Phil Rice 1:00
and welcome to And now for something completely machinima, the podcast about machinima, virtual production and related technologies. My name is Phil rice, and I'm here with my co hosts, Tracy Harwood, hello and Damian Valentine, hello. Ricky couldn't be with us this week his emotional support. Parrot has scheduled a conflicting appointment for him, but he should be back with us next time around. So this week, we are talking about my machinima pick for the month, and it's a little bit I don't know why, but I've not typically been the one to gravitate towards or find the heavy realism. Emphasis picks like Unreal Engine type stuff, but this time, I managed to beat Tracy to it. So this film is called rally, and the filmmakers name Santiago Mangini. I believe Mangini. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right. So this is a short film. I think the reason that it attracted me wasn't so much. It wasn't the realism per se that that pulled me in. It was the method of storytelling, which is reliant a lot on body language and expression, and less less dependent on dialog. It's not a completely silent film, but it's, it's an intriguing story that kind of, I think, falls into that pocket that we've talked about so many times on this show of there being an artful sense of ambiguity, like not all the details of this story are laid out plain, not, not even the full context is really made plain by the film itself. There's a little bit of additional context that the description supplies, but this is basically a scenario, and the, you know, what's outside those boundaries isn't really emphasized. And I think what's cool about that, in this case is that it doesn't matter, or it didn't, to me, it works as a kind of a self contained story. It's a situation that is relatable enough or recognizable enough. Maybe it's the better term that it works so and then on top of that, it's, it's visually pretty stunning. It's, I think, made with the intent to look very nearly photorealistic. And I think succeeds at that the it's at nighttime, and so the use of color is, is very subdued. It's, it's, it's got this black and white type sheen to it in some of the shots. And essentially, it's about these two smugglers. Who are, they're transporting someone to drop them off somewhere. That really is the whole story, really, I mean, essentially that it's, it's transporting somebody. It's when watching it, it's not immediately clear whether or not you get the impression that the person is being transported against their will. So, is this a kidnapping? Is it? Is it a is it a rescue? And, you know, there's, there's a lot of head scratching there at first, and it just, it doesn't use any exposition tricks or narration or anything like that to to cheat. It just throws you into you're in the story. You're just in there. And here we go. And I found it very, very intriguing and very well made. And it. It's one of these that really makes Unreal Engine look good. It's not the first film to do so, of course, but it's one of those. So what did you guys think of it? Well, there's that bit

Damien Valentine 5:11
the beginning when the two smugglers are waiting for their passenger and they're listening to the radio and the news going on, and it's done in a way that makes you think, is that the person that has just been about to be loaded into their car, or is it just something they're listening to? And it's never really confirmed one way or the other, so it's kind of left up to your imagination, and you don't know if this person is a good guy or not, and you don't know if who the smugglers are working for the good guys or the bad guys. It's just it's left completely up to your imagination. I noticed that all the characters, the two smugglers and the other everyone else, you never really see their faces apart from the eyes of the two smugglers. I think that helps with the realism, because it's usually the faces that give away that it's animated. No matter how good the character model is, we're still not quite there yet at that perfect 3d character model that looks perfect human. They're getting close, but it's just something that's still slightly off. So covering up the faces is a good way to hide that, because you could very easily forget you're watching something animated and think this is a live action video that they've put a camera in a car, and they've got these people driving around to the dark, and you've got night vision, things you could see outside and external shots of the car as it's driving along, those could so easily be live action from the way this looks.

Phil Rice 6:38
There were some moments where I wondered Damien, if this wasn't some kind of hybrid, because we've seen those before too, where there maybe there is some elements of this that are live or not. So yeah,

Damien Valentine 6:50
external shots of the car driving to the trees and down those narrow roads have taken a huge amount of effort to create that environment in Unreal, because you're you're not just having a road. You've got to have the detail of the road. You've got the trees and the grass and the lighting, and

Phil Rice 7:06
the lighting is so great, yeah,

Damien Valentine 7:09
the dirt that the car kicks up as it's going along the dirt road. There's so much detail in it that it gets to the point where it probably would be easier to go out and film a real car at night, doing, you know it's, yeah, sometimes it's hard to tell, but yeah, obviously, a lot of work has gone into this and nice. I don't know what the background of the filmmaker is, or anything with that, but it's one of those films where you want to see more, not necessarily this story. I think this story work as its own thing. You don't need to know the answers. It's best left as a mystery. But I'd like to see this creator at San Diego do more stories, more films, not necessarily about these characters, but just, I don't know if he has done more. I hope he has. I need to look up to see if he has, but he's obviously got real talent. And you know, it's nice to see, nice to see that. And he put the Unreal Engine to really good use. So let's see more of it, please.

