Phil Rice 00:44
Hello and welcome to And now for something completely machinima, the podcast about machinima, virtual production and related technologies. My name is Phil rice. I'm here with my co hosts, Damian Valentine and Ricky Grove, hello, Hey, there. I brought

Ricky Grove 00:58
my fork today. Excellent.

Phil Rice 01:02
Tracy did not bring her fork, so we didn't let her be on this episode, but she'll be back with us very soon. Yep. So this week we are covering it's an unusual pick in that it's not just one film, it's a this is kind of a collection of films that are varying perspectives around something that happened in a video game. I'll let Damian clarify that that mess for us go ahead. Damian,

Damien Valentine 01:31
right, so elite, dangerous. You've shown film was made for this game a number of times. But it's an ongoing it's an online game, and there's ongoing stories and events happening, and over the last few years, there's been this war against this alien race called the thyroids space. It's a space game, right? Yeah, right. So you're in a spaceship, and you fly around, and it's a big open galaxy, and you can fly around making money however you want. So you can trade, you can be pirate, do missions or just go out exploring into the unknown depths of space, because it's a full size galaxy. And I think in the 10 years the game's been running, less than 1% of it has been explored. Wow, that's how big it is. So about halfway through the games, life's time, so far, the thyroid show up. These are aliens that go back to the original game from 1982 they've shown up in the Elite Dangerous and initially they were just there being a bit of a nuisance. They would drag ships out of hyperspace, scan them, and then fly off, and then the pilot had to restore power and then can carry on their journey. But things escalated in terms of a war, and it got to a point where late last year, this huge thyroid mothership was spotted heading to Earth. And the build up of it is there was all these missions to evacuate people from Earth and the space stations around the solar system to get them away from the aliens before they showed up. And it was about a week before that was going to happen. Then the the aliens actually arrived, and the mother ships was stayed in orbit of Earth, and all these other aliens, smaller alien ships, were attacking the space stations. And if you came to this solar system, there's a good chance you're going to be attacked by the aliens and people bringing in release supplies and all this stuff. But the alien mothership had a weakness where you have to fly in very close, which is very difficult because the mothership was surrounded by this some very acidic cloud. So unless you have the right armor on your ship, your ship would disintegrate before you get close to it. So you get through the cloud, then there's these rocks around it, and you go through those, and then smaller ownerships are there buzzing around looking for targets. You get really close to the mothership, there's these air vent these vent systems around you have to fire a couple of special missiles into those which would open up the cooling system. And then you have to hit that out. What was happening is players were doing this, and there's no single player could just do the kill shots, not at the Death Star where Luke Skywalker flies in. He's the one pilot that does it, but it's similar in that sense, that you have the daring light, but it's the culmination of everyone taking part that blows up the mothership. Eventually, enough damage was done to the ship, it would cause it to overheat, and there's a 24 hour countdown before the whole thing explodes. And this is a one. This is only going to happen once. It wasn't an event that you could just replay any again. So I got up at five o'clock in the morning, because that's when the 24 hour thing ran out to see this ship explode. And I take, I did take part in the attack on it, and I got a few shots in. So. I got up, watched it. The final countdown was going, and I stayed at quite a distance just to see it explode. It's very satisfying to see this thing happen. And I knew that, as in the history of this game, that's never going to happen again like that, I had to get up at that time in the morning to see it, because there's no way I could come in later and see it happen again. It's not one of those missions where you can, like in most MMOs, where you can just replay however you want. That's the fixed time, and that was it. So I thought, Well, I wonder what other people have done to record their experiences of taking part in this event. So I found these. I actually found several other videos. There was a really good video, but for some reason, they'd chosen this sort of casual jazz music as the sound track, and it was so wrong. I just could not choose that as one of my pitch for this. But the actual video itself was good, but yeah, the music was just so wrong, but I found these three, and there are different styles. So the first one, it's kind of like a documentary of the whole battle for the soul system. So he's got clips of the damage the aliens have done, debris flying, and shots of alien ships attacking and the human ships fighting back and stuff like that. And then he kind of gets his pilot is sitting way back, like I did, and the other ship explodes, and he's got the sound effects from the explosion as well. Then there was one that was showing his his own take on the being part of the war, rather than just like a generic one. So he did it more of a memorial for the fictional pilots who died. And then she went up close to the mothership as it exploded, and you see him getting blasted back out of the clouds. And then he sees it explode from a distance. And then the third one was more of a Let's Play kind of video where he recorded it as he was going in close, and the alien ships started firing at him as he was there trying to film it. And like the previous one, when the ship explodes, he kind of gets blown back out to safety and he sees the thing explode. Now, the reason is, these videos are pretty rough, but the reason is, you only get one take on this, because you can't do it again once that ship explodes. That's it. So none of them are exactly masterpieces of machinima. By is really fascinated that how these three different players have decided to document this event in the game's history. It's something that you know, five years from now, if the game is still running, they can look back and say, Well, yeah, we were part of the defense of Earth, and we saved it, and this is how we did it. And I thought, well, this is very different from anything we've done before. Even though we've covered this game before in a number of videos, I thought, I don't know this is capturing history as far as the game is concerned. And I can't just choose one of these. I had to choose three, just for the different perspectives, because none of them are perfect depictions of what happened, because, just for the rough nature, the way the event unfolded,

