Phil Rice 01:00
to And now for something completely machinima. The podcast about machinima, virtual production and related technologies. This episode, we're going to cover some news of the month. My name is Phil rice, and I'm here with my co hosts, Damien Valentine, hello and Tracy Harwood, hello. Ricky Grove is away this week. He's performing an encore of his highly celebrated nude avant garde Beckett play. So yeah, he's, he's a little bit predisposed with that, but he'll be back with us shortly. So yeah, this is the episode that we talk about new stuff. So Tracy, why don't you kick us off?

Tracy Harwood 01:39
Sure. Well, let's, let's start with a tribute and a notice, because I was very saddened. I'm sure you both are too to hear that Tutsi navaratna, whose name in real life was Bazil vinye, has passed unfortunately, Tootsie was one of the most innovative Second Life creators I've known, and we have covered his work previously on this show, most recently, a documentary that he made of the Baudelaire inspired Flowers of Evil, show which was created by Lali sorbet and Chris, which was released last year, but prior to that, I interviewed him back in 2021 for our show's blog, and I'll put a link to both of those in our show notes, so you can see that what we were talking about at the time, to say it was a surprise to hear of his demise is really an overstatement, and It's been very moving to see how his friends and the Second Life Community have celebrated his life with an interactive installation, which I actually managed to visit and see the various video tributes that his friends had posted his unique take on the virtual world as his extended Self or in search of the Creator, was something I found especially intriguing in his short called Journey Into the metaverse. If you remember that, it's one of those films that has stayed with me ever since I first saw it. In actual fact, that was when Tootsie first shared it with me, as it was being released back in April 2011 and I distinctly remember showcasing at it at an event in Leicester to an equally intrigued audience. Suffice to say, we will all miss Tootsie and his take on the worlds we inhabit today. And I'll just finish by saying My deepest condolences to his family and friends. I Okay, let's move on to some slightly lighter subjects, some projects. I want to highlight some things that I found particularly interesting that I came across during the course of the month. A number of these have been made using generative AIS, but they are worth taking a look at. They're not what do you call them? Phil slop? I'd say they're not slop, but I'd encourage you to have a look at them because, because of the breadth of work that they represent, and also the you get a sense of how the work that is being created is evolving through the the use of these, these tools. But actually, rather than me just discuss each of them, I'll drop links onto our blog so you can check them out. There's about three or four. They include a rango like tale, a sci fi made with VO three, a black magic circus inspired by Danish clowns also very interesting. And then some other projects that I want to just talk a little more briefly about are actually made using classic machinima tools. So I found a Red Dead Redemption, two inspired minecraft animation made using Blender, which is definitely worth taking a look at. And. And I also found an Egyptian Renaissance cinematic which had been made in Unreal Engine. There's not a lot of action in it, but it's a beautiful sweep through of Egyptian landscape, really. It's gorgeous, including the pyramids, the Nile and so on and so forth. Really, really well made. There's a trailer for an upcoming movie, which the creators are trying to fund and involve the original actors for Team Fortress two that I'll put a link up to. Again, I would encourage you to get involved with that. If you're a Team Fortress two fan at all. There is an intro to an updated game called Back to the Future 2025 which has been made in Unreal Engine, another one worth having a look at. And there's also a webcam test for meta humans, which has also been made in Unreal Engine that I'll put a link to. Now. On top of that, I also came across some really interesting conversations. These are about storytelling and filmmaking as all as well as generative tools themselves. First one I thought was fascinating, was a sort of a, you know, talking heads discussion between Darren oranovsky, the director, and Dennis Hassabis, who's the founder of DeepMind, which is now owned by Google, and they were participating in this discussion about their collaboration. And basically they seem to be in reinventing machinima. But for those that have never heard of it before, not sure how many folks that would actually be these days, but it's an interesting overview of a big tech perspective of a so called emergent creative practice for moving image definitely worth checking out. It's about a 40 minute long, hour long kind of interview. And you know, they do really make some very interesting points. But I'm not sure what's new, to be honest. Anyway, that's one another one is the outcome of runways 2025, Film Festival, which showcased a number of really fascinating shorts using many different esthetic approaches, with the with the generative tools themselves. And it's worth checking out just to see how a pro environment like that, along with all the professionals, industry professionals that they've got acting as judges in that mix, are using the tools and recognizing how the work is evolving. It's definitely worth checking out a few of those and and, you know, and reflecting on that. And then also to do with generative AI is, of course, this month, we've seen a US judge siding with anthropic on copyright being a fair and transformative use of web based data, albeit that it was claimed the content used was actually from pirated books. So sidestepping that bit, focusing on the decision itself, I mean, obviously, has caused a lot of ongoing discussion, but it's actually what I think on this show we were always expecting to be the result, at least for the moment, not that the pirate content is appropriate, but that the content based on whatever material is transformative in its nature, and if it's using an open platform in any way, which a lot of content is these days, most of the world's research, for example, sits on publicly open platforms, and that includes a lot of reviews for innovative and emergent creative practice and work. Then the court's decision was that it was also fair use. So it's transformative in nature, and it's fair use to use content. I think that's reasonable outcome. I think that reflects what we've seen in the world of machinima for as long as machinima has been debated, which is at least 25 years in terms of legal practice and what have you like I said, the issue with content and where it comes from is a different matter, and I don't think that was necessarily handled particularly well in that particular legal scenario. Phil, I don't know if you wanted to jump in on that. I think you've got something to say about that as well. And

