Ricky Grove 00:44
Hey, everybody, just having a little cigar in between movies and you are listening to now for something completely machinima.com. A great podcast that's been around since you were a teenager, and it covers machinima, which is movies made inside of game engines or real time engines. And also, as Phil, adroitly came up with the phrase related technologies. So we are here in our second week March, I believe, and we have a selection by Phil, which I am eager to talk about, eager So Phil, tell us all about it.

Phil Rice 01:27
Yeah. So this is, I think, a first for the show in that and, and it may prove controversial as a result, but this is, this is an entry that that makes heavy use of AI,

Ricky Grove 01:45
heavy completely use, complete use of AI, however,

Phil Rice 01:52
and this, this kind of, this comment will harken back to our previous episode talking about The days after and and to many prior episodes, writing is huge. And for me this, what propels this series is the writing the character, not AI, the world building. And that's not GBT, it's original, right, right. So the the the episode that I selected is one of a series called unanswered oddities, and that the maker of it, it goes by the YouTube name neural neural vis via this is episode seven, exercise. And I mean, where to begin? So he has neuroviz, he or she has built this world that is kind of like our own, but not quite. It's like a distant future, and there's a completely different race of beings that are now here. And they they're kind of glory the arc. We're the archeology of them. You know that all they know about humans, and they pronounce it in a funny way in here is, is what they have found in the arc of the archeological record, basically. And so their understanding of things is a little tilted because of that. And of course, their whole way of being is different than ours was, and yet they're still using this kind of reality TV framework, Social Media Video framework, to communicate and express themselves and things like that. So it's this weird juxtaposition of this essentially alien race that is behaving like humans, but completely failing to understand humans, or maybe they have enlightened understanding of humans, some of the reductions that they do of or some of their takes on things we did that they think are strange, it's Just wonderful, and all communicated through through dialog or monolog interview style, in many ways, kind of almost a documentary style to it. And the performances are the vocal performances, and then the resulting lip sync and facial animation that they do, which I know AI is involved with that. But I'm not exactly sure which tool set is able to do that with this kind of accuracy. Because, you know, most of the if you've just kind of put your toe in the water of AI video, it's a lot of, you know, weird hands, of course, in the old days, and strange morph. Things of this that into the other. And here, the the author of this is somehow created a fairly controlled environment. And by that, I mean there's a consistency to these characters. And even even amongst different characters, there's a common thread. You can tell they're from the same race, if you will, and the style of the backdrops that are used, and the settings and all of that, there's a real consistency across there that even with what I know about some of the things that you can do with AI tools to enforce consistency, it's tough to get a truly consistent result shots that match right. And whoever this is has has mastered that. And that's impressive in and of itself. But it wouldn't have been enough for me to pick this. What propels it is the writing I put this, I would say this is in the same category as, like Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. You know, it's just, you know, it's, it's all hilarious, Oscar Wilde for the 21st century, right? It's, it's this wit that is just razor sharp and satire and sarcasm and all of this wrapped up into and these, these characters that are not particularly self aware are who are spouting these things and and, you know, stating these, these experts that are interviewed, that you know clearly don't know what they're talking about, which, again, rings to our Life, right? I mean, that is our world. Now, that's what social media is full of. One of the things that's been most amazing to me in light of the most recent election in the United States is just how many political scientists there are out there. I had no idea so many people that can look at 10% of the information and know what's going on with the world. This satirizes that expert, that expert, that self made expert tendency that, I think, is one of the things that, if you can calm down enough about it, you can laugh at it about today's social media, that that really is what's going on, you know? So I just loved this. I feel like it's so timely. It's out of nowhere for me, like I'd never heard of this person. I've never seen characters that look quite like this. What are they kind of like? Like a bipedal humanoid Toad of some sort, almost. Yeah, it's amphibian looking, yeah, but just the performances are just comic timing to its perfection. And then it's again, propelled by just great writing, really creative ideas for what things to focus on. And like all good sci fi, some really sharp and deeply buried, I think social commentary. Yep, I just, I was blown away by this, and I really wrestled with whether or not to name this as a selection, because I'm not anti AI. I'm not really pro either, and I've kind of wavered a bit, but I know it's a hotly debated topic, that there's some people who are just disgusted by the whole notion of it, and I see their point of view. So it was really a tough call, but ultimately, the content underneath what was done with AI was so good that I just felt like it was worthy of some discussion, and maybe discussion because it's aI as well. So what did you guys think of it?

