Phil Rice 1:27
Hello and welcome to And now for something completely machinima podcast about machinima, virtual production and related technologies. I'm here with my co hosts, Damian Valentine, hello and Tracy Harwood. Ricky Grove is out this week. I had a whole list of excuses, silly excuses for his absence, but I forgot to open them before Tracy hit record. So Ricky's just not here today. That's all. It's boring, but it's true. But we have lots of news to cover. And actually, I think what we'll do, Tracy, if you don't mind, we'll kick off with Ricky actually has some news that he wanted to discuss that we pre recorded. So why don't we go ahead and take care of that now and then we'll get back to the other news. So Ricky, go ahead.

Ricky Grove 2:20
I wanted to share with you all a just a few little news clips that I came across that I think are really interesting. The first of them is a new AI filmmaking tool that Google has put out called flow. And what's different about flow is that it's an actual effort by Google to create a tool, a filmmaking tool, that allows you that gives you the advantage of AI, text to video or image to Video, and then also the ability to create clips, organize the clips and create a scene, and they provide several examples to the process. And also they they commissioned about five different filmmakers to create unusual in it, interesting clips. And I checked it out. They have a free version of it, but really it's not very good. The second tier, I think, is about eight bucks. And then there's a, oh gosh, maybe a $25 a month kind of thing. The advantage of the $25 a month. One is that you get version three of their their engine, whereas all the others on version two. But I can't see the difference between the two, but, but briefly, the some of the features that they offer are camera controls. You have direct control over camera motion, angles and perspectives. You have a scene builder which allows you to edit your existing shots or redo them, reiterate them, create transitions. And then they have a big asset management section which stores all of your prompts make suggestions about how to adjust your prompts. And then finally, they have this thing called Flow TV, which is a collection of works by many other people who not only give you the clips they've made or the films they've made, but they also share all of the prompts and techniques that they used. We'll give you links to all of these things in our show notes, but I'm really excited about it, and I think it's going to be really innovative. It's the first text to video that actually created a format. That for you to to edit, create, edit and organize all of your tools. And also the guy, there's a fellow called Syrio s, I R, I O at YouTube, who has a really interesting channel about AI filmmaking. He uses flow as part of many other tools that he uses, and he has an excellent video called one image, full story sequence in which he creates an image and then he uses that image to create a character, set it in an environment, and then create a short segment with this character in the environment. He's very technical. He provides all of his prompts and and he's really, it's really quite interesting. I I think, I think you'll like it. The other thing I wanted to mention is a game that is really close to my heart, that steam is bringing out, or may have already brought out, if not, it's going to be very soon. It's called Tiny bookshop, and in this game, and it's a sort of cartoon kind of game, but it's realistic, and you play the proprietor of a traveling bookshop, and you go all around this open world, and you sell books, you get recommendations. You make suggestions to people about books. You upgrade your the quality of books. You have, you buy, you talk to people. There's a sort of an overarching story to the whole thing. I'm really excited. Since I love books and I've worked in bookshops all my life, I'm really looking forward to trying out this game and seeing what it's like, and I'll report back to you guys about the results of it. And finally, it's not news, but I just wanted to mention how much I admired and enjoyed Phil's AI created a sequence I haven't gotten on to to I haven't worked with you guys enough to tell you how much I enjoyed it and how much I appreciate all the hard work that you put into it and all of the techniques that you shared with it. Bravo.

Damien Valentine 7:22
Thank you. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. That gives some work. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, Ricky, it's funny you mentioned tiny bookshop, because earlier today, I had lunch with some friends, and one of them was talking non stop about how excited she was for tiny bookshop. She can't wait to play either.

Ricky Grove 7:42
That's great. It's very cute. Yeah, it's very cute. And I like it, but because what they've done is they've created different genres, so you can actually turn your shop into a horror bookshop, if you wanted more science fiction bookshop or classics, you know, and you go to different places, and you find out what kind of suburbs books that people like in the community, and then you stock them, and you talk to people. It just looks like a lot of fun. Is

Tracy Harwood 8:12
it an MNO type thing, open world type thing?

Ricky Grove 8:16
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Damien Valentine 8:18
Didn't I see somewhere that there was an option where you can, like, outside the game that you can put in your own books. So, like, if you've got your own favorite real world books, you can enter the title and the author, and they're available in the game to sell in your shop.

Ricky Grove 8:32
Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, I am. I hope that's true. Yeah.

Tracy Harwood 8:38
Well, I would have thought there'd be copyright issues with that. Well, I

Damien Valentine 8:40
don't think has the actual content of the book. You could just put in the title and the author, and it's a thing that appears on the shelf, but

Tracy Harwood 8:46
that's like a like a library listing. How interesting. That does sound intriguing? Actually cool. Listen. The question I've got for you is regarding, regarding flow, because obviously the other thing that I picked up this month is the Gen AI tool called vo three, which that's it? That is blow. Is it? That's the same thing. Okay, so when I was looking at it, I was thinking, this is really very similar to Unreal blueprint system. Is that simpler, though? Simpler? Is it? Okay?

