Phil Rice 00:44
Hello and welcome to and, oh, yeah, are we good? We got the grid, yep, okay, hello and welcome to And now for something completely machinima podcast about machinima, virtual production and related technologies, I'm here Phil rice. And why do I always mess that up? I'm Phil rice, hi, and I'm here with my co hosts, Damian Valentine and Tracy Harwood, hello, hello. Ricky is not here this week. He accidentally joined a cult thinking it was a Pilates class, but we hope you'll return to us next week. Alright? So this week, we've got another film pick, and this one is Damien's, and it's a little bit of Starfield, which I'm excited about. So Damien tell us about

Damien Valentine 01:31
it, right? So last month, I, uh, looked at a Skyrim the cinema. I thought, well, what is what people doing with Starfield? Because obviously that game has been out for you. Been out for nearly two years, and we were excited to see the share of potential for it, because it was these big open world sci fi game. Now, the player reception to Starfield hasn't necessarily been quite as strong as Skyrim, but, you know, people are still enjoying the game. They're still having fun with it. And I, I came across this video, actually, the creator has two videos, and I found the other one first, but I like this one better, but the other one was newer, which is why it came up on my feed. And it's, it's kind of a fake trailer, and I say that because it's advertising something that doesn't actually exist. But it's like a mod or a DLC trailer, and it's kind of showing off the world and some of the things you could do, and it's like a slice of a character's life in space, and I thought that was very nicely done. Now the other video is more of a action. There's kind of more action in it, but it's done in a way that doesn't it's very static, like there's lots of talk over it, but the you'll get still shots, or you don't see many people running around or anything. It's all frozen, but the camera moves through like it's paused. I think that's the the camera mod that we've discussed before. That like a universal camera mod. I forget the name of it, but it works in many different games, and like with photo mode, it's like a modified photo mode, or something like that. So I think it's a side effect of this, but this, this one things move, and so you feel like stuff's happening in it, even though it's a very brief video itself. And you get a bit for it's called the dark side of Luna, and at the very end there's a nice little touch of the Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd appears in it. So it's like a trailer for an adventure or some kind of experience in the game, either model DLC. But that model DLC doesn't actually exist. Now, there's some mods used to make this, but that's not what it's advertising. And I just really liked it. I thought it's nice to see something this good, made with Starfield, even though it is very brief. I kind of wish it wasn't just to tease the trailer for something. I wish there was more to it like so if you want to make a movie or something, do it like this and tell us the story. But it made me want that, rather than, Oh, I kind of wish this is there's not much to this. So, you know, I'm trying to say, like, it made me want more of this, rather than, it's not enough. Did you say he's

Tracy Harwood 04:32
got a website? I did not. He's got a website, and he's promoting this as a trailer for something that he's going to, I think, sell on the website. So it kind of implies to me that actually, it is an, it is a teaser for a product that is going to follow. I think, I mean, why else would you do a website? Yeah,

Phil Rice 04:57
that makes a little more sense, doesn't it? Yeah.

Tracy Harwood 04:59
So it's. It probably really is a teaser trailer.

Damien Valentine 05:04
Okay, that's good, because then I'm quite intrigued by this, so I'd like to see more of it.