Ricky Grove 08:24
all three are short, so it's pretty easy to watch them all quickly. It's not like you're not going to be spending an hour doing this. And

Damien Valentine 08:34
I really, personally, I'm really glad I got to be part of the I don't play the game so much anymore, but I got involved just for this, and it's such a unique and satisfying experience that I'm glad I did, and I'm glad these other people documented it. I did. I did capture my footage of the ship exploding, but it's just me sitting from a distance, but nothing happens until it explodes, and I got the sound effects and everything, but just they made it more interesting than I did because I didn't really know what to expect. So yeah, that's why I wanted to share. So what do you guys think, Paul,

Phil Rice 09:12
yeah, it's fascinating. I'm fascinated as much as anything, by the phenomenon of a one time only event in a, you know, multiple multiplayer universe type world like this. It's not the only time that kind of thing has has been done in a game, but I don't think I've ever participated in in one, or been playing the game. In particular, it seems like I heard something like this happening in one of the Skyrim games, or something like that, where there was some major cataclysm, or something along those lines. It's a fascinating thing, and I think what I would most enjoy watching of these were these three were interesting, but. What would make a lot of sense is something I think that will emerge inevitably, is a supercut of tons of different because you know that there's more than just these three people who recorded it, right? And so you're going to have all different kinds of angles and stuff like that. And it might be interesting to see, you know, the event where it's cutting from all these, say, the same explosion from these different perspectives could be interesting. The the one that that, I guess, touched me a bit, if that's the right word, is the second one that reflection, because it begins with this, this kind of a montage of audio, of all these radio clips of what sounds like, like actual player game chatter, right? Yeah, and then kind of fades and comes into this music, which is, oh, what's the? Not nostalgia, sentimental. Which I was kind of surprised, because I've Ricky has kind of helped me sharpen my anti sentimental horns over the years. Like, it's one of those things. It's like, okay, now that I see it, I can't not see it. But this one got me anyway. Like, it just, it gave a real sense of like that, that feeling of camaraderie of soldiers who have endured loss in a war, that type of you know, whatever that feeling is, this, this kind of mournful feeling mixed with, what is it like? A bittersweet victory? You know that, okay, we've triumphed, but not without great cost. That one, really, that was the only one endeavoring, I think, to to give that perspective. And for me, it worked. The song's a little sappy once it gets going, but for my that's just personal taste. The third one was funny, because, according to the description, his main objective was to capture a good image for his desktop wallpaper. So he was just there as a paparazzi, basically a space to capture this thing, and then, yeah, gets ends up getting getting caught up in the scrape. That's pretty funny that that would happen. So, yeah, it's an interesting phenomena. I it's one where I think the underlying event is of greater interest to me than maybe any of the single films, which, of course, wouldn't exist without the event. So yeah, it's right, very interesting phenomena. I I would be very interested to see if someone ends up making, someday, making a documentary about that phenomena, not just this, not just this, not just an elite, dangerous but the phenomena of singular event, these singular events in ongoing, multiplayer worlds That's fast. There's a lot of nuts and bolts. There's a lot of moving parts to make that happen. On the developer end too. You know, there's a lot of pressure on them. What if it doesn't go right, or it doesn't play properly? How do they do that. So, yeah, I'm picturing a team of people like in the documentary we covered earlier this month, with you and strange company huddled around computers trying to make it all happen,