Tracy Harwood 8:21
I've got some background. Well, maybe shed some insight into this. You know what? When I looked at this, I thought, my God, this is really impressive. And like you I was thinking, is that real or is that actual animation? I don't know. So it kind of, you know, it led me down to sort of paths of inquiry. I think it's both technically excellent, but actually what shines through is the quality of the storytelling. And so I started with the storytelling angle and and I looked the director up, and actually he is an established filmmaker, having won awards for quite a few live action shorts, which I'll put a link to. Nothing really particularly resonates with me in terms of whether I've seen it or not. One is actually on Netflix. But the genre he works quite a lot with is suspense and horror, and one of his films no one gets out alive, is is on Netflix as a as a live action. So he's not without chops in filmmaking. Most of these films use very little dialog, as I understand, which is clearly an approach that he's taken to this unreal work as well. Now I interesting. I found an interview with him talking about this film on the VFX process channel, which I'll also put a link to, and you can sort of hear what he's got to say about it. What's very evident from that is. Is that it was the unreal tool set, particularly metahumans, that helped him deliver this film. Apparently, he had originally written the script for, well, basically, for a live action film a number of years ago, but then struggled to get funding and decided to go a different route with it. And that sort of coincided with him being caught up in the pandemic restrictions, which when, like so many others, is when he first sort of invested the time to take a proper look at Unreal Engine. So this, I think, is a film that's been a long time coming, definitely not as quick as some of the films that we tend to review on this channel in terms of its production. I think it took him about a year and a half in the making of it with Unreal, of which at least half a year was him learning how to use it unreal. And that's because this guy had no prior experience of doing animation, let alone character animation experience, and that's why he used the concept of a face covering this sort of Night Vision helmet to cover up the fact that he actually really wasn't too sure how to do the facial animation service, which is great. Um, it's a clever trick. It's a real clever trick, and one that we've kind of seen done before when you know. So for example, Martin Bell on presenberg Ridge when he hadn't used a tool like that before, applied a sort of filter over it as a way of getting around the fact that this animation wasn't as he would have liked to have seen it, and this guy's done something not dissimilar within the tool set. So I guess really, I was a little intrigued by some of the comments that he was making in this interview, because he's clearly a very experienced filmmaker, but what he's done with it, and to the some of the points that you guys were making, actually, is he's basically tried to use his filmmaking techniques and cinematography type techniques, and apply them into Unreal, literally, as you know, thinking about how he would do live action. You know, filmmaking in order to create animated scenes. Now that's interesting, because we've often commented that, you know, when you use a 3d engine, you're not restricted to the same physics limitations, the physical limitations that you might be as you would if you were to use, you know, if you were to do live action, but this guy deliberately constrained what he was doing by the physics of what you would do if you were a live action filmmaker.

Damien Valentine 13:13
Maybe that helps with the realism as well. Maybe, maybe when you're watching a live database, yeah, yeah, you expect the camera to behave in certain ways. Yeah, whereas it's animated, you can do all kinds of stuff

