Phil Rice 00:40
You. 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 one of your hosts, along with Tracy Harwood and Damian Valentine. Hello. Ricky is off finishing his final voice lines for Grand Theft Auto. I'm sorry. I wasn't supposed to. Wasn't supposed to, to give that away. More on that. A little bit later this episode, we're talking about the news of the month, and we're going to let Tracy kick things off for us. Go ahead, Tracy,

Tracy Harwood 01:21
okay, all right, I've got a few projects to start with in this month. First off, I'll start with AFK season three, Star Wars parody Super Cup, which was created in Unreal Engine five. It's almost an hour long, but from the very minute you start the video to, you know, to the end, it's a real laugh. I guess, Damon, you've been tuning into this one as well, have you?

Damien Valentine 01:50
Yeah, I haven't watched the Super cut, but I have watched the individual episodes as they were released. So, yeah, it is really good.

Tracy Harwood 01:57
It's very good. I'm always impressed with their work. So definitely catch that one up. Then next, for those of you enjoying Second Life fantasy Fair, which is a celebration of creative practice and covers numerous regions, I think this time around, there were 18 regions in total. Well, prida Parks Studios has done her annual Walk through all of the different regions, and has produced a video must see, which, if you've got a couple of hours just there, you can kind of watch all the way through, or you can jump to whichever the regions takes you fancy as you please. So I'll put a link to that one in as well. She's great at editing these together, so it's definitely worth a look if you want to see what's going on. Second Life at the moment, there's also a fantasy, fantasy fair Second Life channel on YouTube, which I'll point you to as well, because there are quite a lot of films that were submitted to the film festival machinima competition, which I think was hosted by Chantelle Harvey. So those videos are worth watching if you want to catch up with the sorts of work that people are creating in Second Life at the moment. And then, as Phil said right at the beginning, the ubiquitous mention of the GTA six new trailer release. Well, it's just a teaser, because, of course, alongside its release. They also stated that the game itself isn't going to be released for another year, another year. I really hope it's going to be worth the wait for everyone. Got to say, though, looking at it from, from my perspective, the esthetics are really just quite gorgeous. I mean, it's, it's, there's a, I think there's a real juxtaposition with the glossiness of the esthetic and the, no doubt, brutal content. So I guess really, what we can expect to see is quite a lot of more avant garde films that are sort of pushing that juxtaposition around a little bit. And then, I don't know what you think, but that character, in the first few seconds of that video teaser, they are definitely, that's definitely Ricky. I think Brian is that character. And it, you know, not only does it sound like Ricky, it actually looks like Ricky, too. And then I had to check if it is Ricky, and needless to say, he's under NDA, so he can't say anything, and it's not being announced. So I guess we'll have to wait and see and ask him properly when we next, when we next, catch up with him. What we

Phil Rice 04:36
what we do know for sure is that the magnificent chest and abs of that character were definitely modeled after Ricky. But what we're not sure about is whether Ricky did the voice. So we'll find out.

Damien Valentine 04:49
Yeah, I can imagine it didn't look the full body scan. Yeah. I might actually have to tone it down just a little bit, yeah, yeah, yeah,