Ricky Grove 9:19
Much simpler and easier to use. Okay,

Tracy Harwood 9:22
okay, well, that was the only question I got on it. The

Ricky Grove 9:26
blueprint system is so complex that the learning curve is shoo really high. I tried to do that when I was working on a program, and I actually had to get help from unreal to sort it out, whereas flow is built on prompt based filmmaking, so you just speak or type in what it is you want, and then it reiterates it for you, and then make suggestions on how to use it. So if you did a comparable type. Of filmmaking inside of unreal. As soon as you started on blueprint, blueprint would tell you what to do. Unfortunately, it doesn't.

Tracy Harwood 10:08
Yeah. And then the other thing I saw with this is that there's a there's templates that you can use with it. So people are, people have created, and are recommending templates that help you create different types of stuff, which looks, again, a really nice way of, you know, upping the usability of it really

Ricky Grove 10:30
exactly well, one of the the workflows that I read about through serio was that he created a character, and through a series of props and iterations, and then he took that character, an image of that character, uploaded it to another AI tool, and asked the AI tool to describe the image. And of course, the AI tool described the image in great detail, then he used that as a prompt when he started creating videos, which I thought was a fascinating sort of reverse engineering of how to how to do it. So every time, when he when he would put the figure inside of a background or tell it to move, he would have that iteration that perfectly describes the character that he created. So he didn't have to do that over and over again, right? Isn't that interesting? It is.

Tracy Harwood 11:35
It's moving so quickly, isn't it? It is,

Ricky Grove 11:39
and I think in a way it's going to have it hasn't yet, but I think it's going to have the same impact that machinima had when it first came out, but to possibly completely different people for different reasons, because of our social media and all of that.

Tracy Harwood 11:57
Let me ask you a quick question as well. Sure, have you got the new Elden ring Night Rain pack?

Ricky Grove 12:05
No because Night Rain is based on multiplayer, and I don't like multiplayer. I like to play solo games, and playing solo in Night Rain is so unbelievably hard. I really value my monitor and my computer, and if I start smashing it and throwing it through the windshield, I don't think that would work out for me. So no, I'm not playing night ring.

Tracy Harwood 12:32
Okay, fair enough, but

Ricky Grove 12:38
a lot of people are,

Tracy Harwood 12:40
yeah, I know that's why I asked, because I thought you were having

Ricky Grove 12:44
me it's having mixed reviews because of the level of difficulty. Oh, really I was, yeah, very, very difficult.

Tracy Harwood 12:53
Okay, well, all of, all

Ricky Grove 12:55
of From Software games are difficult. In fact, there's a video, a rage video, an Elden ring rage video that that shows segments that some guy went and got from people posting other rage moments. And you think I'm kidding about smashing your monitor or or destroying your computer or your keyboard. I'm not. I mean, there are some people that would spend literally three days trying to beat a boss. There was one guy who did a video in which he died over 1000 times to one of the hardest bosses until he finally managed to eke out a victory through the fact that he just did it over and over again, and he knew what the movements of the boss was by then, but it was funny. He shared every single one of his failures, and they were just hilarious. And I don't know God, how the guy had the patience or the ability to control his anger, because, I mean, he would try and then get smashed. Try again get smashed. Try then get smashed. Try then get smashed. 100 times. Jesus Christ. When I first played the game, I probably spent about three hours trying to beat the last two bosses. And that was frustrating enough. This guy did it for months.

Tracy Harwood 14:20
Too much time on his hands.

Ricky Grove 14:22
So masochism is not for me. You know, fair enough. Anyway, thanks for the question. It is an interesting game, and there's a lot of content being put out. And from software is also making adjustments to try to make the solo experience a little easier, but it just doesn't appeal to me as much as the Elden ring sounds like

Tracy Harwood 14:43
you've reached peak Elden ring, I think I have. So we're ready to move on to an entirely new shower of games, tiny books, tiny

Ricky Grove 14:53
bookshop, tiny bookshop, which is not going to be hard, okay, do.

Damien Valentine 15:00
I'm looking forward to that one as well. Me too.

Ricky Grove 15:03
Well, that's my news for everybody.

Phil Rice 15:06
All right. Thank you, Ricky for that. So Tracy, what else have we got going on this

