Ricky Grove 1:01
for And now for something completely machinima podcast. My name is Ricky grove. I'm here with my pals, Tracy Phil rice and Damian Valentine. This is our episode in which we share our picks for machinima films. And this week, we're going to be hearing from Damian Valentine in his his pick. Take it away, Damian

Damien Valentine 1:25
Alright, so this is one of those films that just randomly popped up on my YouTube feed. I don't know how it got on there. It must somehow, maybe it knew that I had recently watched the Naked Gun films again. Anyway, this came up, and it it kind of recreates the opening scene of Naked Gun films, where the camera is above the police car of the siren, and it kind of goes through these ridiculous scenes for comedic effect. So this video is by the hat loving gamer, he's done that, and his idea of ridiculous scenes was footage from various video games. Some of these games are incredibly old that I don't think I've actually seen anyone make machinima with before, because it's just not really practical. But he does it well. And they're all kind of games. Most of them, I don't even know what they are, and I looked at the description. You've done this video before with even older games, but this is this video is better. So this is the one I chose. And, okay, there's not a huge amount to it, but as a sort of parody of the naked girl opening scenes, and using a number of different games for the Machinima, source, footage source, I thought he did it well, and he calls it the Naked Gun 64 bit. And, you know, I had a good laugh at it. And, you know, it's not going to be more than that, but, you know, sometimes that's all you need. So I thought it's gonna be my pick and I would share it with all of you.

Phil Rice 3:03
It was fun. Yeah, it's, I mean, this could have been done with a lot less effort, and it wouldn't have, it wouldn't have had the same effect, but there are some little touches in this that give it a little bit of sense of sense of polish, and there was some work involved in the first and foremost is the reflections on the top of the police car. That's compositing work. It's very well done, and it just gives you a little bit more immersion there. And then there's one point, at least one point, where the light actually comes loose. I didn't expect that. Yes, yes. So, I mean, who knows what they rendered that foreground part in it's probably blender, from the quality of it, it looks like maybe blender, because it's really nice quality. That foreground, it's photorealistic. So that was probably done in blender, and they just animated a little bit of the a little bit of the, you know, some of the tilts and the way that the thing fell over and all that. So, yeah, I again, like you said, Damien, it's, it's not, it's not one that's going to have me, you know, up at night pondering deep intellectual truths or anything. But it was fun and it, you know, I love the Naked Gun movies. They just just cracked me up. I'm a little concerned about what's about to be done to them with certain upcoming remakes. Yeah, hopefully he has a very particular set of jokes. Yeah, I

Ricky Grove 4:43
don't know why they got Quentin Tarantino to direct it. I just think he's the wrong choice.

Phil Rice 4:52
Anyway, this, yeah, it was, it was, it was a fun little diversion. I'm glad it wasn't. One second longer than it was, because that's about as much of this that this really needs. So yeah, it was good pick. Well, I thought

Ricky Grove 5:07
it was a great pick. Is too, and I'd like to contrast it to the film that we chose last week, which is Baron Susan's, you're so sick now, Baron Susan, you know, comparing these two, they're examples of somebody who is just a towering, talented filmmaker. This person is not in the same category, but is part of the same community, and they made it with the same kind of sense of fun and dedication to it. And although it's a single joke, the joke doesn't go further than it should. And oftentimes, in the Machinima community, you'll see somebody make the joke, then they'll make the same joke again, and then they'll make the same joke again, and it's much too long. There isn't a variety in it. This was the perfect link for what it was trying to do. And the director knew that, and they didn't press it any further. I admire that. I think this is an example of a community created film, an idea, film that somebody was able to execute flawlessly, honestly, again, it doesn't have the same oomph that Baron Susan's film does, but it shows the range of talents in the community, and also the range of things that you can do in machinima, if you don't want To spend months trying to composite or create reversed animations and edit sync. But you want to create, you want to use an idea, and you want to create something fast that's funny and fun, that'll get everybody laughing and enjoy it, plus it might introduce them to the variety of games that are in it. Maybe there's a nostalgic factor to it. This is a perfect example of the short machine of a film that does everything right? I just loved it. That was great.