Tracy Harwood 04:55
yeah, yeah. And I do you know what I imagine? I don't know if you remember this episode. But a couple of months back, Ricky definitely had the same, you know, mustache and beard with the same cut that's on that character. It's 100% him without doubt. We'll take we'll take straws on this one, I think, in due course. Okay, so, yeah, that's that. Then I wanted to just highlight man slayers release of a nice sky room short, which is called beware the daughter of the troll, a Bard's Tale. And it's, it's a, it's a really good song. It's really quite stunning. Um, I'll put a link to it. You'll you can check it out yourself. And also another song by tocoso, which is called, if we all haul together, which is basically celebrating the community in elite, dangerous and that's another really lovely music video, which I really encourage you to have a look at. And then I wanted to draw your attention to the AI animation contest winners, which was hosted by curious refuge, supported by promise studios and Luma AI, I'll put a link. There's a few things to check out here. The one thing that I'll put a link to is the actual introduction to it and the preliminary shots, or, you know, teaser shots of the winning videos. But then you you need to go out and find the complete videos on whichever channels they had something like 700 entries from all sorts of different of all sorts of different genres. And in that show reel, you can see just the breadth of work and the quality of it that was submitted. And of course, the one thing that comes through from my, you know, overview of what they were looking at is the quality of the the writing and the editing, irrespective of the fact that it was generated. Stuff was generated with various different types of of AI. The AI just takes a back seat with all of these, these works, and it's worth looking at those examples, just to see how that was achieved. And then, in other AI news, I was interested to read that films being made with AI will, in fact, now be eligible for the Oscars, although, of course, I guess it's going to be on an individual, you know, case by case basis, and as I understand it, they're particularly interested on what the role of the human creators are in the process too. I'm not really surprised, of course, that that's going to be the case. It's inevitable that this will be the trajectory of it. It's just another set of tools for people to use. So of course, they're going to be used in in professional production practices as well. I think what we're going through at the moment are really just teething issues, and that specifically relates to the training models and the workflow in relation to developing those which I think clearly has to be sorted out. And it's not there yet by any means. But I think you know, be fair to say that you get teething issues with all sorts of tools that are in development. And I have no doubt really that these tool developers will want to address the concerns that everybody has in order to increase confidence in the projects that developed with the with the tools, as soon as possible, I'll put a link to the the news article that I saw on the Oscars story. I'll also put a link up to an example of a another generative AI tool that I saw being used, which in a film basically, which is so flawless in its application that you wouldn't even know that this wasn't a foreign language film. So this is a tool called flawless. It's a dubbing tool. It's been used or applied in this particular scenario to a Swedish sci fi. And, you know, it's now being released, I think for certain, certain cinema. I think it's probably in the US, actually, where it's being released, but you wouldn't even know that it's been dubbed from a from a different language. It's brilliantly done.

Phil Rice 09:17
What was that one called? Again?

Tracy Harwood 09:19
Well, the tools called flawless, flawless, AI, I think, and it's a, it's a dubbing technology. And the film is called, watch the skies. Got it. It's, it's interesting. I put a, I'll put a link to the trailer for it, and you'll see what I mean. And then runways, Gen four is also worth taking a look at. That's where you can basically, you know, use different style transfer techniques for a single character, which seems to work flawlessly from what I can see. And then Sora AI, yet another generative AI tool. I released an absolutely hilarious Red Dead Redemption to 1970 style western movie in the last couple of weeks. It couldn't be more bolanza Like if it tried. It's absolutely hilarious. It's my it's probably my favorite find of the month. And really, you know, just serves to remind me just what utter crap TV was in the 1970s it's gorgeous, though I love it. I really miss that kind of TV. Anyway, that's it for my updates this month. What have you guys got? Well,

Damien Valentine 10:36
as per tradition, it's happening for a while, and it's some sort of stopped, and now it's happening it's happened again. The day after we recorded our last month's recordings, a News episode, real illusion, announced character creator five. Now there's not a huge amount of information. There's like a teaser video, and there's a there was a website, and there was a special offer, which I believe has expired now, but it kind of shows off the latest in their character creation software they've got, and you see some very animated faces in that teaser. Like I said, not a huge amount of information available just yet, so I'm kind of intrigued to learn more about this. And I'm also wondering if this means that Ico nine is not only close behind, but probably going to be announced tomorrow after we record this, because that's the way realizations seem to operate. It's like they know,

Phil Rice 11:33
yeah, they've been coordinating it very, very nicely.

Damien Valentine 11:39
So yeah, if you are watching this or listening to it, and you already know about icon nine, well, there you go. But yeah, I'm excited for character creative five. I did not I haven't bought it yet, because maybe there'll be a special offer if you buy the two combined, because they did that last time. But I do look forward to learning more about it as they make more details available.