Tracy Harwood 13:23
exactly. Yeah? Well, no, he's, he's deliberately taken that approach to this, and I think, I suspect it's because he doesn't really know any other way. Doesn't understand that you can use, you know, virtual cameras from any angle and that kind of stuff in in the same it's a comment we've made many times, actually, about machinima. Creators often have a unique angle, but real, real live action guys just never see it in that way. And I think, think this is a typical example of that didn't attempt any of it. He his aim, really was just to create as near a realistic film as possible, which in some ways when I when I heard him say that, I was a little disappointed, because of the perspective that we have when we talk about machinima generally on this show. But having said that, his general approach to short stories is that it's all about iteration in the development stages and then sharing and community, which is a little bit different to live action. So I think in terms of his process and the way that he made it, and the way that he improved it as he was developing it over this sort of extended period of time, is really highly commendable, because he wants it out there, he wants people to comment on it, and he didn't expect it to be a perfect finished article when he put it out there, because he was using it primarily as a tool to test ideas. Um, and that really was his main rationale for attempting to do the film in Unreal in the first place, because he was thinking about, how can this tool, you know, during lockdown, of course, how can this tool help him with previous for his live actions? Like we were talking about the predator thing, you know this, he was he had this sort of previous mindset with how he wanted to use the tool, including, for example, things like lighting positions, that said that was his original reason for learning it. But of course, like many others, once he got into it, he could really begin to see the potential of it and the workflow sort of came to him, although, in fact, in this he didn't use any mo cap at all, but he can really, you know, his comments were along the lines of, he can really see the potential of how other, other tools and techniques can be integrated into the workflow to improve the realism of the way actors move, for example. So, you know, he started out with one thing in mind and ended up, I think, with an entirely different product, which is really quite an impressive little short, so impressive in fact that it was an official selection at Fantasia 2024, Canadian film festival. And also, I think it's worth mentioning here that, you know, because he's a, you know, you know, filmmaker with chops and whatnot, you know, he's got this approach to, well, I'm going to actually have an original soundtrack with this, which I think, by the way, that that soundtrack was created by a guy called Theo Fauci, along with a sound design, which he created with, with with a few others. But I think it's worth saying that it is the sound design and the soundtrack that actually really makes this work. Because I think without the sound design, the story would be really much harder to tell, that's particularly, for example, in delivering some of the emotional depths that it seems to have. So for example, in the interview, he talks about sound making animation easier to do for him, because he found that if there was a sound, like the heartbeat, example, and the, you know, the window wipers on the car and whatnot, because that sound was there, he didn't have to animate Something that would convey that sort of sense of tension. So it made, you know, a good, you know, working with a good quality sound designer through the process as part of the creative process is what helped him, you know, make, make this animation as he was going and going along, which I think is an, you know, we've, we've said that before about the importance of, you know, one thing being integrated with the other, rather than sort of leading with one thing. Like, for example, when we talked about Arthur, I think the music was what led, how that film was put together. But for other films that we've talked about in the past, you can clear, I mean, Dune was an example that you talked about Phil ages ago, where the music was was an integral part of the way that film was produced. It's very evident in this, and I think it's a really smart way to actually overcome some of the limitations that you might have when you are technically not the savvy as as you might want to be with, with a tool set. What makes this, I think, also technically impressive, of course, is the editing. Now he's he's using Unreal to illustrate such tiny details with a focus on these two central characters, these car drivers wearing this, these, this night vision helmets, and navigating through this kind of dark forest to some sort of border crossing point. And by the way, he's used resolve to add filters and masks like the rain and the dust and the missed effects. So they're not actually done in the engine at all they're done in post. And I think it's these kind of little details on the windshield, as well as lighting on their faces, and, you know, also their eyes, and the the the emotion that's evident in the eyes that are really quite impressive, and then the cityscape on the on the other side of the border crossing. That's also a level of detail that I think you know, sort of watching from the first the first it's a film of two hours. We often talk about film of two halves. This definitely is a film of two halves. That sort of city on the other side of the border is. Level of detail that I think is a little unexpected, given that the earlier part is this intense focus on these characters, which kind of led me to think, well, actually, then it's the shots that he's used that are really quite intriguing here. The first half are primarily close ups, real close ups, you know, real sort of, you know, on the that bit of the face kind of thing. You know, where they're, you know, the character is in the cockpit of the car. But then once you get to the border, and then over the border, they're mostly long shots, you know, not exclusively, but they are mostly shots taken at a distance where you can't even see any detail of, you know, any any kind of emotion, not even through the way that the characters are are really moving, because it's just too far away, um, which makes you lose the sense of the personal. And I guess it's an approach, when I was thinking about it, to ending the story as you know you've got because the story arc is so intense, he seems to have used the second part, this sort of cityscape and the withdrawal from the personal as A kind of way of closing out the story and that, which then made me sort of think, well, actually, that would be my only real criticism then, because it took too long to close out the film, if it was entirely done with those kind of long shots. At least I say that given the overall length of the of the film, where there was such intensity, and you know, clearly in the first half, but such distance in the second half, why would make it so long when really what you wanted it to be was the intensity of the personalities? So yeah. I mean the using the focus to to draw attention, I think was, was the most impressive bit. It's what draws you in as a viewer to the story. I think for me, when I was watching this, it's the proximity that you have as the viewer to these two drivers. I mean, you, you, you, you feel, you feel you're in the vehicle with them. Yeah, it's very intimate. It's really, yeah, you feel, gosh, this car's crammed with people, isn't you've got the two guys in the front, and God knows who in the back, and you're in the back seat, you know between them. You know what? You know, that sort of intensity, it makes you question, well, what are you what you know? What's going on here? You don't know what's going on. You don't know who these people are. You don't know what they're doing. You don't know where they're going. You don't know You don't know anything. There's a lot of information that is just not explained at all, and that's quickly followed by, you know what, I actually don't think these are bad people, necessarily,