Phil Rice 09:20
you Yeah, a lot of this working on that project that I did, which was, you know, kind of taking after neural visits approach, kind of really, first of all, got me into, in deep with some of these tools, deeper than I had previously been. And I'm working on I'm editing the documentary for that right now, and during the documentary, I end up reflecting a lot on how my thinking on AI has continued to move forward. I still am not landed in a particular place, but I'm definitely of two minds. You know that there's. Yeah, there's a part of me that very much sees the artist's point of view. And then there's also the side of me that thinks, Okay, on its face, what AI does with the material that it trains on on its face, it's not that different from what humans do, and let me, and just let me, just as a simple example, I read, I'm a writer, let's say, and I read a lot of what's I want to say? Just say eski, because that's what I've been reading lately. But let's pick somebody more modern that copyright would make, would have would be applicable for so let's say I read a lot of, oh, there's a there's a fantasy and sci fi author Brandon Sanderson. So let's say I read a bunch of Brandon Sanderson books. Is he's a good one to use too, because he's been pretty vocal on on AI and voicing an opinion on it. So I read a bunch of his books, like multiple times, just really absorb them, or I read a bunch of the Harry Potter books. And out of that, I start to evolve a certain style, because all human beings, to one degree or another, are always a little bit imitative when they create. And so I start to emulate, not even consciously, maybe, I start to emulate the style of who I've been reading, and it's very possible that some point I might use a turn of phrase of that author in my own writing, not with any malicious intent or with any intent to plagiarize or steal, but because you are your influences to a degree, and yes, we add something else to it, but really it's about mish mashing those together. Same is totally true in the world of music as well. Famous example that I can think of is there's a band who whose name is extreme. They have and they have they're still around. But when they were at their peak in the early 90s. Their guitarist is one, considered one of the greatest guitarists of the modern era that's ever lived. Nuno, I can't remember his last name. It's very long last name, but he's just ridiculously good. And the song is called rest in peace. And it's, it's this rock, uh, Anthem, and he plays this solo in it, and at one point in the solo, he breaks into this riff that very clearly is mimicking a Jimi Hendrix guitar lick from 40 years prior, like it's very recognizable, just in the middle of his solo, he just does that as kind of a turn, and then moves on to the next thing. And there are, there are more obvious examples of that, you know, BB King, uh, pretty famously. Would, would work in little recognizable tunes into his solos, because he's playing, you know, hundreds of shows a year when he was in his prime. And so all of a sudden, in the middle of his solo, you'd hear a strain that's unmistakably from happy the song Happy birthday, or some TV show theme or something, and people recognize it, and they clap and whatnot. But that's because he's heard that, and it just worked its way into his lexicon. And I think in BB King's case in particular, it was deliberate, like he was doing that, because it's almost like the work of a stand up comedian. You know, he's throwing a reference that people are going to recognize. But I think