Phil Rice 12:03
Same here, yeah, I too, and I looked at their offer, and it was if I needed, basically, the offer was, you buy X amount of content from the content stores, and then you can get character, you know, basically you buy about as much as you would pay for character creator five in content. They'll give you character creator for free. So if you needed content at the time, that was a great that was a great deal. I didn't happen to need any content. And so, yeah, I'm in the same boat. Damien. I'm waiting for the inevitable. I think upgrade bundle for iClone and and character creator at the same time. And yeah, I hope it's, I hope it's pretty soon. Yeah,

Damien Valentine 12:43
me too. That was definitely a good bundle, though, if you're just getting started with character creator, because you don't get a whole lot of free content right available to you. So if you're gonna it gives you a lot of stuff to play around with when you're actually creating content. So

Phil Rice 12:59
we'll see what actually you know, what would be a smart if they want to revisit and choose it up with yet another bundle. Smart way to do that, I would think, would be you offer character creator five bundled with some of those really exceptional content packs that are specifically for character creator like, you know, the skin Gen and headshot and and some of those bundles of of stuff for characters. I'll bet we'll see stuff like that in the future too, as they continue to to market this so, but it does look very promising. It's very exciting looking.

Damien Valentine 13:34
Yeah, I hope so well so that one of the other reasons I held back was it's probably not going to be that useful until I clone nine comes out, unless you're using your a different software package entirely for your characters, because I don't know if they're going to modify or upgrade icon eight to support the new characters when it's probably better for them just to release a whole new iClone. So since I use icon, I would want to use the characters for it. So yeah,

Tracy Harwood 14:06
the next thing, John, before you, before you move on, what's the rationale for updating to new versions in this way?

Damien Valentine 14:16
Well, each upgrade is a huge leap forward in what the software can do. It's usually a performance and graphical stuff. They overhaul the engine. It was the is when I clone six was announced, and they showed some very impressive visuals that got me interested in it, because at the iClone five and movie storm didn't look that different. And obviously they're this their visual style, but in terms of actual quality, there wasn't huge difference. But when I saw I clone six, I thought it was allowed to move a while, yeah. And then I closed seven was, again, a huge leap forward, and eight was as well. So I. On, yeah, I

Phil Rice 15:00
agree. I agree. The the changes between version numbers on this pair of software suites that work together, character creator and I clone, they have for the past several times around, been substantial changes, not just incremental little tweaks and stuff, not Yeah, not just bug fixes. They're doing bug fix releases all the time. There's, they're still doing those for I clone eight, but it's, it's updated on a very regular basis, yeah, yeah. And they still

Damien Valentine 15:32
do sizable updates as well. Yeah, they still

Phil Rice 15:34
add functionality. That's right, yeah, that's right. So in the case of character creator five, Tracy, the it seems like that the the biggest innovation is just a more more fine level of control of the facial expressions, which means that you can get and also the way that certain parts of of the face are rendered, all in the direction of realism, so in the way that the visuals are enhanced, the way that eyes and face skins and all those things work, the net result is it's just a much more an even more realistic looking figure. And then as far as the what they call morphs, the changes that you can make and, and the which, which play into how well the facial animation is going to work, because all those facial muscles there's, there's been significant steps forward in this from, I mean, character creative force already quite impressive. Yeah, it's quite powerful. Yeah, and, and, and I was wowed by what they're showing us for five. So it's a big difference. Yeah,

Damien Valentine 16:45
yeah. Even, even though as good as character creative four is, there are still, I mean, obviously there'll be some limits with five, but there are still limitations on just how much face movement you can get. And you can look at footage from uh character creator four. And you can look at something like Unreal or blender, and you'll see that those characters, they have more so those software packages have overtaken character creators, so this will be their step to to at least catch up and probably overtake them. Yeah, right, right, right. Got you. If you want to have a good look at the neepin software for iClone, at least watch right Heir to the Empire, episode two and then episode three, because that's when there was a jump in the software between those two. And you'll notice the characters in two they they're very blocky. Well, not blocky, but they're very primitive compared to how they look in the following. Well, I've

Tracy Harwood 17:44
been following it. It's just that I, you know, it's hard to imagine, because I'm fairly certain we didn't we talk about the release of character creator four not that long ago. And

Damien Valentine 17:54
Weren't you it's been a few years? Yeah, it's been about four years.