Ricky Grove 08:50
I appreciate your your concern about that. It's something that I don't think about. But I know social media and platforms that we go on could hit people who are just, you know, they react to the mention of AI like some arachnophobe response to a spider, you know? They just, they're freaked out by it, and they also, they immediately condemn us. Well, you can say whatever you want, but this is the kind of thing that's being done right now. And I think you're right. The writing is just that's what the key is in this whole thing. Neural vis has 31 videos on in a YouTube video that has over 130k subscribers. So it's not so into AI that 130 people, right suspend their upset about AI in order to watch these absolutely hilarious and disturbing videos. Let me tell you what his workflow is. He mentioned this in one of the comments to a one of his videos, and he says this. Speaking footage, the the mainstream footage of people talking is made with Hedra, H, E, D, R, A, by plugging in mid journey images and audio of the audio of the dialog. So he records the dialog for the character himself, in his own voice. He comes up with a character in mid journey. He takes that character and he goes to Hedra,

Phil Rice 10:26
I assume is, what is, what creates the lip sync. And, yes, okay, right? I've not heard of that tool.

Ricky Grove 10:32
So he uses the mid journey character with his voice, and he animates their lip sync, and all of that in headdress. Then for B roll shots. Oh, by the way, he uses 11 labs to generate the voices. So if he wants to have he, since they're all his voice, he wants to have them to have different qualities. So he uses 11 labs to change the voices.

Phil Rice 11:01
Let me interject there real quick, in case our viewers aren't aren't familiar with how that process works, because I use it quite a bit. I know Phil Brown has used it in his Forbidden Planet. It's a really cool feature that basically, you can actually perform a vocal. You record the vocal with the inflections that you want, and you can run it through an 11 labs voice synthesis, and it will preserve. It does very, a very good job at preserving the emotion and the inflection of your performance, but inscribes it with this, this new voice, no voice, little, little self promotion plug here. But the new series that I just started releasing, called Ralph and Chuck is Phil, and Phil, one of them is me, and my regular voice, I'm Ralph, and then chuck it, I performed that and ran it through the voice synthesis of 11 labs to give it a different timbre. So it's two different people. That's what he's done here. It's a really cool technique.

Ricky Grove 12:04
That's how he's gotten so many different characters, such all him performing Awesome. Now there's a lot of B roll shots, which is, for example, when they cut to a location, or they in one of the series, which is cop files, they go to a location, and he needs B rolls for all of that footage. He uses Luma in order to animate B rolls that are prompted with mid journey images. So he creates the scene with mid journey, takes it to Luma and then animates the shot. He also uses runway Gen three, which is another thing that takes text to video or image or image to video, right image to video. And finally, he uses a program, an online program called Audio, u, d, i, o, generates all of the music,

Phil Rice 13:06
text to video, so like a Sona type of AI, exactly. Okay, yeah,

Ricky Grove 13:11
okay. I've visited all these sites. All these sites have free accounts. They all have low monthly payment if you want to get watermarks removed and get commercial use and all that. But I wanted to get that out of the way to show you, this is a one man band. This is a one machinima person. He writes amazing he acts all of the images. He creates all the characters. He animates all the characters through the help of AI. Now, I was so taken by his videos that something took over me. I think I was possessed by an evil demon, and I could not stop watching. I watched all 31 videos, every single one of them, because they were absolutely hysterical. And my favorite, he has a he has his character, uh, TIG tickles. Who is this loud mouth, asshole, disc jockey, podcaster anti Joe Rogan, that is just hysterical. This guy is just hysterical. And then my favorite series that he did, my two favorites are cop files, which actually has that sort of crime drama footage. I was astounded how he was making work together. And then one of the most satirical ones that he did was it was the church of z, which is about a cult and their cult leader. My God, just mind I was in. All afternoon in this, my little garage studio, laughing my ass off. I think my neighbors must have thought I had gone mad, because this was so good. And the thing he does, it's my last comment, because I know I've been talking a long time, the thing he does, which many, many people who use AI are unable to achieve he overcomes the uncanny valley effect. Because one of the big problems of using AI with mid journey or text is that they're all on they have that uncanny valley so that you cannot suspend your disbelief in order to engage in the story of the characters or the dialog. He has overcome that, yeah, now you couple that with fucking genius Saturday Night Live mash TV, every comic series you've ever seen that had brilliant writing. This guy's right up there with him. And I'm not kidding Absolutely. Yeah, I am not kidding you. This guy is that good. You couple that ability to overcome a thundery and you have an absolute masterful YouTube channel using a brand new technology in ways that no one had thought to do. So I am so excited about your your pick, and it has really inspired me. And I hope people, people watch these, and I'm very interested to see what the rest of you have to say.

