Phil Rice 00:44
Hello and welcome to And now for something completely machinima podcast about machinima, virtual production and related technologies. My name is Phil rice, and I'm here with my co hosts, Damian Valentine and Tracy Harwood. Ricky Grove, white courtesy phone, Ricky Grove, white courtesy phone, just in case he's in the area, we can have him pick that up. I actually thought of that, that excuse for Ricky like I thought of that a few weeks ago, and thought, Okay, next time he's absent, I'm going to use that. And then I took that, me saying Ricky Grove white courtesy phone. And I ran it through 11 labs. So it's a British lady saying Ricky Grove white courtesy phone. Ricky Grove white courtesy phone. And then I took that sample and I put it into a song in suno, and the only lyric prompt was Ricky Grove, white courtesy phone, And this is what it sounds like.

Tracy Harwood 01:49
Ricky Grove, you

Phil Rice 02:03
white courtesy phone. So yeah, Ricky, we miss you, but we're not going to let we're going to take advantage of the opportunities to broaden our horizons and be a little creative with it. So please come back to us, or this will get worse. All right, so this week, speaking of getting worse, this week is Tracy's pick, and I think I smell a rat. Tracy tell us what it's about.

Tracy Harwood 02:33
Oh yes, I pretended to be a rat, npc and GTA RP and trolled the entire server. And this is by putter uncut, and it was released couple years ago. Actually, it's a couple of years old, but my God, when I discovered this, it just made me laugh. This is a guy doing a Let's Play as a rat NPC in GTA five, during which he trolled a server where no one knew him as anything other than a rat, NPC, but he's armed and dangerous, and his behavior is clearly terrifying for others, playing the game in their own way, doing doing stuff as they Would, going about their own business. Now, putter has numerous other videos of a very similar approach and has a massive audience. This one's amassed 2.8 million views at moment. His latest one released about a month ago, is actually of him trolling the city as a South American hornbill bird. NC. Why would you do that? But yeah, and what's fun about that one? If you really want to laugh at that one as I mean, these are crazy, he's stealing people off the street and carrying them off and just seemingly dropping them onto the tops of buildings so you can watch them jump off. It's just ridiculous. He's actually got a couple of channels dedicated to GTA gameplay. He launched his channels in about 2014 I think it would be fair to say that the animal series of videos is rather typical of his style of what are really described as entertaining trolling videos, where he likes to target griefers who disrupt others experiences in the game with this sort of witty commentary, this kind of creative editing and and what is described as a focus on the free aim mode in GTA. Well, in this one, the first thing we learn in the rat video that is that the rat can die bloody horrible deaths. It can also ride motorcycles and unicycles. It can drive cars. Cars. It can carry guns and knives, and he has a voice, and this particular guy's voice is absolutely hilarious. He's part narrating his rat persona, and he's part explaining what it is he's doing, where he's going, and what he's trying to achieve in the interactions that he's having with these other game players. So in this video, the first thing he does is visit a cinema, but there's no one there. And then he tries to frighten a bystander, but without much success, his first main attempt to do something odd is to jump into a vehicle, and that's where the fun really starts. Two bystanders jump into the back, and then they're off driving around the city. Well, he drives to the top of a multi story car park, and then launches himself off it, and then he gets the cops called on him simply for driving over the edge of a car park. I mean, come on, unfortunately, when, when I think he tries to pull a gun on the cops in order to, sort of, you know, really stir things up, I think you're then in the realms of how he's achieved this being revealed because the game crashes, which is actually quite a letdown watching this. So, you know, unfortunately, when he then resumes the game, you kind of lost the momentum a little bit. However, the worms turned. He's being chased by gun toting players who shoot at him and and then eventually steal his ratty body and shoot him again. And sure enough, by the end of it, no one no one seemed to know he was an actual player. You know, this is really quite crude machinima. There's a third person camera, and obviously using a mod that is far from perfect in its animation quality, but that's its beauty, really. Videos basically, this, let's play, but has, in fact, been edited, actually by another player called sush. It's done in a rather rough esthetic style, perhaps just taking out maybe some of the setups to keep it to an authentic sort of representation as possible. But what I actually really enjoyed is, is the sound editing with lots of kind of additional components alongside the narration. Now, I don't know whether that's recorded during the main gameplay or afterwards, but I it, I would say it feels like the narration bit is done during the gameplay and then just added to or tweaked with some other fun sounds to enhance it for comedic effect in, you know, afterwards probably either way, I think it's it's great for what it is. It's just a little bit of lad GTA five humor with this kind of unanticipated NPC in a game that's clearly intended to cause as much mayhem and backlash from others as possible, probably giving them as good as they give others. So it's a little bit Robin Hood like in its overarching mission. I think I picked it because, notwithstanding that rat cam short that we covered a year or so ago. I've not really seen many mashimas that focus on this type of approach. There could, however, I suppose be many of them, probably a lot of them created by this guy. I don't really know, but yeah, that's my view. What did you think? Go ahead. Amy,