Tracy Harwood 17:59
That's not that long ago. Yeah, and now we are on another, another version of it, and it's another leap forward, but with what exactly I'm guessing, it's going to be generative, AI aspects as well, I would have thought there's

Damien Valentine 18:12
probably going to be some of that, you know, for skin, yeah, tones and details and stuff like that.

Phil Rice 18:19
They've brilliantly integrated that technology into iClone already, in terms of the way that the animations work. I think we covered it on this, this show that that was a that was just an update to iClone. Now there is a paid version where you can get access to even more of these AI influenced or AI generated animations. But, I mean, it's just, it's really brilliant. It's not just, you know, hooking itself up to AI and letting it just do something that it was very thoughtful, the way that they implemented it. And that's, that's the part of this innovation that that excites me as an animator, is to see these technologies harnessed and put to work in controlled ways. The Go ahead, no carry on. I think I was actually done.

Damien Valentine 19:11
Oh, okay, I believe the headshot plug in, it was also AI based, not in a generative way, but it can read the photo that you put in, and it knows how to shape that over the character model, and it knows how to create the character model for head to match the picture. And you know, I imagine that's going to be an upgrade as well when this comes out. Because, again, it's really good. It's not perfect. You still have to play around with it to get it just right, but it's still a very powerful tool, right? So the next piece of news, it's a Star Wars video game that was announced at the celebration event in Japan. Now, I don't normally talk about Star Wars games being announced, but I think this one might have some machinima potential. It's produced by. A people who used to work on the XCOM video games, they've gone off and made their own company, and now they're making a Star Wars game, and it's an XCOM Star Wars game, and we've seen a couple of videos in the course of this show that I've made with that. And what attracted me as to this is a potential machine at all is they were talking about the they want the game to be very cinematic, so you're going to get lots of cut scenes which you can use, and you could probably modify and get in close with the camera. But the characters are going to be extremely customizable. So they got you have a main player character, and you can choose what they look like, and it doesn't have to be human. They're different alien characters, and you can choose different voices and different gender options and imagine different outfits. There's a set of characters that they've created that tell the story, and they're going to have some limited customize all options, which they didn't really go into. But you could also have your own team of characters that you create yourself, and they're going to be completely customizable as well. So you could probably create some kind of battle sequence with the characters that you want. You know, you have them look in the way you want, sound the way you want, dress the way you want, have them act out the scene. And you've got a way to create, you know, a Star Wars film. It's going to be set in the sort of the Clone Wars era. So it's not that useful for me with air to the Empire, which as in Star Wars law. My story takes place about 30 years later, but I'm sure someone will modify the game to replace those battle droids with stormtroopers, and then maybe that will be good for me. But I was very excited about this game, and that got me thinking about its machiner potential. So I thought I'd give it a shout out. There is a there's a short trailer, and then what I linked to in our notes here is the 40 minute panel where they talking about the game. That's where they talk about the customization. The little teaser trailer doesn't show any of that super Yeah. So look forward to finding out more about that as it comes out. It's not going to be released until sometime next year. So it's a agonizing weight, because I really want to play this. It's kind of like one of my favorite types of

Tracy Harwood 22:10
games. Oh, Andrew, compete with GTA six then, well, maybe

Damien Valentine 22:14
that's why they've decided to release it next year, and now the GTA six has been first back. Maybe they'll bring this one forward. Oh, you never know, yeah, but I think I'm gonna move with this game like Ricky is with El rings.