Tracy Harwood 7:09
Yeah, well, I completely agree. First thing I thought, actually was I haven't seen. I mean, it's great that you've been watching these more recently, but I haven't seen these films for years. But they're the sort of films that once you've seen them, you just will never forget them. Yeah, you know Frank drebbing character, who could I mean, he was brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Just, just a stellar character, really. Um, so good, in fact, that I actually had to look up a version of the clip that, you know, this was, that was used in this, you know, the of the siren and the light on top of the car where it sort of crashes through the city. And, yeah, the point of view shot, the point of view shot, yeah, with it, well, I mean, yeah, so I did the same thing again, as I did with Baron Susan, with the, you know, with the with the fly leaf. Video played it side by side, and you would not believe how close it is, shot by shot to the original, not but it has the same style, and the clips are really, you know, it has that kind of same editing style, which makes it really an excellent homage to the original, which I which I thought was, was brilliantly well done. I mean, the same kind of zany approach to the that original sequence, the siren blaring, getting into places it shouldn't being, should where it shouldn't be, seeing things that it shouldn't ending up not so much at a doughnut shop, which is where the original files and police squad things sort of ended up, but this one ended up at airplane, which is another one of Leslie Nelson's classics, of course. So I really love the humor, because it just, it just evoked a sense of nostalgia. But I also really liked the the timing of the edits as well, which I think were all done in a way that gave you a good sense of what the game was that was being used, and then to reflect on the stupidity of the police car being in that world and in that scenario. So that's why I think it was as long as it was, because it needed to just sort of make you remember a little bit more than actually your brain could actually, you know, figure out. I think it's really quick witted in the way that it's been done. Yeah, and some of those classic early game clips, I mean, they ran on six. Sony Mega Drive, and also other platforms like also Playstation and in arcades. And it's really, I think, interesting that this just like you reflected on it with Baron Susan, I did too, because it's another example of a mash up and a machinima that's that's doing something a little bit different, because it's positioning itself in a period of time, basically centered around the 80s or 90s in terms of entertainment culture. You know, the the Naked Gun was, I think, an 88 film or series somewhere around there. And these games are sort of early 80s to early 90s, primarily, except when it gets into the world of machinima, which is also making reference to, which is clearly early 2000 so the halo and the GTA examples, which do you also see in there? Early 2000 2004 I think roughly Super Mario Kart 92 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Diddy Kong Racing. There's a 64 you know, 897, and so on. Pac Man, 1980 and so on and so on. What's not very clear, I think, is whether the Creator actually shot all the scenes from those games. But given his name, and when I looked up the other work that he's done, it's certainly possible that he actually did, you know, did, did get the content out of the games? Maybe he just screen kept them from trailers. But I don't really think so. I think he's actually got the content by

Damien Valentine 11:35
playing these games. I think so too, on an emulator or

Tracy Harwood 11:39
something of that, very possibly

Phil Rice 11:40
the one exception might be the Pac Man One, because that's not really, yeah, TV footage from the arcade Pac Man. That's that's just motion graphics using Pac Man assets, which is fine,

Tracy Harwood 11:51
fair enough. Okay, well, I was going to say it doesn't really matter, because I think the point is it's not so much about the retro games. Because the car roof is actually doing something different, and it's interacting with the scene as well, which you don't really expect it to do, you kind of think it's just going to be a layered thing, but it's not. It's actually interfering with what's going on. You see them shooting at each other and reflections and what have you so that. So there's a bit more to it, and in terms of the technical competence in the way that it's been done, then you might initially sort of think, but I think what I would conclude from it is it's a contemporary take on a mash up of a retro esthetic and all these kind of cultural references. And it's definitely an interesting approach. And I suspect we'll see a lot more of this kind of mashup homage type thing as pie. Yeah, I think we will, hope so. I think this pick is also very timely for another reason, though, which is I thought why Damien, you might have picked it, which is because of its reference to Nintendo in the opening scene of the film, which refers to this sort of Naked Gun being for the 64 well, when did switch to release?

Damien Valentine 13:12
Two days ago. Two, three days ago. Yeah, yeah, when we're recording.

Tracy Harwood 13:15
Okay. So one of the interesting things I think about switch two is that it is it states that it's got backwards compatibility. Now I'm guessing that's not necessarily to games as old as these.