Damien Valentine 13:31
the doctor who theme in one of their songs as well, obviously deliberately, because it's,

Phil Rice 13:34
yeah, very deliberate with that stuff. Yeah, absolutely. But they had those things happen accidentally as well. And so you end up with, I think a good case for the accidental is there's a song that was made by a music artist called Ferrell, or Pharrell, I'm not sure how it's pronounced. He's the one who did the soundtrack for all the Despicable Me animated movies, right? Well, outside of Despicable Me, he did a song with another American artist called Robin Thicke, and the song is called blurred lines or something like that, and it's just this bouncy pop tune and very soulful. The rights holders for a Marvin Gaye song produced many decades prior, sued them for copyright infringement because the vibe of the song was so similar to a Marvin Gaye song. Then there were certain, certain phrases of music that were happening in that song. I don't think, no, it's possible. Who knows? I don't know Pharrell, so I don't know. Maybe he did it on purpose and thought he could get away with it. But I think it's as a musician, I know sometimes that just happens, and I'll catch myself doing it, sometimes go, oh, that's just, you know, that's when I I'm able to cite the reference and spot. Right? So I'm saying all this to say, to some degree, that's what AI is doing with its training sets. Is it's it's using that to build a lexicon, a vocabulary of how to do, whether it's music or images or even writing. And sometimes it's going to end up directly borrowing, but it's not complete plagiarism, per se, like it's not hopping by rote, you know, the whole thing. So that's what, that's what half of me wrestles with. Yeah, go ahead,

Tracy Harwood 15:31
here's a question on the because what you're talking about with with your music certainly is, where it's deliberate, don't you call that sampling, and it's a legitimate strategy, is it not to making music, so you're sampling the work of

Phil Rice 15:45
others, yeah, when it's deliberate, yes, verse, but that would actually be, that would actually be the actual sound recording only, right? Like, if, like, if I just play a riff that was played by some musician in the past. That's not sampling. Sampling is the actual, only the sound recording. But you're right, that does seem more applicable to the way AI works with things. It's

Tracy Harwood 16:05
sampling is one thing, but the other thing I was going to say, and the other analogous thing, is that you know, you might have that on the on, you know, one end of a continuum, but on the other end of the continuum, you have learning and bootstrapping, which is how we learn. So you you know, you continually build on stuff that is learning. And evidence of learning is in the application or something. And I think you've got to be a bit careful about about how you talk about this, which is, you know, you can't there's nothing created in a vacuum here. Learning is literally taking stuff in, you know, absorbing it and and testing it in in ways that make sense to you. That's what bootstrapping is as a learning technique. So, so you know, by trying to sort of say that these aren't appropriate techniques for the use of new work, or, you know, existing work doesn't make a lot of sense to me, if you're, if you're going to talk about it in terms of the way that we learn as human