Damien Valentine 22:33
And then the last thing that came up was going back to iClone. It was a tutorial to create smart hair for character creator. Smart hair is hair that's designed not only to look realistic, but to be modular. So you can, instead of just having one set piece of hair that fits on the heads of the character and that's it, you can play around with it. So it might be, you can have a ponytail, or you can have some bangs, or you can have it long or short, and you just pick, mix and match the different bits of hair you want to create your own hair stuff, your character. And a lot of these smart hairstyles also have sliders. So if it's not quite long enough initially, you can, you know, adjust the length, and it will make it go longer or make it just a little bit shorter, however you want it to be, anyway. So this tutorial, it's a great little guide on how to make your own smart hair. And I thought, you know, I just going to share that as well, because hair is tricky to find. You know exactly what you want for your character, and you can't find exactly what you want. Maybe have a look at this, and I'll show you how to get started with it.

Phil Rice 23:48
Yeah, hair can get expensive, even if you've got some nice, smart hair kits, sometimes you just can't quite get what you need. And yeah, the this hair is not easy to build right and make it look great, and make the physics work properly and all that. It's a lot of work, and so it fetches a pretty decent price. So this, this, the idea of making that process of making your own accessible, is interesting, for sure. I had an uncle who had modular hair. He had like, a patch over here and back here, and that's probably my future as well.

Tracy Harwood 24:24
Lends itself to a few jokes, doesn't it?

24:28
Really, yeah, yeah,

Tracy Harwood 24:31
I will resist.