Tracy Harwood 05:10
Shall I go next? Because I got a few thoughts. I actually thought it was quite an interesting portrayal of Starfield. But the very first thing that caught my attention after I watched it is like, I really like the pacing of it, but there were a couple of comments that that just sort of thought made me think, yeah, okay. It's one where somebody was saying, yeah, there's nothing to do in Starfield. And basically the comment was, yeah, this because they they kind of lack imagination. And then a comment in relation to that was along the lines of people who say there's nothing to do in Starfield and No Man's Sky fanboys who have 10,000 hours in the game of just walking around in barren planets, visiting the eight points of interest they placed over them, and doing math puzzles in response. That's quite funny as a as an observation of what what this is, and it kind of made me think what it what it actually was doing, really, as a machinima, it's got quite a nice vibe. I thought it's, it's definitely representing the open world. Nature of it a bit of a creator paradise, is clearly what he's trying to portray here. But evidently, also it's a call out for a modding community. I would suggest, in order to sort of push it, you know, make, make it sort of more sticky with it, with a creative community, I'd say, in order to extend whatever the storytelling is going to be. And it would seem that this creator is, is one of those that is probably those that is probably in the process of creating a mod or an environment, you know, part of the part of the story that he's expecting others to sort of tap into at some point in order to tell their stories. That's the, that's the sense of what I got from from it, and I guess we'll see how well he does at doing that in due course, whether he's successful in inspiring others, I would say it's, it's, it's almost certainly going to lead to a few of the usual sort of stories that we see of space operas and whatnot, you know, the stories of isolation, social dramas, terror, Ally and kind of thing. What intrigued me about this one is that, yes, it is certainly visual stunning, and the scenes are well selected, even if what I think it actually shows is really just a tech demo or an environment demo, made me think about the voices, because a lot of it is driven, you know, you don't see an awful lot. There's just, it's there's just voices that you hear, and the voices are done really well, there's a male voice that dominates it, I would suggest. And it's a kind of cross between a Carl Sagan and a James Earl Jones. And then there's a woman's voice. Maybe one of the voice actors from the game, I don't know, and it made me think, well, maybe those voices have been created using something like 11 labs. I'm not really sure, because it doesn't really say that in any of the description, but I'd guess that would be how that's been done, rather than using actual voice actors to talk through what's going on. I quite liked that. That sort of aspect of it literally teasing some intriguing stories of adventure over adversity kind of thing. But it made me think with such an iconic like voice, it made me wonder about how well these two voices fitted together or fit together. And in the end, I kind of thought, I'm not really sure they do, and I'm going to be intrigued to hear what you say on that in a minute. The male voice is so strong that the female voice is just really quite simpering and whiny, really. And I think it very much positions the female side of the tale as this kind of helpless character, you know, maybe somebody tripping from one near disaster to another. It's really, you know, setting it up to be kind of, I don't know, a bit, bit anti female trophy. I don't know, really, I just thought that was a bit odd. I really like the change of editing pace at the end. I thought that was really cool, you know, the way that it was kind of a bit slow burn on the beginning, and then the whole thing zoomed past in under point five of a second before it finished. I thought, you know, got that last little bit just made me sit up a bit. And I thought, yeah, if you'd have had a bit more pacing on the first part of it, maybe that would have worked a bit better as well. But I have to say, notwithstanding the comments I just made, I am actually looking forward to seeing what follows this from this creator. Because I don't know if you you guys remember, but certainly I was really disappointed that the barely not monkeys crew who used Star Citizen with their with their short they never got to make a second episode. And if nothing else,

Phil Rice 11:07
that one called again, oh, starts with an A is it a drift

Tracy Harwood 11:12
or a drift? A drift? A drift? Yeah. Well, if this is anywhere close to that, and certainly the female characters voice was a little bit like that? Yeah, I'm up for that. I think that would be quite cool. What did you think?