Tracy Harwood 15:10
month? Sure. Well, I've got quite a few projects to tell you about, and I'll start with the ones that are made with games. The first one I want to tell you about is a I spent 30 days in a Dead game, which is by a Creator called globut. And it's basically him trying to find folks to play within a game that clearly hasn't been used for many years. The game is called their.com apparently, you can still buy it, 99 999. Even on Steam. And the film is his relentless quest to find other players in this long abandoned game. So check that out. It's really quite fun. It's probably a bit long, but, yeah, it's a good one. The next one I think you'll enjoy is actually GTA six trailer, the trailer, but made in GTA five by Gomez. I think it's one of the better machinimas I've seen this month. It's hilarious, and you can clearly see the animation quality is a step up in GTA six with with how this is made. But it's not really intended to be a sort of a screen by screen comparison. It's there's a lot of comedy and adult humor in this one, I think that you'll probably enjoy. But check that one out. Then another one was that I picked up on is, is called I modded fast traffic into our Red Dead Redemption two. Now it's a, what's he called it now, it's a horror game by blurbs, and it's, do you remember that, that one that we talked about called the modded wacky West? Oh yeah, it's sort of, in that vein. It's crazy. But Carl, you know, sort of, you know, horses and carts and carts and whatnot, just sort of flying around, crashing and burning. And, yeah, it's, it's, it's, really, it's good. But the thing that I found tiresome about it, because I would have picked it as a, as a, as one to discuss in a bit more detail, but I it's done as a, let's play and, and, and, you know, somebody sort of over talking it. And I found the over talking just a little bit too tiresome. I just wanted to sort of watch what was going on, so it's worth looking at, but you may or may not find that one quite so enjoyable. Then the next one is actually a really clever little tech demo for, I'm assuming, an AI mod for the game. But my goodness, this is absolutely stunning. It's called cyberpunk. 2077, point of view, hyper realistic motorbike ride on RTX. 590 with Dream punk, 3.1 point one graphics in 8k and it's been made by next gen dreams, who I think is the creator of the dream punk. I'm guessing it's a sort of a mod. I've got to say, I don't think I've ever seen anything quite so stunning made in the game. It's like you are watching a live action film in this sort of hyper realistic world. It

Phil Rice 18:42
really is. It's turned up in my that one turned up in my algorithm this week, this month, too.

Tracy Harwood 18:47
Yes, it's really amazing, isn't it? I mean, there's not a lot to it. It's just driving around at ridiculous speeds. What was it? 320 kilometers per hour kind of thing going the wrong way through traffic. And yeah,

Damien Valentine 19:00
it really is the game as well. Because what? Yeah, I recognize the locations. Yeah. So it's not someone just made an environment that looks kind of like Sarah Park. I these. This is, definitely, is the game. It's very impressive.

Tracy Harwood 19:12
It is very impressive. It's, it's the photo realism. That's just, it's crazy good.

Damien Valentine 19:18
But you can hear is my computer screaming at the idea of trying to run it like this. Yeah. Run it like

Tracy Harwood 19:24
this, the RTX 5090, Yeah, I bet it is, anyway, good. Check that one out. He's got a Patreon, and obviously, you know, he's keen to sell the mod. I guess. I don't know whether you can use it in other games as well. Maybe, maybe not. I'm not sure, but worth a look. The next one I picked was called Haruki made in Unreal Engine five by bad decision studios. Now it's probably also a bit of a tech demo using meta humans and kind of various tools, but it's a nicely done tale of a samurai Haruki being a well known Japanese writer, a fantasy. Short. So it's clearly a kind of homage to a writer. But, you know, there's beautiful atmospherics in it. It's really worth taking a look at. You know, we saw quite a lot of these sort of tech demos in Unreal Engine five. I'd say they're getting better. If this is an example of a similar kind of thing in and of itself, not worth us to, you know, sort of dedicating an episode to discuss, discuss it as a story, but definitely interesting to have a look at. The other one I wanted to tell you about is a blender short about Mickey Mouse by Mickey Mouse made by, actually, JC Thornton. It's actually a short in remembrance of the voice actor Wayne Howell. Is his name all wine or OWL wine, who was, I think, the third voice of Mickey Mouse. And it's a really nice homage to how he found the voice and how he created it using blender with the character on a couch, sort of acting out really good, nice way to do it. Then I found a nice one that isn't really machinima. I'm not even too sure quite how it's been made or what it's been made with, but it very much reminded me of the Warhammer stories that we've seen. It's really heavily narrated VFX called Solstice, five forgotten archives by a guy called Paul challison. Don't think it is machinima. I think it's probably just made using an animation tool set with the emphasis on this, this narration style thing. But worth another look for the way that it's done, using the visuals. And then I found some really interesting generative AI projects that are worth looking at. One was called Corporation war by solo films, where these companies are really taking the place of countries. It's kind of thing that we've been talking about in marketing for 100 years, really. And it's kind of a hyper stylized sci fi dystopia where these brands wage war against each other. Interesting, very, a, you know, very Gen AI, glossy, sort of, you know, look and feel to it. Very, very marketing, quite interesting from that point of view, a more purely esthetic project that I think is worth look at is one where the esthetic is of origami, and that's been done by somebody called Kelly Bosch. It's been made using mid journey and pica, and it's, it's really, absolutely beautifully done. It's, it's dancers that are made of origami. So it's really beautiful, very Do you remember the crow, the one that we kind of picked up on really early on when the first gen AI animations were coming out, and the first one we picked up was as ballet dancer, you know, enacting the crow. So it's, it's in a similar thing to that,

Phil Rice 23:03
it gives me a gives me a real Laney voom kind of Yes, like yes, the kind of thing she would have made, yeah, yes.