Phil Rice 24:34
Well, that's my Well, I'm super I've got a few things. So one of our more popular episodes of this show in the past, well, quite some time, is one where we covered the ai ai infused films of a creator called neural vis. And that's basically what came. That for us is that I decided I was going to examine the process, the basic workflow that neural vis followed, and try it out myself, just as kind of a learning experience and for fun, it's not the direction that I want to go with my filmmaking generally, but I was so impressed we all were with the output that he got, that I wanted to give it a shot and see, okay, what can be done with, you know, a pretty minimum spend. It's not a zero budget, but very low spend. And, you know, using the same tool sets almost all AI, except for the screenwriting. So anyway, I embarked on that the project is titled Dr the thought picture of Dr crispia, or Dr crispier thought picture. I don't have it in front of me. I can't remember which way I phrased it, but that will be released shortly after this episode goes live. So that's over on my YouTube channel. So check that out anyway. During the course of that, I kind of ended up going down a rabbit hole with some of these tools, because like with suno, for example, the music generator thing I did a one month subscription to that. It's $10 and I used like only about, I only needed about 10% of the generation credits that I had from that sooner to finish my film. It's very generous, like how many iterations they give you. And I was able to do dozens and dozens and then come up with the ones that I wanted for the soundtrack, for that little short. So I ended up with 90% of the subscription to just kind of play with. And as a musician, I have to tell you, I expected to hate suno like I expected to kind of thumb my nose up at it. I love it. We talked previously about the friend of mine who used to run Film music.io, and then he basically posted an announcement that he had given up on making music because he felt like that. The way things were going, music didn't have any value anymore, so he wasn't motivated to do so. Sasha and is his name, German composer, and he says, suno is just, I just love it. I make AI music with it. And then he started publishing his AI music on his new website. And I had commented here on the show that I've heard his own compositions, and then I've heard what he did with suno. And you know, the suno stuff was just not good. So I was I had every expectation to just be really disappointed with suno. I was not. It's a riot. It's a riot. If you're at all curious about it, do the one month subscription. They only lock. You don't have to lock in for a whole year or anything. If you've got money and you want to try it, do it, it is a riot, anyway, so I played around with it. I probably generated, I want to say, 60 keeper tracks, generating hundreds of tests. So it takes a lot of trial and error, and I tried different things with you can actually upload audio samples to to shape the way that the music goes. And you can, you can put in not just lyrics, but actual song structure for instrumentals or for lyric songs. And as a musician, I knew my way around that stuff really well, so I was able to get some just outstanding results from it. Well, during the course of that, that, of course, influenced that, then my YouTube algorithm was just full of suno because, because I'd been researching and doing all that stuff, and all my chat GPT feed was full of, you know, stuff I'd been inquiring about, you know, how to, how to, really, not hack, that's that's too, too smart a term for it, but basically how to really leverage and get the most out of it, and how to trick it, to get more of what I wanted and less of the randomness of the AI. And ended up getting some success, success with it. Well, this video that we'll share here turned up in my feed where someone says, AI copyright claimed my last video. And what he what he talks about in the video is that he used suno to generate music and put it in one of his videos. And I want to say that, if I'm remembering right, he it was just in the background. It wasn't even like i. Uh, foreground. It wasn't a music video, it was just he was doing a talkie, and that was underneath it, and somehow he got copyright flagged. So I wanted to outline a couple things related to that. And one is about the terms with suno. This is, of course, this is assuming that suno even has the right to convey these rights, which there's some who'd say that's in question. So you got to be a little cautious with how you're going to use what you output from it. But as far as suno themselves are concerned, the key thing is that you have the right to use your music on YouTube and for commercial purposes and pretty much whatever you want, as long as you generated that music under the paid subscription, and those rights extend beyond when you stop the subscription. So if you're subscribed, just as an example for the year 2025, any music that you generate while that subscription is active, you can use forever according to as far as suno goes, if you use something that you generated while under a free trial or under a free account, which you know, they do give you some credits on your free account that is not you have no rights over that. You can use it within suno. You can share it within there and do whatever you want to within it, but you can't use it elsewhere. So I don't know for sure if, if this guy followed that guideline or not, and that could be why his got copyright flagged. And the other reason it could be is that it could be that the the suno generation borrowed a little bit too much from one particular source in its training set, and it triggered something in YouTube's content ID system to think it was the same song. I don't know those ins and outs. It's really hard to to analyze. It might be a little easier to analyze if it had happened to me, because I could, I would know the song we're talking about. And, you know, could, could try some things, but anyway, it's something to be aware of and to be cautious about. But if you're, if you're at all curious about that, and it's, I mean, quite honestly, if you are at a point where you're comfortable with the acknowledged risk that the legalities around this tech is still not settled yet. If you're comfortable with that, you could, with a $10 subscription, go in there, and if you need background music regularly for YouTube videos, for example, you could generate a whole library, a very usable Music Instrumental or whatever. With that, a whole library that you would that would last you for years, it's really hard to resist like and even for me, who composes stuff myself, it's like, wow. I was really impressed by that. So now, mind you, you got to be patient, because nine times out of 10 it's garbage, like it just, there's something broken about the song structure, or it just, it clearly doesn't sound like a human was involved and all that. And you just got to try again, you know. But you can get good results out of it, but it's a lot of work, or a lot of a lot of misfires, but it's a very interesting tech. And if you really get to understand how the prompts work, there are style prompts. There's a lyric set where you can actually put song structure in brackets and things like that. And then if you also upload an audio sample, you can actually, you can actually have a lot of control over what gets composed. You can even upload like what I did is I found an old recording of a song that I'd composed in the early 1990s so it's very not great quality, right in terms of the instrumentation, it sounds like the 90s, and I uploaded that, and just used the remix function, which will listen to the old audio and then try and redo it with new instrumentation. And again, lot of trial and error, but it was able to do a pretty decent job with that.