Tracy Harwood 23:10
and that's despite the description, which actually I didn't really think matched closely enough what was going on in The film, although you, you know, it's pretty evident that embroiled in something slightly nefarious, but I didn't get a real bad vibe about these things. What I did get was this incredible, claustrophobic sensation that you're just part of it, which was, which was kind of interesting and and part of that is also the way you're bouncing around. You know, the cars bouncing around, the characters are sort of bouncing around the camera. Yeah, as you drive

Damien Valentine 23:49
cameras, the camera's moving in a way that feels natural for the car, and not really over the top, but not static either. That's hard to get right,

Tracy Harwood 23:59
yeah. Well, okay, so he explains that he's done a second level of movement, so the car's doing one thing, and he's allowed the physics of the characters to sort of move in a little more exaggerated way. So it's a layered effect in terms of the camera movement, which I think is brilliantly well done. But in the end, I felt quite dizzy from it. And then, you know, there are other shots where you're actually hailing the car and you're really far too close for comfort as you sort of follow it through. I think it's rare that you can actually say this. But what I also enjoyed about this was what the director left out of the main scenes. Um, because you've got the sense of, you know, this character being bungled into the boot of the car, you know, you're not sure if he's a hostage or, like you said, Phil, he's somebody that's being rescued, or whatever. You're not really sure. Um. Mean, you don't know what the what the reason is that they're going through the forest. Why? Why be transported in this way or, or indeed, why you would want to navigate through the forest like a rally driver in the first place? And what? What's the point of this border point? Why does that exist where it does? When there's nothing else around, it's just there in the middle of nowhere. There's nothing that explains any of that. And then another aspect I thought that was a little bit disturbing, actually, was the way the body of the CO driver that doesn't make it through the border crossing is dragged out of the car and left under the bridge. Why would the driver need to do that? So, you know, you you guys, nailed it in terms of, you know, what Ricky always used, was always called with us, is the ambiguity. It's the ambiguity that actually makes this so interesting. It's not so much the content of it, but it's the thought process you go through as you watch it about what's not said, or what what's not portrayed, and it makes it very consuming because of that. And yes, there are probably some technical things that don't quite work so well, like, like the eyes, I thought just lacked a little bit of fidelity, because I've seen, you know, much more realistic meta human eyes than than what we saw in this I think, then I think you're talking

Phil Rice 26:29
on the on the eyes, are you? Are you talking about the actual design of the eye, or the,

Tracy Harwood 26:35
yeah, the eye, the movement, and also the lens, you know, because you were so intense on that, but it didn't really matter. I mean, I'm just, I'm just nitpicking, really. I suppose the other thing that I thought was a, maybe a technical detail that didn't follow through was, you know, there was the skin of the drivers appeared to vary a little bit different points in the film. I thought the blood looked a bit plasticky.

Phil Rice 27:01
Yeah, the blood wasn't the strongest, that's for sure. It

Tracy Harwood 27:05
just didn't, yeah, you kind of lost the sense of realism at that point. And the clothes were just too clean, really, for for, you know, driving through a, you know, filthy forest, dead at night, with a God knows who in the back, but you know what, for nine minutes. You know it was, it was a really thought provoking story. So did I really care about those kind of details? Not really. I just thought it. It worked really well. I think it's a great show. It's far more than a technical demo, but it did raise a lot of questions. I'm not sure I'd necessarily want to see an episode too, because I think it like, like Damien says, I think it's a it's it stands alone. The only thing you might want to see is closing out some of the ambiguous. You know, elements, the questions that it raised, but I didn't get that wedded to it to really want to know more. Yeah, I mean, I guess you know an explanation of why it's called rally and not something like transport or escape or something might, might be nice, nice to know, but, but a really, really interesting pick. Fascinating to sort of go through it, fascinating to hear about the director's approach to it, and really interesting in terms of what he's managed to achieve with it. So, yeah, great pick.