Damien Valentine 13:34
It's to the switch one for the most part, and some older Nintendo games have been updated to run on the Yeah, on the switch one, and some of that is going to carry over, but I haven't really looked too closely at it. I was I never really grew up in the Nintendo console, so I don't have that nostalgia enough to want to play those old games. So it's not really something I looked into too closely. I think you have to have a special subscription to be able to play them, and some of them are time limited as well. That works. Mm,

Tracy Harwood 14:09
okay, alright. Well, actually, I did look up Nintendo life had an article on the original games that that are immediately backwards compatible with the new two. And none of these games are, as far as I can see, some, some are like you say. Some might be able to, you might be able to do something with a with a patch of some sort. I guess

Phil Rice 14:36
they'd have to, they'd have to be ported these, these, these games. Most of these games that were depicted here are such a different generation of of technology that it's very possible that the publisher, usually, what they've been doing is they'll, they'll go back, if they own these old properties, they'll port a bunch of them and sell them as some kind of a bundle for a few bucks. And you can find those on the iPad. You can find them Activision. Has a whole bundle of these really old arcade like games. There was a movement for that. There was a demand and a movement for that. They used to they were pirated, largely, yeah, and they would be arcade ROMs. They called them. And basically you could get an emulator that would run them on a modern PC. But it would be these arcade games from the 1980s and stuff. And I think that enough activity happened there that the publishers who actually own these thought, Oh, well, why don't we make a legitimate way for people to get them? Yeah, from time

Damien Valentine 15:35
to time, their legitimate way was probably just use the exact same pirated software and just package it

Phil Rice 15:42
out it very well could be, yeah, something very similar to it very well could be, yeah.

Tracy Harwood 15:46
Do you think, though, looking at this, because the graphic quality is better than I would have expected.

Damien Valentine 15:56
If you're playing on an emulator, sometimes the emulators let you upscale. Yes, you can play at a high resolution.

Phil Rice 16:02
That was my thought, too. Yeah, okay, all right, he wouldn't have been playing it on the original console to get this kind of no image fidelity. Yeah, it's some kind of emulator. And yeah, they have the upscaling is not terribly difficult. When the resolution is so low, like this, you just do a pixel, right? Yeah, upsize, and it actually is quite crisp. Yeah, he

Damien Valentine 16:23
may have done it, run it through, run the actual footage through an upscaling as well, like you did,

Phil Rice 16:28
which would have worked well too for this, yeah,

Tracy Harwood 16:31
yeah, okay, well, I suppose so that's sort of one type one, one, sort of observation I had on it, the switch to thing. The other thing that I thought was was very interesting. Was the chip to tune outro of Huey Lewis, which I thought was another very interesting retro reference. And then what I noticed, like you said, Damian, he'd actually done another version of this, an earlier version 2017, version of it, where he'd used a chip tune intro to the Naked Gun soundtrack. And I actually was a bit disappointed. Then, why did he not continue to use that in this version of it? Because that would have just positioned it so nicely. The sort of chip tune, sort of style, I guess it might have been a bit more difficult to actually get your kind of cultural reference in place if you were born in the 1980s which I suspect this guy was not. But yeah, it just made me want to sort of hear chip tunes a bit more in it than some of the soundtrack from the film, actually. And then I suppose the other thing I was asking was, why on earth did he use that particular film? Why? Why? Why that one? What? What was the point of that? And I guess then, because I didn't even know there was a new Naked Gun movie coming out, so I actually some of the comments were, oh yes, there is a new one coming out. And Liam Neeson in the title role, playing the son of Frank Drebin.

Ricky Grove 18:05
Let's move on.

Tracy Harwood 18:09
Well, I found the trailer, I tell you what, I shall not be rushing out to watch that. No, just does not hold any interest for me whatsoever. So, yeah, I don't know. I thought it was a really interesting one, and I really enjoyed sort of digging around it, but I really thought you were going to say a bit more about switch too, because that's

Damien Valentine 18:30
where it actually wasn't on my mind when I chose it, but when I watched it again to refresh my because I chose this a few days after our last recording session, so I wasn't thinking that for a hedge. But then when I watched it again, to refresh my mind a few days ago, I thought, yeah, it's just got timed quite

Tracy Harwood 18:47
nicely. Yeah, I've really timed it very nicely. I thought, very well done,

Damien Valentine 18:50
but it was just a complete coincidence. Okay, I

Tracy Harwood 18:53
wouldn't have said that.

Ricky Grove 18:55
Well, then I guess that's our episode all. However, before we leave, I did want to have a short message for all the gluons out there, and it's on my T shirt. Justice for snorbo.

Ricky Grove 19:17
Fantastic. That's it. Thank you, Damian, for your excellent choice. It's a really interesting contrast to last week's Pick and Phil and Tracy. Thank you. If you have comments talk at completely machinima.com We'll have show notes at completely machinima.com as well, with links to the movie and links to topics that we've mentioned here. Thank you. Next week, we'll be back with another pick and some news updates, so we'll see you next time bye bye bye

Phil Rice 19:48
bye.