Phil Rice 34:24
So anyway, it's interesting tech. I was surprised that I didn't, you know. I really expected to just hold my nose through the whole thing and think, all right, I'll do it because neural vis did, but that's that. But no, it's actually quite interesting. And yeah, I hope, I hope the the rights aspects of it Get, get sorted out, because it's, it's a very interesting tech and, you know, yeah, should, should musicians be worried? Is the question that I get a lot, and that I wonder about a lot. It depends, you know, it. If you're, if your bread and butter is making corporate background music for videos and stuff like that, yeah, you're in trouble. You're, you're, you're in trouble, you're the wagon wheel. And this is Henry Ford, really, it's over. This thing can do it just like that. Yeah. But if you want, if you're a composer who does you know, controlled and thoughtful compositions, or a songwriter who's actually not just trying to churn out the latest Taylor Swift clone, then you're fine. You're fine, because the limitations that we've noticed apply for that apply to chat GPT, in terms of, like, how terrible a screenwriter it is, and yet how great a code troubleshooter it is. Yeah, there are. There are clearly areas where these AIs. They're exceptionally good in very specific tasks, but overall, is this actually intelligence? No, absolutely not. 100% not, no chat. GPT can't even reliably do basic math or geometry, and it can't reason logically at all, at all. I play with it a lot, with some work related applications, and I have, I've worked with, experimenting with it, trying to write code and stuff like that. And, yeah, they're very, very clear limits to what it can do, what it can do. Well, it's like a savant, you know? It's amazing, but is it overall, anywhere near AGI Artificial General Intelligence? No, like anyone who says that right now doesn't know what they're talking about, really not, not with what we've been shown in the public. These tools are not that. They are imitators. They are remixers. These these tools, and you should leverage them, you know, to the degree that you're comfortable, but they're not going to replace Hans Zimmer. Give me a break. No chance. So anyway, that's my take on that. I'm sure. Yeah, go ahead. Well,

Tracy Harwood 37:14
I was going to ask you, did you take a copy of the terms and conditions for the month that you were using it.

Phil Rice 37:23
It actually, I have not done that yet, but the month expires in like, two days. So I'll do that before I before I close out the month,

Tracy Harwood 37:30
cuz it's, I think, be fair to say, they do have a habit of changing the T's and C's,

Phil Rice 37:35
yeah, I'll take a what I'm what my plan is to take a copy of that and also to do a screen capture of all the songs that I generated during that time as kind of a receipt, just in case it ever comes up. I don't really plan to use the stuff terribly widely, but some of it's some of it's quite usable, yeah, and and fun, so I'll be using some of it. Yeah. Anyway, all right, so moving on. There's a Minecraft speed runner guy, probably one of the more popular names in all of the Minecraft YouTuber world, who goes by the name of dream, and I've talked about one of his videos on here before. I can't remember what the context was, and maybe it was a part of a series of Minecraft stuff that we talked about, because we don't really see a great deal of actual Minecraft machinima. We have, we have seen some that are impressive, where it's Minecraft assets, but animated with Blender, and that's quite impressive looking. But actual Minecraft, it just, it's not really an engine that supports that well, that hasn't changed, but this this guy dream, did a very interesting April Fool's joke this year that made me think that there was a machinima tool that existed in Minecraft that I didn't know about that has The capabilities of one from the old quake two days called key grip two. So let me explain what that was. Yeah, key grip two is how I made the recams that I did back in the late 90s, how I made father frags best. It's what Hugh used to make. Strange Company used to make the second of the eschaton movies. It was the quake two demo editing tool of choice that would let you record a demo back then, when you recorded a demo in the game, it wasn't a video, it was a recording of a series of events that happened in the game, and then you could go in and tinker with those events. And there was a there was a tool where you could do that on a textual level, made by a guy named UI. Tell me if I'm pronouncing this right. Tracy, UI, Gerlich,