Phil Rice 17:10
beings, yeah, I think it's more nuanced than that, for sure, yeah, because there's no such thing as like an infant who is raised in complete isolation and and and comes out of that, with the knowledge of quantum physics, there's no such thing anyone who knows something about quantum physics studied the sciences that lead up to quantum physics and studied what other people are doing with quantum physics, and assimilated that information. And that's true in the realm of creativity as well. You know, any of the great classical musicians. There's all kinds of talk about, oh, prodigies and whatnot, but to actually propose, they trained, they learned, they studied formally or not, they did. You know, there's plenty of examples in the modern world of music, for example, of someone who's had no formal training, and yet they've achieved a level of virtuosity that people would call genius, right? Nuno is a great example. Nuno, I don't think Nuno knows any music theory whatsoever, which, to me is someone who took piano lessons and trained and learned that, and it's a big part of how I build music. I just don't even understand that, because the stuff that he writes is so musically complex, but it, according to him, that is, he doesn't know the first thing about what he's doing. It's weird. Like he knows it's good, like he it's but, but he doesn't know how he's getting there. It's, it's all intuitive from i It has to be from his from his influences, from what he's been exposed to, from what he's listened to and learning. Oh, yeah. So yeah, yeah. So the the AI, to some degree, a case can be made that that's really what it's doing now, what it's not doing is adding that special sauce that almost all human creativity does involve, because we don't just assimilate influences and then spit something out, or at least, I hope not. If we do, most people recognize it as sounding pretty uninspired, or the word that they like to use for it is derivative, right? That's when we use that word, even though all created stuff is derivative to a degree. But when it's only thus, then it's just it. There's a staleness to it, right? So when the human creators, they do what AI is doing, not as efficiently, maybe they can't, but they do that assimilation process. But they also add something. They they synthesize, they they make new connections. And that's that really is the most important part of creativity, and it's why I tell artists that I know who are worried about AI taking their jobs. It's like, okay, well if, if what you produce is stale, like in the realm of music, is stale, corporate background music, generic, such and such, then yeah, you should be worried. Right? Because that's gone now that that's not going to exist, that no, no one's going to pay a human to do that anymore. But that was never really, not to be snobby, but, I mean, that was never really the good stuff anyway. You know, like, who cares if a machine can just take care of that for us? But, you know, true compositions and and experimentation and innovation. Ai gives the impression that it experiments. Yes, if you play, if you play with suno, it gives you the impression that it's experimenting. But it's not. It's random. It's just throwing things together and seeing what happens. And, yeah, it's got some rules that they have set up. That's why it sounds like music and not just chaotic noise. You know, they've, they've, they've put some guardrails in there so that it will randomize within certain parameters. But it's still just a complete empty machine, guess, and that's, that's why, almost never. When you do something with generate, I almost never, does it get it right the first time. Why do you think all these things are based on credits, and they'll give you a lot more credits than you probably need? Because the first iterations are going to just, it's just not going to get it right. Because it's, it's dice rolls, really, it's just guesses. So, and that's what's really different. You know, human beings may experiment and they may guess sometimes, but there's some other I call it the special sauce. There's something else going on. This is true in the world of art. It's definitely true in the world of writing. It's true in the world of music and whatever other areas that you know, this tool gets focused on in the future, and that's, that's uh, should we keep fighting against this thing encroaching and and just gobbling up stuff without any uh, restriction? Yes, we should. Yes, we should. But to any thought that, well, we should just destroy this thing. First of all, it's just not going to happen. I just don't think that's ever going to happen. It's here. So are there any upsides to using it when it's used ethically and when you're not farming out the part of creativity that is the most rewarding? You don't want to you don't want to have a machine do that. How soulless and empty an enterprise that is, and I we've talked about on this show before, but I know a composer who kind of went down the rabbit hole of AI music, and I don't think he's composed anything of his own sense. That's not an outcome I'd want for anybody that's tragic, that's horrible, but it's because I think that his mind is on. Well, it's just so easy this way. Why would anyone want to put in that effort? And I think that ultimately it comes down to maybe he fell out of love with the process, and the process is where the real reward is. You know, it's not in the likes, it's not in the views, and it's not in the acclaim, it's the process of the making, and AI does have the potential to steal that joy if you let it. That's why it's dangerous. I think

Damien Valentine 23:11
I don't creators, yeah, so I don't use AI tools in anything I do, because I enjoy doing everything I do, or in case of voice acting. I enjoy working with the real people. They're friends of mine. Like interacting with them. I could get use 11 ABS do voices for me, but then it takes that element of interacting with people I really like and work enjoy working with. So I don't use AI at all because it just doesn't appeal to me as a creator, when I'm enjoying everything that it would take away from me. Sure, I can do things faster,

Tracy Harwood 23:43
but you you've got a fun workflow there, workflow that, yes, works for you. But you know, I talk to a lot of digital artists who've been using generative tools for well since the 1960s and what they will tell you about the use of technology in their creative process is that it enables them to work with many more options than they would be able to do if they had to create it all by hand. And they use that as a way of, you know, generating new ideas, filtering through, you know, filtering through ideas, integrating new ideas into their work. And for them, it's a it's a tool that takes them to a place where they know they couldn't, couldn't get to on their own. That's literally what they will tell you. And and I think looked at in that vein, which I think is the correct way to look at it, then it's a tool that has lots of potential, where it can add to your creative process, fundamentally add to your creative process, but where it's a replacement for lazy thinking, then, yeah, it's not. It's never gonna, I mean, at the moment. When we're looking for films at the moment when I when I'm sort of scanning, which I do on a fairly regular basis, scanning YouTube for content. Do you know, finding anything at the moment that is something that you can trust has been created with in an in a way that demonstrates a genuine creative process is really tough because there is so much what do you call it? Phil, I slop? Yeah, flop. There really is so much slop, and because it's getting lots of views, you get nothing else on YouTube. At the moment, it's a disaster for YouTube, in my view. It's a disaster waiting to happen. Already happening.