Tracy Harwood 23:10
It is exactly, yeah, very nice, though. Then I found one called Alice. Or, where's Alice? By Aaron Sims, creative. Now, we've covered some of Aaron Sims, creative workflow projects, typically using Unreal Engine, and we've commented on those before. This one is sort of a fantastical, horror ish themed interpretation of Lewis Carroll story. It's very creaturey, as you you would expect from Erin Sims. What intrigued me about it, though, was it's actually a workflow test for generative AIS of one sort or another, and you can clearly see in the four episodes that have been released as we we talk here today, you can clearly see how the workflow is developing with the way that they're producing that content. It's, I have to say, it's kind of, it's, it's quite different to how the glorance has been done. I guess what I'm less enthusiastic about with this particular version of of a workflow trajectory, if you like, is that the creators aren't really sharing with us what the workflow is, whereas neural viz was very open that it was a workflow test. Clearly, you know, there's commercial interests sitting behind this, so we would expect to see something that comes out of this in a slightly different vein, but it's worth looking at nonetheless. Just to see, you know, how these other studios are, are working with the tools, I think you can put it together from, you know, how you how, well, how we know these tools are evolving from the tests that there's

Phil Rice 24:56
always that war isn't there though, when, when in, when you're. Dealing with creativity and technology, there's always this battle between the community side of let's, let's bring everyone up with us as we go, as we learn, and we better keep this to ourselves so that we can, I don't know what be the first or have some kind of competitive edge. And, yeah, yeah, I think the the latter of those two is pretty ill advised as well, because at first, because you're never going to keep that secret, someone's gonna if you're not going to share it, then someone's going to figure it out, and that person will get the credit for it, and they'll get the credit, and they'll probably share it with everyone, and so you'll lose out on the opportunity to be a community supporter, which, which, this, this, this, say, what you will, about people involved in the AI creation thing. Community is important to them. It is, oh, it's a shame. It's, it's, yeah, someone will, someone will decompile it, right, and figure it

Damien Valentine 26:01
out, it's fine to be the first night you come up with an idea, and, you know, no one's done it, yeah? And you figure it out, and you put out something that you're really proud of, and it gets, you know, a lot of recognition. But you know, at some point, even if you don't do it as you launch it in a week or two, explain how you did it, yeah, give people a chance, even if you don't want to release it straight away. Give people a chance to I wonder how he did that. How does that work? And then you put it out and you say, Oh, this is how it is done.

Phil Rice 26:29
Yeah, you don't turn into it. You don't try to convert your innovation directly into copyrightable property, so to speak. You know what I'm saying? Like something that's, this is mine. Yeah, it's not going to stay yours. Man. You know, that's not the way the internet works, exactly. So anyway, so it's an interesting project. I'll be intrigued to watch that and see what I can. Yeah, to it from I think it

Tracy Harwood 26:53
will. But I mean, you know, given, given that neural This has been so open about the, you know, the process and, you know, and sharing the ideas and trying new things out this, this falls a little flat for me, other than the fact that it's a really interesting take on the story and clearly a tech demo. How far they push it, I don't know. I mean, they're putting it out as weekly episodes, but that, in itself, means to me they haven't really got a great idea of where they're going with it, I would suggest, right?

Phil Rice 27:26
Which is the big one of the big questions about this content is, what's, what's your venue? Yeah, you know, absolutely assuming that you want to try and pay the bills with it. You know, that's tough, man. That was already tough, as we all know, oh, yeah, that was already tough. But this, this even more so because of some of the stigma that is around the unresolved issues around AI. So I think it would be even harder, yeah, to find a way to, I don't want to cheapen it and just say, monetize. But you know, if you want to be able to do it full time, you gotta, you gotta pay your rent somehow, you know. So I, I sympathize with, with wanting to get to where the art will pay for itself, because then you can make more art. Yeah. Now there are people involved in the world of art that are interested in the money, part of it, just for the money, part of it, and so they want to exploit and do all that thing. But there's plenty of artists who, Hey, I just want, I mean, I think of Tom jantel all the time. Poor guy, he would spend 24 hours a day. Well, okay, 23 because he'd sleep an hour, spend 23 hours a day making films if he could. But damn it. You know, life is expensive, and so it is, it's, it's, it's the big conundrum. And long has been, I think, for artists, it's, I've

Damien Valentine 28:45
always looked that at there's several different ways of it. Sometimes you just want to make something. You don't care if you get anything back, you just made something. You share it. And then there's the little bit up above that is, I made this thing, if I get something back from it, that's nice, but it's not really my focus. And then there's the level of I want to do this, but I need, I want it to work and pay the bills, like you were just saying. And then there's the people think I'm going to make this and become a millionaire. And that's not how that works.

