Grove 27:57
and you'll see that same kind of community of amateurs coming together, using technology to create art and create entertainment. So it'll be interesting when we go to my pick, which is our next week. To keep in mind that demo, that the demo work that we saw this week, yeah,

Phil Rice 28:20
all right, well, yeah, that's, that's our that's the film for this week. We are demo. We'll put a link to that in the description of this. And, yeah, I look forward to seeing what we can on Earth. We've, we've made numerous references to the demo scene in in the course of the years of this show, and this the first time we've had a literal demo scene pick come through. And it was, it was nice to see it does it. I'm really curious, like, how younger members of the audience, are they going to find this interesting at all or not? Or is this all just something that that people over a certain age limit are going to appreciate. Let us know in the comments. I think this is interesting stuff, and hope you enjoyed it. On behalf of my co hosts, Damien and Ricky and Tracy, we miss you. We will see everyone in the next episode, bye, bye, how long bye?