Damien Valentine 16:36
Well, Ricky, I'm glad you explained his process, because I was trying to work out, how did you get these different creatures? Because there's several different characters, and they're all meant to be the same race, but how did he get them to look like the same race, but different? So he wasn't just using the same image repeatedly, but you can tell they're meant to be the same because you know, if you're using like character creator for icon or something, you can do that, but if you're doing AI, then you have to know exactly what to say to the AI to generate an image that's similar to what you just created for your previous character, but not identical and not radically different. That it doesn't work. So that must have taken a lot of time and effort, I

Ricky Grove 17:22
don't think so. I think so, because what he did, as long as he was able to create the first character, yeah, text, text to image, reuses elements of your text, okay? And it also provides you with variants. So for example, in most like mid journey gives you four variants of text that you get, right? So he could choose any one of those four as a completely separate character,

Damien Valentine 17:49
okay, but it still takes a lot of time and effort to understand the technology too.

Phil Rice 17:53
I think he invested time, yeah, yeah, which is interesting, because one of the kind of surface criticisms that you'll hear of AI is that it's there to service non artists who want to put out no effort. This throws that convention completely on its head absolutely this clearly had effort. And if you don't know anything about the process now you do, that's not that, that process that Ricky just unfolded, that's not sit down type a couple keystrokes and boom, it spits this out. No, this. This was, there was labor involved here. This is someone who took the time to learn how to use these tools in an artistic way. And, yeah, there's plenty of people who will sit down and just go, oh, a fart in a jar, and it just makes something and but nobody's talking about that, nobody's watching that, you know? So, yeah, this is it's really something. And

Damien Valentine 18:51
what I said about taking the time to learn that applying to every AI tool that he uses, because he's not just using mid journey, the time to learn every single one of those tools which, yes, there's a lot of dedication Indeed,

Ricky Grove 19:05
indeed, all in the service. Now, for those of you are crazy about AI, all in the service of the writing, the humorous, intelligent, satirical writing, all of the rest of it is just serves that writing for him. So he's not out to say, to use AI to scoop everything. He's using it as a way to express his own writing.

Phil Rice 19:31
Isn't it a wonderful relief too, that, because we've talked many times about and not just with AI video, but we've, we've talked about this with regard to Unreal Engine to the tendency for there to be all these videos that essentially feel like tech demos, no substance at all. Just look at this pretty thing, you know. And they may have wow factor, but it's like eating a little piece of candy and then it's gone, you know. And. So it's, it's so refreshing to see somebody this answers the question of, well, what's missing from those? What's missing from those is, the most important thing about this guy's videos is that writing that, that, that that's where the substance is, and it's, it's so I was just, yeah, I was I was made so happy finding this and I went on a down a similar rabbit hole as you did Ricky. It's addictive stuff. It's wonderful.

Tracy Harwood 20:30
I also went down a rabbit hole, a little bit of additional things, I think, to the workflow that I THINK, THINK I found out Ricky was that he'd also use mo cap and runway does video transfer. So I'm guessing part of the workflow is actually he's videoed himself as some sort of character and then transferred using whatever the three style

Phil Rice 20:52
transfer type.

Ricky Grove 20:54
Where did you get that info? Because, well, many of the different exactly his comments. Where did you get that?