Tracy Harwood 29:14
Indeed, indeed. Yeah. Well, the other thing that I wanted to sort of mention to you is on the AI front is 11 Labs has launched version three. Apparently it's most expressive text to speech model yet. Not sure if you've tried it yet. Phil,

Phil Rice 29:33
I have not. I didn't even know about it. That's that's interesting. Yeah,

Tracy Harwood 29:37
okay, version three. Get this 70 plus languages, from 33 with a coverage of 90% of the world's population, up from 60% in terms of language coverage. Can you believe

Phil Rice 29:54
that 70 is a lot of languages? Wow,

Tracy Harwood 29:58
and it's got a dialog excited. Yeah, I can't get my head around the complexity of this. It's got a dialog mode which basically enables it to handle natural interruptions, tonal shifts, emotional flow across multiple speakers. You can add valences or tags if you like, so you know, whisper this, or get angry that, or, you know, laughing, or door creeps, or anything like that. You can add, that's huge. Yeah, that's huge. It's all about controlling performance in fine detail. I've gotta say it's probably one of the most impressive, you know, sound things I've, I've seen with generative AI, I can't wait to see what you do with it. That's it, really. I mean, the only other thing I've got is a is a bit of game news, which kind of intrigues me. I have to say, probably the only game I ever had a go at was a James Bond GoldenEye. I think it was, I don't know when that was, takes it back a bit.

Phil Rice 31:03
That is, that's a ways back, yeah,

Tracy Harwood 31:13
that's a while back. However, what I saw was double oh seven. First Light has put out its first trailer, which surely is going to be used for machinima in due course. I don't think this game launches until 2026 although probably by then it's going to be competing with GTA six. But even so, I was thinking, you know, even if that is the case and it's launched at a similar period in time, James Bond versus GTA they're different markets, aren't? They can't see them clashing that much. You're gonna

Damien Valentine 31:47
No one's going to want to compete with GTA six. No, even James Bond. You think, yeah, yeah. I think, yeah. I've noticed a lot of that. So GTA six got delayed a year until, I think it's May next year sometime.

Phil Rice 32:00
Yeah, everybody's shuffling to reposition based on that. Yeah, everybody's

Damien Valentine 32:06
announcements that were 2026 Yeah, they're just, they're not putting any months to that.

Tracy Harwood 32:12
Yeah, they've not put any months on this one either, which I think is, yeah, I guess, I guess they're doing a bit of shifting around. I will share the trailer link as well in the notes. I don't know if you've watched this from the from the notes that I put on the on our shared board and whatnot. I you know, it is quite interesting. But to me, it's very mission impossible in its in its esthetic. So I will be really interested to see what makes focal that folks make of it. I think it's going to be a kind of an adventure game with a focus, which is why I don't think it will actually compete with GTA six, because that's a different thing altogether.

Phil Rice 32:50
So maybe more of like Mass Effect, I feel like did a really good job of blending an interactive adventure with action. Yeah, I think they're the I think that game series is the most successful at that blend. Yeah, whereas before, those were two very, very different genres and Bioware, kind of their prior titles were working in that direction, but Mass Effect was like a culmination, I feel like. So the trailer is gorgeous, by the way. It's just incredible that it's beautiful looking. So,

Tracy Harwood 33:24
yeah, yeah.

Damien Valentine 33:26
Speaking of Mass Effect, there was a game announcement late last night, so I didn't have a chance to add it to the news. It's not Mass Effect itself, but there's an expanse video game.

Unknown Speaker 33:39
Ah, kidding, yeah. Well, there's

Damien Valentine 33:41
already, like, a point and click adventure game, but this is a proper, actual action game. And wow, the trailer, it's a few minutes of pre rendered footage, and then it cuts to gameplay. It looks just like Mass Effect plays. Oh, wow. I don't know if it's gonna have, like, the open decisions and all that, all the role playing. I

Phil Rice 33:59
did not anticipate a game coming from that world, but that is so smart. Yeah, it was only announced

Damien Valentine 34:05
last night for we were called wonderful. Oh, share the link with us. Definitely share the link. I'll put that in the show in the notes so it can go on the show notes. Brilliant. Well, that's

Tracy Harwood 34:13
it for my news. So you know, over to over to one of you. I, I had so much this this month, but many projects I think

Phil Rice 34:20
I don't have anything so, okay, this makes this really easy.

Damien Valentine 34:26
Okay, so I'll start off this one might it may or may not, given that the history of how these things tend to go a live action movie based on Elden ring has been announced by age 24

Tracy Harwood 34:42
is Ricky in it?

Damien Valentine 34:43
I hope so. But I say that with caution, because movies made a bit from movies based on video games tend to not to be very good. Um, so we'll see how that turns out. But I thought I'd mention it, because Elden. Is something we talk about quite a bit on this show. Well, we don't, well, yeah, we'll keep an eye. Yeah, I

Phil Rice 35:10
don't, I don't know my my son was who plays Elden ring, or, you know, enjoys it amongst many other games, but he was the first to bring that to my attention before I caught it on news anywhere. And he just kind of had a wrinkled nose about it, just kind of like, yeah, I don't basically just kind of saying, I don't see how that they can I don't see how it will work, like how it will be any good. And we talked quite a bit about it, and some of it was kind of a sense when there's a really, I think people probably had the same misgivings about dune and probably Game of Thrones, because the world building is so big and so deep and so rich that it's like, how is a movie or series of movies gonna do this any justice? Maybe once, though, wasn't it Lord of the Rings as well? Right? Yeah, you know, do not just the original novel, but there was like five before Frank Herbert passed, I believe. And it's a, it's, it's very elaborate world, but they've been successful there. You know, George RR Martin is, is one of the contributors of the world of Elden ring. I don't know if you guys knew that, but no, I didn't. So it's got good bones, that story world. I mean, it's, but, man, it is a real challenge. And part of the challenge, I think, is audience expectation. You know, maybe that's there's probably some corollary between, you know, the the popularity level of a game, and it's its prospects as a movie, simply because the fan base has some pretty specific ideas in mind and about, you know, what's important enough to include in a game that rich that I don't know what the total play time is if you visit everywhere in that world, but it's, it's a lot more than Two or three hours. You know, for a movie, it's a lot more than nine hours for a trilogy. So, yeah, it's going to be interesting to watch. I think I'll be interested in it because I have no intention of playing Elden ring, but I've heard enough about it from fans of it, and I like George RR Martin a lot, so I