Phil Rice 11:31
All right, so the voice is almost certainly 11 labs or one of its competitors, but they're good quality. So I think 11 labs. I think the reason that they I didn't quite read quite as much into the mismatch as you I don't think that. I certainly don't think the filmmaker intended no for that statement about females in general, right? I don't think that was the intent at all. But I can see what you mean. I think the reason for that impression is because the male voice is, it has this very like cinematic Narrator broadcast voice quality, like what you would see in a movie trailer, right? And hers is, first of all, it's just a normal voice. But then the EQ, clipped a little bit on it to make it sound like it's, you know, the astronaut transmission. And that tends to make a voice sound a little bit thinner as well. So that's the reason for for the difference. It would have been interesting to have in the in the the vein of a drift to have another character there. Now maybe the whole point of this was that she's alone, and has to solve this alone. But I think if to get that sense of equal footing, or that type of thing, that would have been the way that that could be handled is that that that, and it also helps with trauma too, that there's, there's someone else, there's something at stake, besides just her to her, you know that that's, that's just Okay everybody, for everybody, if, if they're on their own, survival is, is a stake, sure, but you know, the idea that someone else's life is at stake, is much heightened drama and more interesting. I think naturally, visually, it's beautiful, and it made me immediately think of a drift. I haven't watched these side by side, but I dare say, the fidelity of the image in this is even better than what they got out of Star Citizen at the time. I mean, it's really good. It's really beautiful. The shot selection is very nice. That edit, the fast edit there at the end, even though I can't make any narrative sense of it, and maybe I'm not meant to. Maybe it's meant to be ambiguous, but, but it was effective, like it was oh, huh, so nicely done, and a sound, the what they did with sound during that edit. It all just that was a that was a pro move, for sure. The writing's a bit weak, even just on a basic grammatical analysis. And I don't want to be a grammar nerd or anything, but you know, humanity's path has not come a long way. Humanity has the path doesn't come anywhere, and then you don't follow that up with much more than we thought. So again, I could, I'm a nerd with that so, but I say that dude partly in contrast to a drift, that one of drift drifts strengths was the writing. It was a very plausible and believable conversation. Maybe. Maybe this was, maybe this was Boy, this will really, this will really insult the filmmaker, if it's not true, but maybe English isn't their first language. And so there was an attempt to translate. And you know, little things like that can get missed by especially by auto translation. It's not bad enough to be like that. They just popped it in Google Translate or something. But it's just, it's just not quite there. So the ideas were generally conveyed well. But the thing is, is that it seems like every few months this, this idea of artful ambiguity comes up, right? And that it's kind of a fine line on how, how mysterious you can afford to be before it feels like maybe they just don't know how to communicate very well. You know, I'm saying, and I'm not making that statement about the piece, but I'm saying it really teeters on that line of was deliberately ambiguous or just not well thought through. And I don't know it's gorgeous. I'm not narratively. I'm not at all intrigued, because I don't feel like that a hook really took, you know, yeah, but, I mean, I would love to see more stuff that looks like this, for sure. And it makes me, you know, Starfield is still on my Steam wish list. I keep waiting for something more than a $10 discount, and it's still a $70 game. That's a lot, that's a lot of cheese. So but I do want to play with this game. I think it's, it's gorgeous. I think some of the some of the scenes down on some of the planets, like the cities and such the architecture and everything in the skies, it's just gorgeous, and even the open areas of the planets. So it cracked me up that, yeah, that there's not tons of comments on this yet, but it did crack me up at the comment section quickly and inevitably turned into a star field versus No Man's Sky contest, right? Because that's been going on since the day Starfield was released. It's like the thing most talked about on No Man's Sky or Starfield videos is how much better one is than the other. That cracked me up, because I because I have no dog in that hunt at all. I don't care. I intend to both own both games. I waited for the right sale on No Man's Sky, and I'll wait for it on this too. I don't really play the games avidly, though, so I don't really have any. I don't have a highly informed opinion, and I don't really care enough to compare the two. I think that there's room enough in this world for two science fiction, you know, large universe exploration games, maybe even more. You know, it's not just these two. So there's, there's, there's, there's a number of these, you know. So anyway, yeah, it's, it's, it's definitely an impressive reminder of the lighting. The lighting in particular really stands out the way that, you know, her space suit has a lot of tech on it, so a lot of different surfaces made of different materials, and the way that the light reflects off it and stuff. It's just, it's gorgeous. It in the same way that that was the most impressive thing to me about the most recent GTA six trailer was the lighting office surfaces. I kind of made a joking reaction to the the character that we, you know, are jokingly surmising that Ricky might secretly be the voice for Yeah. Well, one of the, one of the opening shots is this just magnificent shot of him with no shirt and the chest and just the light coming off it, and that the skin just looks so real. He's

Tracy Harwood 19:13
got too much baby oil on. I'd say, yeah, yeah. But it

Phil Rice 19:18
was, it's, it's, I mean, throughout it, it's even my son, who's, you know, the younger generation, and I think has a even keener eye for realism in games. Said, Man, most of this doesn't even look like a video game. And then at the end of the trailer, you see the little fine print that the whole thing was rendered on a PS five. So not even using the full blown GTX extra shaders, all that stuff that can make stuff just, I mean, you see, if you've ever seen any of the cyberpunk videos or even GTA five, with those latest shaders, it's stunning, like it's crazy, how real it looks. Um. So this isn't quite there, of course, but it's not meant to be. But the point is, is that it's, it's, it's just beautifully, beautifully lit. I love the shots. That moon is just magnificent. The texture on it is just so detailed. That one wide shot where the full moon is in view is just breathtaking. Yeah? So, yeah, I haven't I again, I haven't dabbled with Starfield yet to know firsthand what the Machinima possibilities are. But, you know, I'm, I'm optimistic. When I see stuff like this, it's like, okay, so maybe, maybe mission accomplished in terms of the video, right? That fit, if it's supposed to get people, he says in the description, doesn't he? This is a fan made piece where you can envision potential stories with a cinematic flair and a life like appearance. Yeah, sold. It worked like, I mean, I cannot like his particular story or not. Maybe it just didn't intrigue me very much personally. But in terms of what his objective was, his state of objective, it worked because I am it's a good reminder, yeah, I want to, I want to explore and see what can be done with this. So yeah, I guess it's, you know, to that degree, it's success. But I'm certainly glad you shared it with

Damien Valentine 21:19
me. I would recommend check out his other video, which is, it's very similar to this, okay, but it's based on Mars and some of like the criminal underworld that lives there.