Damien Valentine 25:41
Yeah, in one of our other videos, I said I just don't engage with AI when I watching a video. So when I realize it's aI generated, I just don't engage with it because there's so much of it, it's tedious, yeah? And it's all the same, even

Phil Rice 25:54
in the ads. It's all through the ads. Now too, it's rare to see an ad, even an ad with a talking head and someone supposedly endorsing a product. I mean, all the social platforms, you know, Instagram and Tiktok and YouTube, the ads are all going that way. And I'm sure it's because it's, it's economically expedient to do, but I just think that's going to backfire bad, like, I think it's killing it. It really, I think they're really underestimating how easy it is for even untrained human beings to detect that and they don't like it.

Damien Valentine 26:26
There was a meme going around. It's if you have an AI generated ad or a poster for your products, it shows that you don't really have the what's the word, confidence in your product enough to actually advertise it properly. So why it

Tracy Harwood 26:44
a good point? Yeah, all right, well, I'm not quite finished. I've got a couple of other things I want to just talk about, which are things like tools and techniques. One is meta has released its world's desktop editor for VR creators, which I'll put a link to. That looks quite interesting. I don't know. We haven't really talked too much on this show, although we always intended to talk a bit more about VR experiences, we've never really found that many that we wanted to discuss. But with this new set of tools, maybe, maybe that will change in due course, there's also a really great tutorial out there on how to create a crowd of meta humans in Unreal which I'll put video link to. And then Martin Bell, who created prazenberg Ridge, was that last year or the year before, he has released this fabulous new series on how to create in Unreal Engine that you might find particularly useful. And what's, what's interesting about that is, of course, when Martin made present Burt Ridge, he'd never made animation before, so it was a learning curve for him, and now he's clearly quite a bit more experienced.

Phil Rice 27:53
Teaches people how to do it, yeah, nice to see that two

Tracy Harwood 27:57
years sort of down the line, and he's doing that. It's amazing. So, and it's really well produced, and he's, you know, he's, he's really worth listening to, he's, he's great. So I put some links to that. There is also a really fascinating video about a couple of musical notes creating the dramatic mood for one of the most classic films of the modern era that, you know, it's a, it's a really interesting documentary about how, how the sound for JAWS approaches that video, yeah, just with, you know, with those two notes. And I guess I hadn't really thought about it in the same, you know, in the way that the guy was talking about it. But it's, it's worth listening to, it's worth reflecting on, because it's as much about what they didn't include in the film as what they did include in the film. I think that's, it's brilliantly well done. And of course, Jules remains one of the, one of the most suspenseful. Would you call it a horror? Because cult horror, I suppose. I don't really know what you'd call it, that classic anyway. I'm sure most people here would have known, would have seen it at some point, even though it's what was it 80s or 90s? I don't

Phil Rice 29:16
definitely early 80s. Yeah,

Tracy Harwood 29:20
75 Oh, my 75 No way.

Damien Valentine 29:23
Yeah, it's celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Oh, my

Tracy Harwood 29:25
God. Well, I didn't, hadn't clocked it was quite that old. But yeah, I remember.

Damien Valentine 29:30
I watched it a few days ago. Justification, so it's very timely. It holds

Phil Rice 29:35
up, yeah, oh yeah. It's great.