Tracy Harwood 37:41
would go watch it, but it'll be horror, won't it?

Phil Rice 37:45
I would think it's going to have horror elements to it. I wouldn't think like pure horror, like the Hellraiser series or anything like that. It's not going to be silly horror, but it's going to be, I'm sure it'll be horrific. Oh yeah, yeah, friends, right? Probably darker than that, yeah,

Damien Valentine 38:02
stuff like the white walkers, that when you got really nightmarish, it'd be like that. Yes,

Phil Rice 38:06
yes. So, I mean, a lot of, a lot of what's going to be interesting as this comes to pass is the casting, yeah, because who

Tracy Harwood 38:17
would you put in that?

Phil Rice 38:19
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know the game well enough to say, but I think that, like one of the reasons this is again spilling discussions my son and I have had many times, but one of the reasons that I'm optimistic about some of the future Star Wars projects after they've had some, you know, some of the Disney plus stuff just didn't resonate quite as well. And or, of course, being the exception, that is maybe the single greatest thing I've ever seen made in that universe. It's so good. It's so unbelievably good. Tracy, if you're not a Star Wars fan, watch it anyway. You can get it. Yeah, so good. It's not even really about Star Wars, really.

Damien Valentine 38:59
It's, it's there anything about Star Wars. You

Phil Rice 39:02
don't need to know anything. There's no lightsabers, there's no Jedi it's, there's you don't need to know any of that lore. This is, it's a contemporary drama set in a sci fi universe, and it is spectacular on multiple levels. So since andor now, they're starting to talk about Star Wars projects that are out there in the future, and because of the mixed reaction that the sequel trilogy got, obviously there's some unrest, and there's some people wondering, gee, what's the future that's going to be so what I've been looking at is, who are they casting for these future projects? And so you've got, I believe it's firm. Damien, you'll correct me on this if I'm wrong, but I believe that Ryan Gosling is confirmed as a I think it has Starfighter in the something like Starfighter in the title. Yeah, there's another, another Star Wars movie that's been announced. And it had a casting choice, and I can't remember it now, but it's a big star, uh, Sigourney Weaver is in one of them. Okay, see, that's always good. Yeah, she's in the next one that gets he's got such sci fi gravitas, right? You know, she but anyway, it doesn't guarantee that it's going to be a great movie. But my way of looking at it is, if that actor, that well known actor seems to have been making smart choices on what films they do based on intelligent writing. And so Ryan Gosling, we don't even need to go into it. It's it. He's he's got a smart agent, or he's really smart with his choices. He seems to be discerning. He's not just making any movie he can, right? So the fact that he's read at least a treatment of what they've got planned for that movie, and it's enough to where he's willing to sign on to me. That's a reason to be encouraged, right? Yeah, it's a theory, but it's plausible. So I'm going to be looking at the Elden ring movie with the same set of eyes. Who do they attract? Now, it's not a perfect method, because if we'd said that about Game of Thrones when it was before the first episode launched, yeah, I mean, I knew who Sean Bean was, and I was excited, just because he was going to be in it, but that was the only name I recognized. Yeah, nobody knew who Peter Dinklage was at that point. Nobody knew who any of those. Nobody knew who the girl who plays Khaleesi? No one knew who any of them were. No one knew who. Oh, who's the guy who plays her first husband, the the warrior. Now, I don't know who Jason Momoa was at all.

Damien Valentine 41:39
I did like because he was in four seasons of Stargate Atlantis.

Phil Rice 41:42
Okay, so, like I said, nobody knew who Jason at all. And now you know, so it's not a perfect method, that it could be a cast of total unknowns, and if the writing is right, it could knock it out of the park. Yeah, so I don't know. I've got mixed feelings about it. I don't have any dog in the race. In terms of, I'm not what you would call a fan of the game. I'm more of a vicarious fan of it because my son really likes it and talks about the story in it all the time and the deep lore. And Ricky, who is the world's biggest bookworm, and really appreciates literature and depth. And I mean, his spouse is a award winning writer, yeah, and he likes Elden ring. I have to think that's because when you peel back the skin, there's something really good there. So the story has good bones. It's, you know, is, is a 24 gonna? Gonna do it right? Because you're right. Tracy, a 24 you tend to think of in terms of of horror stuff, but some of their stuff has been quite good, like, I mean, some of it's had real depth to it, but they are all pretty, pretty horror based. So, yeah, we'll see. We'll see. Yeah, I'm cautiously optimistic. Sounds

Tracy Harwood 43:04
like it could be a couple of years before we even need to worry about Yeah,

Damien Valentine 43:08
before three or four years of production before

Unknown Speaker 43:11
we right. They're

Tracy Harwood 43:12
not going to be doing machinima with it, are they? No.