Damien Valentine 08:41
I started. So I watched the whole thing through, and I was struggling to listen to what he was saying, because I was laughing. So, yeah, the idea of playing as a rat just to see how other players are going to interact with you. And he said he he tried it on a different server, but people figured out he was a rat because his name was above the character. So he found this server where that wasn't possible. There must be some kind of setting or mods on the server so people wouldn't instantly know he's a rat, and it gave him a lot of freedom to experiment and see what did he get away with before anyone did actually figure out that he was a real player controlling this creature. At the beginning of it, he starts up in the mountains somewhere, and you can see the city off in the distance. And he's obviously got a very long way to go before he's going to interact with it. Find anyone to interact with. So immediately, climbs, tries to jump down, and he dies. So he tries that several times, and then kind of cuts to being in the he gets on a motorbike. So you've got this little rat driving a motorbike trying to get to the city. Of course, the rat's been in quite. A fragile creature in the game, one tap and you're, he's dead. So I don't know how many times it took him, because he kind of cuts through being in city at that point. And he's, I was thoroughly entertained by the way he was kind of sneaking around. And you could see a couple of the players on the street, and they completely ignored him, because they just looked as a background rat walking around the city. They didn't realize he was doing anything, and at that point he was just exploring. Because when he you find that group of people outside talking, and he gets their attention, and then he gets in the car, and they start saying, well, that rats just driving the car. Let's get in and get in and see what happens. They all get in, and the car starts moving, and they don't really know what to expect, where they're going, or anything. Yeah. And yeah, the whole thing is just that.

Tracy Harwood 11:02
It's great. It really is good. I think, I

Damien Valentine 11:05
don't think we've looked at a machine, but quite like this before. It's definitely a unique take, but it's fun as well, because he, he's not, he's trolling them, but not in a way that's nasty. I hope the people who Charles see this video and have a good laugh at it? Because, you know, it sounds like he was having fun, and I think they obviously were willing to have fun by getting in the car with this mystery rat. So, you know, that's been up for it. It's not exactly a cinematic masterpiece, but it's not that kind of machinery it's meant to be. He's playing it live and recording what he's doing and having fun with it, which is exactly what it's meant to be. And it works really well, and it is really funny. I need to check out some of his other videos to see what else he's done. Well,

Tracy Harwood 11:54
check out the bird, because he reckons it took him 15 hours to get from wherever that came from, you know, on an island to the city 15 hours. That's a long trip

12:05
again.

Phil Rice 12:07
Yeah, it's a really daring approach, really the I think, in the same way that, you know, doing truly live television was always a little dangerous, you know, and it feels that way, like that, he really just, he spawned in as a rat on this particular server and just started recording. And yeah, there's, there is some editing going on, but he didn't have any idea what was going to happen. And I think a lot of the a lot of people who have attempted similar genres, they kind of have it. There's things are planned out to a degree, or, if not, they're edited to look as if they were. And this one has kind of a freeness to it that makes it very makes it very unusual. You know, the fact that things clearly didn't go as planned, that this wasn't staged. There's an authenticity to it, that some of it's with the scrappiness or the glitchiness of the mod at times or whatever, or just the unpredictable ways that that things would go, and that's very daring. I have, I have a tough time relating to that, because I tend to be when I'm making a video or production, I really want to know what's coming and control what's going on to a degree and stuff. So this is it's, it's interesting to watch from that point of view. The passengers in the car moment was my favorite by far. Yeah, like, I had to go back and watch that again, because I did. I laughed out loud when he gets in the driver's seat. And so they just all get in, all but one, one guy got left behind. But they all just get in the car, and then they're just conversing, like, where we go. I can't believe this is happening. That rat is driving the car. I don't know what the consequences on a GTA role playing server, which is what this is, which is a very popular use of of GTA five right now, by the way, those those servers where it's you're not playing the typical GTA game. It's not about heists and such. It's literal role play, like long term stuff, like to be a shopkeeper or just hanging out with your friends or whatever. It's not the it's not typically, it's not what you'd expect from GTA five. It's become there are people who are there's a whole community of people who are playing GTA the same way that people play Second Life, exactly, yeah, yeah, oh, oh. And it tends to be kind of some it depends on the server, but some surfers really emphasize an immersive in character, role play, and people will just stay in character and operate in character. Character the whole time. It's really wild. So yeah, that's that's interesting. As far as how this was you were wondering some things about how this was filmed and with with regard to sound and things like that. So the typical setup for something like this is that it's that the video and audio are captured, and it depends on if it's if it's a software setup, and you're talking about software like OBS, which can do screen capture stuff like that. Some people use third party hardware that takes a video output from their computer and captures everything that way through HDMI or something, for something like this, especially since it's going to go to another person to do the editing, typically they're going to capture the stereo output from the game. So all the in world ambience and sound effects and all that, and probably voice chat is in that as well, all merged into one, and then on a separate audio channel is the narrator. So I do, I too. I think it was recorded. The narration was recorded live, but it was recorded on a separate audio thing. So then when the person goes to do the audio mixing, they can balance the levels on those and then, and then sound effects, very common for someone who is hired as a YouTube editor, they've got a whole, whole library of sound effects and little musical add ons. If you've ever, if you've watched Grace still plays, his editor clearly has a library of like these meme sound effects and meme little musical themes. And those are all added after the fact. And that's, that's, that's the case here too, like, so some of these sounds are there to enhance the the experience of watching it. So that's typically how that works. Yeah, I tend to. I watched the whole thing. You put a note on it, being very gracious, saying you don't have to watch this whole thing because it's, you know, it's not, it's not a tiny video. But I ended up watching the whole thing me too. It didn't really, it didn't hold my interest 100% of the time. And some of that's because there were moments like the crash where, like you said, the momentum got disrupted. And