Tracy Harwood 21:00
Well, I found him on Reddit. Wow, and his name on Reddit is J, wallyman 51

Ricky Grove 21:10
Can you spell that? J,

Tracy Harwood 21:13
W, A, double, l, y, M, a, n5, 1j, wallyman 51

Ricky Grove 21:20
got it. Thank you. Yeah, and there's

Tracy Harwood 21:23
quite a bit about him on there, and he, he has done what I would assume are things like ask me anything through through Reddit discussion fora and he talked quite a bit about his workflow on that, which is where I sort of picked up what, what I think is probably the main part of his workflow, with runway as this kind of style transfer tool, I suspect. But I mean, before I got to that point, I you know when, when I started looking at, what the hell is this? This is just crazy. I mean, what an interesting show. And to me, you know, you talked about Douglas Adams, that was one of the things that immediately came to my mind. And I was thinking, actually, no, there's more to this. This is more like Outer Limits meets Hieronymus Bosch, and there's a Star Wars Jabba the Hutt in this as well. To think about what these, these, these creatures are, these glurons, and I think what the hell is a glue on? Where on earth did that come from? Well, I found a wiki page on that, which I'll provide a link to. And I quickly realized, as I was sort of thinking, what on earth have you found for us this week to to appreciating that there's a hell of a lot more to the mono verse than I was expecting to find with what this guy has created, it would seem these gluons are a creation of something called the monolith, which is a structure that serves as a sort of living God. They are, in fact, a post human race. Humans have long since died out. They exist on Earth long after humans went extinct, possibly originating from Wyoming. And there are many tales relating to their lives on which the unanswered oddities series shines a particular light as well as you know, the other ones that Ricky's mentioned there. This is surrealism at its best. I think even the description of it is hilarious. I mean, this guy or woman, they have the mind of an oddball genius. This is, this is just, it's not just a best AI derived world building projects we've probably ever seen, but it's probably one of the most original series we've ever seen as well. You know, I was looking at, you know, before I started digging around, I did what you guys do. Just sort of took it all in. I was thinking, Well, you know, looking at this, listening to this, it's surely AI generated script too, because it's just so damn weird. But then I was thinking, as I was, you know, sort of getting further down into I was thinking, There's no way that that's AI generated it. It could be improv, I suppose, but it's more likely to have been scripted. And sure enough, when I started digging into it, it turns out that there is indeed a script. And Wally man 51 has actually commented that the his technique is at the. He hasn't he or she has an overall narrative, a kind of a loose narrative in mind that connects all the stories in this main storyline and then just alters the, you know, the dialog as the as the episodes progress, so that, I guess that it's a sort of a mix between scripting and a bit of improv, depending on you know how they feel, probably what they do say in the comments that I've seen is that they absolutely love writing, which I think you can really tell by the quality of the Presentation. Characters, absolutely like I said, there's evidently some mocap in there too, and you can see that a little bit at play just by the some of what's, you know, what you see in terms of the of the movement, I think, if you thought, you know, if you, if you sort of sat back and thought, is this purely AI generated, which I'm guessing is where you guys came to it, you know, you the first thing you'd sort of say, well, yes, I can see how AI could create some of these images. But no, they couldn't create that workflow, because hallucinations would be introduced. And therefore, the the tools, although it's implied in what you're looking at here, that they can do this kind of thing, I don't think they could ever generate the kind of weird stories that this guy has, which is rooted in in in human experience. If not, there's no way it's aI from, from the quality of what it what it is.

Ricky Grove 26:37
It's like an absurdist check off.

Tracy Harwood 26:39
It's absolutely yes.

Phil Rice 26:41
Thank you, yes.

Tracy Harwood 26:45
Well, I like the character. I mean, the characters themselves are absolutely fascinating. It would seem that they are the consequence of some kind of you know. Well, it would seem that they've been developed over the period of time, that this has been kind of out there in the world. And in that sense, it sort of struck me a little bit back rooms like ish, because it's grown with its audience. It's gained a phenomenal amount of traction, and in actual fact, was only launched in June last year, sure, yeah, which is astonishing, giving the, you know, the 10s of 1000s of views and the you know, the the way that he's supporting himself, doing this with all the T shirts and the all the which are very good, but absolutely all The merchandise that he's got running alongside it, which I'm thinking is probably the ways he's funding it, rather than through any kind of what is it you run? Phil there, you know, the Patreon, Patreon type thing doesn't have a Patreon, from what I can see,

Ricky Grove 27:56
too bad, because if he did, I'd be on it.