Tracy Harwood 39:48
yeah. UV,

Phil Rice 39:50
UV, okay, like, Yeah. He, he started making this tool back in the days of doom, even before that, and kept updating it all the way up through, I think, Quake three arena. Hmm, but that was that was for coders, right? And key group two gave a user interface to that experience. And you could actually look at the demo while you were editing it and all that. And so you could, for example, record a demo of your player going through it, and then go in and you could completely remove the player, make them invisible for the entire demo, or remove one of the monsters that you'd shot. And even though it doesn't make logical sense, but you could do things like that. Well, Dream released this video where, typically his videos are, it's him, the the award winning Minecraft speedrunner, trying to to reach the end of Minecraft, which is slaying the dragon, essentially, while one or more opponents players are in there trying to kill him, and the stakes are if they kill him, even once it's game over and his only way to win is to complete the entire game, which is, there's a lot of steps, if you know Minecraft than you know. So he's released a number of these videos over the years, millions and millions and millions of views, sometimes upwards of 50 million views. At his peak. He's past his peak now, I think. But at the time it was is stunning. He would release it, and within two or three days, would have north of 50 million views. So he's established this pattern of those are the types of videos that he tends to do. They're called manhunt videos, and well, he released this video on April 1 that says uh, Minecraft speed runner. I can't remember what the original was called, uh, but basically it was from his point of view, just like one of those videos, and he's talking on voice chat. But there's no one else there. There's no one else in the video, not on screen, not on the audio, and so it's this weird thing where it's like, is this some weird piece of performance art where he's just just talking and pretending that there's other people there, or what? And there were certain moments in the video that were really hard to explain how they happened, given that there was no one else present. And so I was looking at that through the through the eyes of Quake two and key group days, and thinking he's got some kind of tool that can actually record demos in Minecraft and then edit them, and he's using that to create this surreal experience where it's only him. I was convinced of that, and about a week later, he released he revealed that this was an April Fool's joke. And here's the actual video, and he releases the actual video, and it's the same thing, but all the players and the audio of him talking back and forth with the guys chasing him are all there. But then he explains how he did it, and it wasn't anything like I thought. He somehow rigged up his controls that he uses to move around in the game to simultaneously control two different computers, one of which his friends were connected to on the server, and one of which was just a standalone instance of Minecraft. But because of the way the minecraft minecraft seed system works, everything will generate exactly the same as it did. You know on another computer? So he basically played it once with his friends while this other computer was receiving all the keyboard and mouse inputs to and that's what he recorded for the first video. Is that other computer

Damien Valentine 43:56
still pretty clever, though

Phil Rice 43:57
it's wild? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't. There's still parts of it that I don't quite get because, like, if, if, at any point they interfered with his behavior, you know, if they dug out a block that was under him and he fell, how would the other game see that? I don't quite understand that part of it, but maybe I need to watch it closer and see maybe it just so happens. There was no such thing but, or, yeah, it was a very low tech thing. It kind of reminded me, Tracy of some of the stories we've heard from machinima festivals past where I didn't have a video capture card, so I, I taped my camcorder to the yeah to the screen with a shroud, you know, crazy stuff like that. This was like, in that type of vein. It was so strangely low tech but very clever idea. I thought, got you going. Then, yeah, it

Tracy Harwood 44:48
really had me. I guess you could say you were April Fool.

Phil Rice 44:51
Then, absolutely, yeah, absolutely. That

Damien Valentine 44:55
is the best kind of April Fool's Day, when it's something really clever. Yeah, right, but you don't. Not

Phil Rice 45:00
at someone's expense either. Yeah, just, just fun, yeah. So the last thing that I'll mention is unusual to me, because it came to me by way of Instagram and not YouTube. It's an animation posted by a guy on Instagram by the name of drunk physicist. Drunk dot physicist. And it's a, I actually am not 100% sure what it's made with, probably blender or something along those lines. I don't know, but it's, it's a strange almost Pixar, like lower generation Pixar, like animation. About these, these. It's called Mission delivery on a tiny planet. And it's, it's a little bit of a Gulliver, Gulliver and the Lilliputians, you know, theme, you know, big guy on this world with little people. I just, I decided to just share it, just on a news day, not as a regular pick, because I it's, I have no reason to think it's actually machinima or even virtual production. It's probably just a 3d animation, but it's a really funny, clever story, and it's really well made. So it's, there's probably a YouTube version for it as well. If so, we'll, we'll include that. But for now, I've just got the Instagram link. But anyway, so, yeah, that's, that's all I've got for this month. Great is that? Is that it from everybody? Yeah, I think so. All right. Well, that is it for this episode. We will be back next week to start talking about our film picks forthcoming weeks. And on behalf of myself, Tracy and Damien, we wish you a great day. We'll see you next time you