Tracy Harwood 29:36
I remember going to Universal Studios with the with the jaws in the middle of the lake. And, you know, it's, you know, even as you're going past it on your little on your little train, I don't know many years that must have been 40 years ago, it's like, Oh, my God, get me out of here. I don't want it to to catch me. And then just as you get through, or you got through that section of the. Studios tour, you're on the train track where King Kong is looming over you. So it goes from one horror to the next. It was brilliant. I remember, distinctly remember that. And then also, Phil, to your point about generative tools and what have you. There is another sort of interesting tutorial about an AI called Laura, which has been used to control character creation. Now actually that this sort of link came to us by somebody that actually posted on the episode where we're talking about the gluons and neural vises work. And it's, you know, it's fascinating link to have a look at, see how they're how you know, how the characters are being created using that particular tool. So it's not one I'd really come across. I don't think Laura, okay. And then on in other news, game releases, I wanted to just touch on, I'm sure we mentioned this in the past as well. Dune awakening has been released now. Here's a question for you. Have you played it? And if you have, what did you think? Obviously I haven't. However, last week, I was walking around my university's degree show for graphic arts, and some bright spark had come up with a fascinating idea for a new Coca Cola cinema cup inspired by the sound worms. I won't spoil it, in case somebody wants to pick that idea up. I'm sure you could copyright that, but it was a really interesting idea. So have you played it? What do you think

Damien Valentine 31:49
I haven't played it. It's I like dune and the world, but I've read. I read the first three books after that, they get really heavy going, and I just didn't enjoy going from that but I liked the first three books. I enjoyed the 80s film, I enjoyed the Sci Fi mini series, and I enjoyed the recent films. I'm very excited for part three, which just started filming, think last week. So I'm quite intrigued by this game, and initially I was put off with the idea that it's a it's an MMO survival game, so you have to collect your resources and build a base and all of that. And I thought, Okay, this is going to be one of those things where people who have more time than you are just going to destroy your creations in the game. And I don't want to dedicate my entire life to playing a video game just to stop other people from destroying what I created in it. That's interesting. So, yeah, I didn't want to get into it for that reason. But I found out that actually, your stuff is safe when you're offline. I think a force field goes around it, or something that no one can attack it or destroy it or do anything to it when you're not online. Which I thought, okay, that is my big reservation for the game. So if I don't play it for several weeks, I don't have to worry that some 16 year old has crashed everything. And I thought, actually, that might be useful for machinery creators as well. Because if you're going to go into this game and you build your base to be your film set, and you know you're in the middle of your production, and your team either just yourself or whatever you're working with, for the other characters, you go offline because you go to bed or go to work or whatever, you don't want to come back and find that someone's destroyed it all, and you have to rebuild it, and because you haven't finished the scene yet, so no, your stuff is going to be safe. There are people who are getting around the other dedicated player versus player areas, and then the rest of the game is only player versus environment, so you can't kill other players. But some people have gone around that limitation by summoning sand worms. So you summon a sand worm and you'll eat the other player, even if, just because the way the games work. So obviously the developers are gonna have to figure out a way around that, to stop the grief thing that's going on. But at least as far as your creations go, they are safe when you're not there, which I'm kind of thinking about that as a something to look into at some point, but,

Tracy Harwood 34:28
but presumably you only have to log in and instantly somebody could be straight on you, because somebody works out Your pattern of gameplay using an AI tool. Say

Damien Valentine 34:43
they've had to be very interested in me and my creation to want to go to that level

Tracy Harwood 34:47
of but maybe if you've spent months building something like, you know, like lots of folks doing Second Life, not sure I'd be very happy about that.

Damien Valentine 34:56
Wow. I guess it depends on how easy it is to actually find. Defined stuff in the game. And so as you play it, it's hard to to know,

Tracy Harwood 35:05
interesting, yeah. I mean, we touched on this just before we were we came on it the, you know, of all the of all the games to sort of want to play. Why pick something that's got such a defined world? What's the point of that? Why would you not pick something? I mean, I can see something that's got more world choices to be a little bit more interesting. But this, why would you not do something like Warhammer, where you've got all the different factions fighting each other? What's, what's the, what would be the attraction to this?