Damien Valentine 43:17
All right. So the next bit of news, I haven't looked too close at it, but Unreal Engine has just had a huge update. It's the 5.6 and I've got two highlight videos talking about the new features, and it's things about, you know, the animation and the character creation and all of that. So for people who, rather listeners, who use unreal for making your movies, this might be worth having a look at, although you probably already know about it, but I thought it's worth mentioning anyway, because it seemed like it is a big step up to my next piece of news, which really caught me by surprise when I discovered this. So I'm gonna start at the beginning. I'm big fan of the predator movies, so at least the first two, some of the others are a bit hard there. But, you know, the first two I really enjoyed. And then a year or two ago, that released pray, which is a straight to streaming movie set in the past, involved the prayers of hunting a tribe of Native Americans. And I was really impressed by that. I think a lot of other people were as well. And because they were successful, it's obviously spawned more predator projects, and one of them is predator, killer of killers, which is an animated um Predator movie, which is new for the franchise. And it's, it's three it's an anthology of three different stories set in different periods of history. The Viking story, there's a story about ancient Japan with Samurai, and then there's one set during World War Two. And each one there's a predator on the planet, and it's causing problems for the people in those eras and how they deal with it. So. I watched it. It came out on Friday, from a few days before we record this. I watched it. I really enjoyed it. There was something about the animation style that was very familiar. And I was watching it, and I was thinking, No, if you made your textures for your characters look like they're painted, you could probably do this in Unreal, or iClone, or if you wanted a game to have those kind of textures, because it looks like concept art that's been animated. So skip ahead another six to seven hours, I started watching the summer the Summer Games fest, where all the next games gets announced. And in. Rid of that there was, it was kind of a sizzle reel put in by unreal to show off all the games that have been powered by unreal. And then there's a bit about predator. I thought, wait a minute, did I just see that? Right? Because it's just a big can you miss it? Kind of thing. Mentioned the name of the movie. So I put the stream on mute. I looked up predator, killer of killers, and it turned out they animated and rendered the entire thing using Unreal. So this is, as far as I know, the first big budget 100% machinima film that made by Hollywood. I know that they've used it for other things, but this is pure machine, like I'm not talking about the Mandalorian, where they use unreal for the backgrounds, but it's still live action people in front of it. This is all animated. And there's a sort of five minute video for a presentation from a few days before, which I completely missed till I looked it up, where they talk about how this came to be, and what it is is they were using Unreal to do previous for free, which is the one that got released a few years ago. Are you kidding

Phil Rice 46:48
me? Yeah, I was wondering. Oh, wow.

Damien Valentine 46:54
So what happened was, they did the previous and then COVID started. They're working on the previous for it COVID happened, so the movie production got halted, uh, while everything else did as well. But the guy who's working on the previous took it home so he could still work on doing the previous stuff. And they finished. They did the he did the previous for the whole movie, and he showed it to the director, and they thought, Yes, this is really good. They really liked just what the previous stuff looked like. And then prey got released, and had a huge positive reaction. So they started thinking, Well, what if we took this previous style and made a whole movie out of it? And so that is how we got this movie. And they were talking about how it the whole thing from beginning to release, took 18 months, and they were saying, if they were doing it live action, it'd probably double that, because they'd still be in the middle of filming it. Plus you've got the expense of not just one historical period, but three. So you've got, you know, all the costumes and the sets, and you have to design three different predator monsters and three different casts and all of that. And, you know, he said they had a really great time putting this together so quickly compared to doing it live action. Yeah, I really did not think about that when I was watching it. I really enjoyed watching it. And apart from that thing of, you know, it seemed familiar, I wasn't actually thinking, this is a machinima film, because it doesn't look like it until you know it is. So I actually have to go back and watch it again with that in mind.

Tracy Harwood 48:27
No, gonna have to watch that now. And yeah,

Phil Rice 48:29
it's, it's incredible looking. I'll tell you what the esthetic of the trailer reminds me of. Is the Netflix series, Arcane. Have you seen that? Damien,

Damien Valentine 48:44
I've seen the trailer for it. It's on my list of things to watch, but I haven't got to it yet. It's

Phil Rice 48:48
so good I would bless you.