Tracy Harwood 21:32
I wasn't aware that Musk had made it that far yet.

Damien Valentine 21:39
Well, I uh, but yeah, check out his other video. I kind of like the loon this one better, but the Mars One is good as well. Um, that's kind of what makes me feel like it's not actually promoting a mod, because the other one's called starfields Red Devil revival, and there's only like a four month difference between the two. So if there was going to be a lunar mod, he would have released it between that and this. But so I feel like this, he like what Phil was saying. It's just a way to spark people's imagination and imagine what stories could be going on with what has been shown in this trailer.

Phil Rice 22:25
Yeah, he proceeds both videos. Damian with the Xbox logo. Are we? Are we to assume, from that day, he has captured the footage for these on an Xbox? I

Damien Valentine 22:36
would imagine he's, no he's, I would imagine he's using as a PC for it, buddy. I think he's trying to make it look like an official Oh, okay.

Phil Rice 22:46
Like I remember I slapped that kind of joke version of the the Disney plus logo on the end of my hair to the Empire. Yeah. Okay, so that kind of thing, okay, yeah, because

Damien Valentine 22:56
it's got, it's got the logo on it, and the way the the title comes up at the end. It feels like what you'd expect from an official trailer.

Phil Rice 23:06
Yeah, both of them are that way, and it does say Xbox, xs and PC. Okay, yeah, I didn't notice the end one as much. Well, yeah, great pick. I hope you'll keep an eye on on Starfield machinima for us in the future. Damien, because I Yes, it's an untapped resource so far, largely, yeah, right, it's such a I mean, you know, Bethesda doesn't really do anything small. Do they? They may not do things perfect, but they go big. And this game is a big deal and has a lot of if it's anything like the other Bethesda titles, like like Fallout and Skyrim and stuff like that. They don't really make a big deal out of the fact that they are machinima friendly, not in the way that like rock star does, with an actual editor in there, and things like that. But these games are because they're so model. They really do have lots of potential. So, yeah, I hope, I hope we see, you know, it's conceivable that that somebody could, could craft a Mass Effect type story, like a story you might want to tell in Mass Effect, but you can't do this kind of stuff in Mass Effect, you know, it's not as model. So, yeah, there's, there's some, I don't know. I really think it's an untapped resource, because there's, there's a big appetite out there for, for, for indie sci fi. There's a channel out there. I can't remember what the channel is, called Dust films or something like that. Oh yes, it's all sci fi shorts. Yeah. And then there was that, that series of shorts that we reviewed, I don't know, a couple years ago and were puzzling over some of. How it was made. It was this anthology series that they just did these, these little sets of shorts. I can't remember what it was titled, but it was very, very impressive, and that they didn't use any of the tools we would have thought like we we thought, sure, it must be Unreal Engine or something like that. And it wasn't. It was, it was more traditional CGI tools, but it's very, I mean, independent budget and and it really blew up. So I think there's a, there's a good audience for this, for this stuff.

Tracy Harwood 25:38
Well, pick, great pick.

Damien Valentine 25:40
Yeah, very good. I see someone do a big epic or a big adventure story in Starfield, I think there's potential for it. It's just down to someone figuring out how to use the mods and

Phil Rice 25:52
to make it and maybe there's someone out there right now working on that, you know, these things, these things, these things, take time. And sometimes people work on this stuff, and they're not obsessed with showing every little bit they do, you know, on social media as they go, and all of a sudden they show up one day with a magnum opus. So we can, we can hope for that. Yeah, even some nice shorts would be nice, honestly, you know. So, yeah, yeah. Great. Pick Damian, thank you. Well, what did you audience members? What did you think of this? Let us know in the comments on this video, or wherever you're listening to this podcast, or you can email us at talk, at completely machinima.com on behalf of my co hosts, Tracy and Damian. My name is Phil, and we will see you all next time you.