Ricky Grove 13:32
trying to make a film about it. Yes, exactly right. Yeah, that'd be interesting. Singular event is just a great not only is it a great promotional gimmick for the game company, but it's also quite an interesting philosophical thing where it only happens in an imaginary space, this unique event in which you can have feelings about fascinating. It's also the kind of subject that the science fiction writer Philip K Dick would write about, if he lived through the the internet age, he would, he would definitely rewrite about that. I, you know, I am not the brightest Bush sometimes, and I failed to read up on the films, but that's my that's generally my approach. I hardly ever read the filmmakers statement about what they're doing. I like to just watch the film, but in this case, I didn't do due diligence, and I had no idea what the actual purpose of these films were, so I just watched them as films, okay, and so my perspective was completely different. However, midway through the last one. Um, I was I saw the fact that there was this explosive event that occurred, and I suspected in the third film there was going to be the same thing. So I read the description, and it all clicked into place, and I went, ah, unique event. This is all because I was curious as to why Damien was referring it to as documentaries, because they didn't look like documentaries. Maybe they look like right, fictional films, you know. So I'm going to have two perspectives on it. One is the uninformed perspective, and the other one is the person who knows what the event is about. So the uninformed perspective, the first film was the best in terms of being just an interesting science fiction film. It had really fairly traditional music, but it was shot and very effectively. It was more professional, and it was quite involving and interesting. The second one was more fragmented and harder to follow, and the event itself didn't seem to be as emphasized as well as the first one and the third one was didn't make much sense to me at all. However, the when I realized what had actually what the films were about, they reversed their order, and the last film that was the most interesting to me, once I understood what they were about, and the first one was the least interesting to me. So that was a very odd experience. That's strange. Yeah, I've never experienced anything like that in watching machinima films before, but context is everything you know, and that's what I think, in a way, makes machinima such a unique art form, because you you, if you stand outside of machinima and you watch the film, you look at it as a film, as an animated 3d film. However, if you're within either the game community that the film is shot in, or the community of filmmakers, you have a different perspective on what's being done. And I think that's important to make that distinction. Even today, I think that distinction exists when I watch somebody who do it does a Let's Play video in Elden ring, once I know what they're trying to do my perspective on it as a game player, I immediately, because I love that game so much, I know all about it, however, if and it's harder for me to pull back and get away from that perspective and look at it as just a film so interesting perspective and experience for me, and I'm really glad you gave me the opportunity to understand how stupid I I am at times. I thank you Good, good picks.

Damien Valentine 17:53
I think the context is important here and just the so now that the ships exploded for the debris, even as we record this now, is still in orbit of Earth, and players can go in and salvage parts of the alien debris. Wow, sell and, of course, awesome. Then all the space stations got damaged because they're attacked. That you can bring in supplies and repair components and stuff. So you can bring those in and sell them to the stations and make money doing that. Amazing. Yeah, so that even though the spaceship is even though the aliens are gone, the aftermath is still an ongoing thing that's happening. I'm quite interested to see what happens next, and if the aliens are going to come back someday looking for revenge.

Ricky Grove 18:38
The ingenuity of ongoing open world gaming is, I think we're going to see this kind of thing happening more in the future. Yeah, you know, I really do.

Damien Valentine 18:52
And Phil, you were talking about having the developers do it the first time they tried this elite, dangerous, it was a disaster. Oh, really. So the idea was they had a pilot who there was a tie in novel, and the author was playing the character of the novel in the game, and he had to fly the ship from one place to another, because she was supposed to have this secret information that other people wanted to kill her so she couldn't release it, and so you had two teams of players, one to protect her and what the others were trying to kill her, because they needed to be a big reward for it, and the game was not designed to handle that. So it ended up and the author was writing a second time book where the result of this was going to be part of the story. And what happened was someone by the name of Harry Potter was able to kill her by doing he glitched the game or something to get her out. Of hyperspace, and without any escort, he killed her. And of course, because he was called Harry Potter, that name couldn't be included in the book. So and he could tell the author was not really happy. That's the way it turned out, because he lost interest in the game after that. But yeah, they've, they didn't do that again for a few more years, and then they've obviously tinkered with the game and made it so they could actually do events and worked around the game of limitations. But,

Ricky Grove 20:31
well, perhaps they realized that they needed to make the scale of the event much larger so no one individual could come in and hijack the whole thing? Yeah,

Damien Valentine 20:41
I think because every everyone had to go at taking this attacking the ship, felt like they were doing something, even if they didn't get the kill shots. So you still felt like you were Luke Skywalker. You're a participant, but you're not necessarily going to be the one that does it. I don't know who's the one that got the last shot. I don't think anyone knows, because everyone was doing it all at once, but yeah, it's just such a unique experience, and I hope that you keep doing more of them.

Phil Rice 21:06
Yep, I picture the developer room being kind of like, you know, the Houston NASA room when Apollo 11 lands and everyone just cheers, yes, yeah, because there's, like, because it's perilous and could go horribly wrong, kind of yeah, great pick. Damian, I'm great picks.

21:33
Yeah, I'm.

Phil Rice 21:35
It's a very interesting thing really gets, gets the imagination going, sure, guys. Well, my name is Phil rice, on behalf of my co hosts, Ricky and Damian, that is it for that's all the films for this month, isn't it. So we will see you all in the next episode.

Ricky Grove 21:52
Check our show notes at completely machinima.com.