Phil Rice 28:45
Yeah, I found myself fixating on the the eye movement in particular. I think it's because

Tracy Harwood 28:53
it's a dead eye, right?

Phil Rice 28:55
Well, on my on my own channel, I've been doing a couple series. I'm in the middle of a second series now where there's a lot of face work. It's really just dialog and two characters moving, and I'm doing digital puppeteering for these different parts of the face, and the eyes are one of the hardest parts, and it's an aspect of eye movement that I never really thought much about until having to try and puppeteer it. But it's the fact that, you know, eyes, and he did this in this movie as well, that there's points where the eyes of the character gradually move from, like, center to left, or from center to right. But our eyes don't really work that way. They don't That's right, unless you're following something with your eyes, then you can easily gradually move them. But if you ever just tried to without fixating on an object to gradually, your eyes don't work that way. They do what are called saccades, I think, is what the term is. It's basically instant darting and like that. And very often you. Are in the middle of a blink is when those are happening right? It's

Damien Valentine 30:03
not quite instant. There's a little delay, but you get that slightly wrong. It looks off because I've played around with this so much as well.

Phil Rice 30:11
It's hard. It's really hard. It's a fun challenge to to mess with. Yeah, I

Damien Valentine 30:16
question your idea of fun when you say that.

Phil Rice 30:20
Well, learning is fun for me. So it's like, you know, I know that on, on some of the ones that the episodes that I've put out, that first of all, I know I'm getting better at as a go, but I also know I'm still not getting that part right. It's, it's, it's maybe fun is not the right word. You're right. Maybe it's more of I'm gaining an appreciation for. And and also trying to think in terms of problem solving for that, like, how could I do that differently to where the eye movement would be more even though I'm not going for a realistic esthetic at all, it still throws you off when, and maybe you don't even know why, yeah, but when you see an eye move in a way that human eyes don't move. We spend a lot of time looking at other people's eyes. We do, you know, it tells you a lot about the person and about the interaction you're having, where they're looking and what they're I mean, we read so much information off of that. So we are, we are all very, very well studied on eye movement. Even if we don't articulate it, we all instinctively, or it's a grown into instinct. I think even infants have it to a degree. They could tell a lot from the eyes, and they read a lot of information there. So yeah, that that's a detail of it that I really fixated on of watching the way that he executed it, and thinking about the way I've tried to,

Tracy Harwood 31:47
it's hard. You know, you know what I did I ended up because, believe it or not, I'm an eye tracking expert. Are you really? I am really? That's fascinating, yeah. But because, because that annoyed me a little, not annoyed me, but because that detail just wasn't there, not that I was expecting it to be there, right? Bit that I ended up focusing on wasn't the eyes, but the eyebrows. Oh yeah, because the eyebrows are quite good. I thought, okay, not, not, not in a muscle movement sort of way, but the detail was quite intriguing, sure. So, yeah, yeah, interesting. I mean, all of that said, these are minute, tiny little points, but Oh,

Phil Rice 32:28
absolutely. I mean, think about what that says about the film, that that's what we're those are the details that we decided to scrutinize. Right? What

Tracy Harwood 32:36
an achievement, though, for somebody that's never actually animated from zero to this. I mean, can you imagine? Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 32:41
it's very impressive. Yeah, brilliant.

Phil Rice 32:45
Yeah. All right. Well, that is our that's our pick for this week. What are your thoughts, listeners slash watchers, why don't you drop us a line at talk, at completely machinima.com, or if you've got recommendations for us for other stuff that we should watch, feel free to shoot them over to us. Even if it's your own film, you can do that that's not against the rules at all. You can also leave us a comment wherever you see this video or wherever you're hearing this podcast. We read them all, good and bad and the ugly. We read them all. So yeah, let us know what you think. So that's it for this week. On behalf of my co hosts, Tracy Harwood and Damian Valentine. I'm Phil rice Ricky grove. You know, blame his parrot. He's not here, but he'll be back with us soon. Have a great day. Bye. Bye. You.