Damien Valentine 17:13
actually thought the crash is kind of funny. It adds to the it sells something about the authenticity, about this being a live thing? Yeah,

Phil Rice 17:21
that's true. That's, that's a good point. That's, that's a fair point. Yeah, I, again, my personal taste as a creator and as a watcher is a little bit more planned and controlled scenario. So, you know, I pretended to be a rat npc and tried to do X. And so there's a mission, so to speak, and so there's an objective, and but I totally respect his approach is, I'm connecting in as a rat. Let's see what the hell happens. Yeah, right, and that's going to result in a very different video, which, which is, which is what we see here. So, yeah, it's an interesting phenomenon. He's got, he's got, uh, quite a few viewers on it, and and seems to really enjoy this kind of thing. I certainly like this uh, approach to to, let's call it, GTA trolling, much more so than the one we reviewed about a year ago, which was, I think the the Japanese made one where it was the guy that found the glitch that made all the cops fall to their death. You know, there's nothing morbid about this. This is very upbeat. This is very kind hearted trolling. And, yeah, like, like you pointed out, Damien, it's it, it's trolling, but not, not really at anyone's expense. Like, he's not, he's not trying to ruin the game experience, yeah,

Speaker 1 18:45
for the other players around tax players, quite

Phil Rice 18:49
the opposite. I think, I think his implicit objective in this video is, I'm going to give these people something they're going to remember like they're never going to forget this encounter with me as the rat, yeah, and so that was his objective. Well, that can lead to really good things. You know? That's, that's a positive thing. There's all kinds of of trolling, or, I guess they call it griefing when it's really negative, right? That it just, there's, there's been time, there's been time periods where online or multiplayer gaming for a particular game is completely ruined by the persistence of that griefing, where people are just there to sabotage the experience. This is the other end of that spectrum altogether. He's He's there to make it, to create a fun experience, not just for the viewer, but for whoever he happens to interact within the game. And

Damien Valentine 19:41
the clever thing about it was he didn't actually say a single word to these other players, no. So that communication was done just by him getting in the car and giving them the opportunity to get in if they wanted to. And actually, they did.

Tracy Harwood 19:58
He did scream a couple of points. Things, didn't he? Oh, he

Phil Rice 20:01
played a sound effect. Sound Effect is hilarious. It is. There's a a reel and a meme going around that shows a groundhog up on its hind legs, like standing up, and it's doing this, this Allen, they do this piercing, like, it's a really high pitched noise that they make to call to others. Well, someone has taken the video of a groundhog doing that and put this man screaming to lip sync with it, and he used that sound. So it's the sound of a groundhog with this human, human like scream, and that's the sound effect that he used. I thought that was great. There was always a chance someone would recognize it, but they didn't. They didn't appear to specifically understand the sound. They just says, Did you hear that? Oh, that was so great. Yeah, that was so great. Yeah, so yeah. Really entertaining pick and kind of off the beaten path for us. I appreciate that. Yeah. All right. Well, that is Yeah. So that's our video for this week. If you have any comments for us, leave them in the comments or drop us an email at talk@completelymachima.com my name is Phil rice, and on behalf of my co host, Tracy and Damien,

Tracy Harwood 21:20
Ricky Grove, white, courtesy, film you.