Unknown Speaker 49:00
What

Phil Rice 49:04
I think Tracy just gave us our cold open for this episode. So anyway, I would, I would talk about, I've got hay fever, Arcane world building and storytelling with the same same enthusiasm that I talked about andor, yeah, Arcane. Is that good, especially the first season. But the look of it, the esthetic, it's a beautiful show. And this, this, that painted look, is magnificent looking, and it's remarkable that this came out of of Unreal Engine. It's just wonderful looking. And the other thing that they did that I think was smart, which is part of what tricks the eye with it to where it at first glance, maybe doesn't look like what you typically see out of Unreal Engine is especially on the high action shots. They used a relatively low frame. Time rate, and so it gives the movements this kind of jagged anime look to them. Very clever, because it does that. And yet the image quality is just it's just ridiculous, like you pause at any point, and it's just crystal. So, yeah, really, really spectacular I was. I was not as excited about this until I watched the trailer, but when you when you just told me about it, my first response, as I shared with you, was just kind of a you know, predator, okay, but your description of the visual look intrigued me. So during one of the breaks I watched, it's like, wow, it looks really, really, really good.

Damien Valentine 50:44
I will say that even if you've watched all the other predator movies, this still is different, even though the basic idea of predators come to earth and it's hunting for sport, but the way it's portrayed and the way they tell the stories so different from any of those other ones. It's like, it's fresh, it feels fresh.

Phil Rice 51:03
Yeah? Well, I think, I think prey, yeah, what was has that same? Okay, this is a different take, because, because prey, at the heart of prey, is this familial story, you know, it's, it's this, this family, it's this, these blood relatives are banding together against this. That's not, you know, you didn't get a warm family feeling from Arnold Schwarzenegger running around in a jungle. It was fun. It was a lot of fun, but it wasn't like you never had a moment when you're like, ah, that's that's sweet. You know, Arnold's throwing knives into dudes and saying, stick around stuff like that, and doing these massive handshakes with Carl Weathers. You know, you son of a bitch? No, you son of a bitch. Yeah, this is a different feel altogether. And arcane has that as well. By the way, Arcane has some some fraternal is that the right word? Is it still fraternal when it's between sisters? So raw ritual, I don't know what the word is family. It's family ties. Yeah, he said. And I don't, I this, this trailer doesn't really, I don't think, reveal enough to let you know for sure that's what's going on. But what it is successful in conveying is that these are, they're characters that I feel like I won't have, I won't take much convincing to care about. That's, yeah, you know, and that's not a hallmark of the early predator movies, no, not really. It's, it's more of just a machismo contest of who's going to kick whose butt. You know, yeah, this is,

Damien Valentine 52:49
I don't think too much about them, about this, because it was just so well good. It's so different. And, you know, obviously it's like an hour and a half long. So the stories are, each of the stories is fairly short for that, but I don't want to give anything away about them, because, okay, it's still fresh and different. It's, it's just as different from prey as prey is from the others. Oh, that's great, yeah. And it's got the same director as prey as well, sure. And he's got a live, a lot of live action comparison movie coming out later this year, and watching this makes me feel like so he's done three now, and I'm pretty sure the new The next one is also going to be just as different from these two and that the older ones as well. So I'm quite excited for the the new one as well. Yeah, so that's a film I can highly recommend to people. It's on Hulu in America and Disney plus elsewhere, as far as I know.

Damien Valentine 53:53
Yeah, that's it for my news. But I also have a question that I'd like to ask our listeners and Phil, you were mentioning and, or earlier. And this goes back to watching and, or I was watching some of the behind the scenes stuff after I finished watching it, because I love that show as well. One of the cast, I think several of the customers, actually were talking about how when they got on set, they had expected green screens and all of the stuff that Star Wars is famous for, and they were really impressed by how much of the sets were real, and there were real props and there are real creature effects as much as possible. But the shop, with all the artifacts that was a real set, the only green screen was the window outside, so they could do different cityscapes at different time today, but everything else was completely real. Anyway, I started thinking, you know, I like that idea, lots of practical, practical sets, practical effects and all that. And I started thinking about, what does it really work with machine anymore? You can't it's all virtual. And I started thinking, actually, it does work because I. I thinking about people have different styles of making their films, and we've seen some of this in the films that we've looked at this month. Is how much do you when you're making a film, how much do you want to use? How much do you put into the engine itself? So all your footage, all the effects, is there. You capture it and it's there for you already, so you don't have to do anything else. Well, how much do you composite versus how much do you composite other things in, like the music video that we were discussing that Ricky chose, that was all composited, but we've seen some films. Everything's there. They just captured the footage. They didn't do anything else to it. There's no right or wrong answer. Right or wrong answer, and sometimes it's a blend of the two. Myself, it's I tried to do as much as possible, but then you touch things up as like explosions in Omniverse, they look pretty good, but you put a little bit of extra glow on in posts, just make them stand out a little bit more, and things like that. But I try and make as much as possible happen in engine so they don't have to try and composite it in that's just my style. So I was very interested to know, How do other people listening to the show make their projects? Do they try and put it all in one go, or do they composite as many layers together as possible, or somewhere in between? So when you're sending us feedback at talk at completely machinima.com please let us know about Yeah, what's your approach? Because I'd like to know,

Phil Rice 56:25
all right. Well, that's our episode for this. That's the news for this month. So if you have any thoughts on what we discussed, or if you've got any hot tips for us, drop us an email at talk at completely machinima.com or leave us a comment wherever you see this video or listen to this podcast, and that will wrap it up. So on behalf of my co host, Tracy and Damian, we will see you next time. Thank you. Bye.