Phil Rice 27:59
I would too. I think that's

Tracy Harwood 28:00
a that's a comments that a lot of comments that I've seen actually, where is your Patreon? And mostly, I think they seem determined to remain secretive in in their identity, from what I can see, good for them, so unanswered on it oddities is a is a TV show situated in this mono verse that he's created, and there are some really interesting characters, like Tiggy skibbles and bought yammy. The idea is that it's hosted by this anonymous character, an unnamed character. So that person that you see quite a lot of does not have a name, and there's plenty of names associated with it. And the idea is that it's the there is a subject that's introduced and then it's discussed both by the host and these sort of guests. These guests, yes, and fundamentally, the whole show is about what it is to be human and discussing humanity in general. So it's kind of this old altar take on it, the episode that you've sent to us. Phil, well, talk about laugh. I was completely hooked on this. The focus of it is on execies. Exercies described as the strange behavior of humans trying to mystically transform their bodies through motion alchemy and strain worship

Phil Rice 29:39
so good. The writing is so good,

Tracy Harwood 29:42
I was immediately hooked on that, because that just so sums it up for me as well. Yeah. I mean, how brilliant.

Ricky Grove 29:53
Nine episodes in the series there's human who runs religion outer space. I. America, marriage, democracy, right? Exercise, St Nicholas, which is absolute genius. And, okay, okay, oh, my God. And then the very last one is the NFL. Well, main in which a character is so entranced by wanting to join the NFL, even though it's gone, that he thinks that the way to get into the NFL is to get a concussion. So he gets an X an old time football coach from way back, or a coach who coaches him on how to get a get a concussion,

Tracy Harwood 30:45
right? Well, there you go. Yeah, it's brilliantly absurd stuff, some of the best comedy I've seen for years and years. I you know what? I don't know how you didn't send this to us before. I mean, it must be right up there on all the all the different channels I found a bunch of links that I'll share with you on, you know, the the characters, the fandom, right, all the Canon that's sort of grown up around it, and also the Reddit links that I found as well. Perhaps

Ricky Grove 31:16
we can also collaborate in coming up with his workflow, yes, with that, be super helpful for people who might be interested in trying to recreate this on their own. That was one of the great things about early machima, is that people would come up with a method, and then they'd share it, and everybody else would try to do it. So we'll see what we can do

Phil Rice 31:39
when you guys do that, when you guys do that, get it to me, and maybe I'll, I could create a video of showing it like I'll take, I'll take a little scene and try it, and I'll use the exact tools that he does, a marvelous idea, if nothing else, To show how difficult to do it, you know? Yeah, right, okay, Tracy, because I'll be amateur at it. I'll contact

Ricky Grove 32:05
you outside of this, and we'll set that up for the show notes. Oh, for this episode, super brilliant.

Tracy Harwood 32:11
I've got nothing else to say. It was such a cracking pic. Well done. Loved it. Thank you

Ricky Grove 32:16
all for your comments. Man, oh man, I am telling you this neural biz channel, and his method of using AI and his own writing to create things is just revolutionary. It's just remarkable. And I'm so glad you chose this, Phil, you've sent me off on a direction that is so rewarding and rich for my imagination. And also, you know that humor gland has been shrinking a little bit recently. You have expanded that thing, and so I'm going to have to have the doc go see the doctor about it. It's just burgeoning. Thank you so much. You're very welcome. Well, that's it for our show today. It was a neural vis YouTube using AI to create one man band style videos that are absolutely hilarious and highlighted by brilliant and excellent writing. Please let us know if you're neural viz. Contact us at talk at completely machinima.com or if you have comments or ideas or even corrections, if we've misunderstood something, use talk at completely machinima.com to let us know about it. Thank you all for watching. Thank you, Tracy, Phil and Damien for your interesting comments, and we'll see you next time bye bye, bye bye.