Damien Valentine 35:41
They A while back, they released a story trailer to say what, what's different about this game world. So they've very deliberately used the visual style of the recent films, which is, I think it's a good choice, because everything in that film looks stunning. It's very well thought out, and it's also very familiar to new fans of Dune, who maybe haven't read the books, but they've, they've gone to see the films, what they've done is they've created an alternate reality where polar Tracy does not exist to become the the basically the chosen

Phil Rice 36:19
one. Is that the premise for this game? Yeah, I didn't realize that. So

Damien Valentine 36:25
when you create your character, you can choose to be a tragedy or Harkonnen. And one of the problems the developers have had is people tend to choose a Tracy. So the Harkonnen population is very small. I don't know if there are other houses represented as playable factions. So the idea is, you're on Arrakis, and you can kind of create your own destiny, whatever that's going to be, but you're obviously not going to be Paul of Tracy with his powers, because that just does not exist. So none of the events of the films or the books take place in this world. So it's kind of a they've taken the world and just made it a sandbox for people to play in, without the major events happening

Tracy Harwood 37:13
or the possibility that they might Yeah. Why would you do that?

Damien Valentine 37:17
I guess it's possible you could rally a huge army of players, the way Paul rallied a huge army of Fremen warriors in the films. But what, I don't know what you do with them, but I mean, I guess there's no reason why it couldn't be done in the game. You just need someone with a, I guess, enough time and the right personality to rally. You know that many people to make a difference in the game world,

Phil Rice 37:42
you know, in that sense, deprived of the the core narrative of the novels and the movies. This this game does seem to me to sound a lot more like Warhammer or 40k or even what's the other one? I was thinking of World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft, yeah, yeah, where there's not really a point, there's not a predestined winner, in either of those universes, it's just factions, it's just clans. And yeah, I'm less drawn to to that environment. But I suppose you know, it's like the Star Wars universe with no Skywalkers, you know? So I guess it might be appealing because it's, it's, it's a blank canvas. So you can, you can then freely create your own stories and narratives. And I'm sure that if anyone plays the game as if it were an RPG, then there's this sense of, you embody that character, and you're the hero now you're you're the hero of the story, right? I don't know, yeah, that that that type of game is has just never had a strong appeal for me. But you know, it those, those other two games we mentioned, sure did attract a lot of players and and with World of Warcraft, well, both of them, they retain those players long term. EVE Online is another one. There's no overarching narrative in EVE Online or even Star Citizen. I think you know, these are more just their canvases that you can interact on. So, yeah, I whatever, whatever it is that makes that market tick. It sounds like they've, they've positioned this game to to fit into that mold. I would have been much more interested in a single player dune experience, where the the the primary narrative is somehow present. I'm not necessarily, I'm not interested in playing Paula Tracy because I've just, we've all seen that so many times. But you know, you think about the way that they set up really intriguing alternate narrative lines. In the Star Wars universe, you know, andor wasn't part of Lucas's original design at all. But, you know, he kind of made some made a splash as a character in one of the films that, again, wasn't part of Lucas's original design. And then they developed this whole narrative around who is this and or why is he significant, etc. Same is true for the Mandalorian their side stories that are happening either while all that other stuff is going around, or kind of in between the cracks. So that would have been an interesting approach on this game for me is it's set in the world of Dune, with the narrative going on, but you're a different character, a new character, someone that wasn't part of the original but is kind of woven into that fabric, you know, maybe a particular Fremen that comes up or something. So it's, it's, I think there's a lot of room for narratives in Dune, but this game doesn't seem to be focused on that really, the

Tracy Harwood 41:02
Do you think we'll get a little machinima out of it or not?

Phil Rice 41:06
No, that sounds of it. Probably not anything other than play throughs, run throughs, okay, there's, there's been some, there's some machinima that I could think of that we reviewed on this show a couple years back, that was made in, I think it was, Star Citizen, is one of the space games, and essentially that the Machinima was, for the most part, a big, large scale battle going on. There was like a ground assault with the ships and the guys attacking and whatnot. And you remember how there was, there was little moments here and there where they kind of gave a hint of a narrative, and we all fixated on that, right? We were all like, what does that mean? What is, you know, what's going on? And I wish there was more of that. So I think that's the most that we'll see out of this.

Damien Valentine 41:50
We may see people trying to recreate scenes from the film, sure, like, you know, maybe the knife fight between Paul and Faze, because knife fighting, my understanding is, knife fighting, is knife fighting is a big component of this game. So that would be an obvious scene to, you know, to recreate, sure, interesting. I don't know if you'll see anything huge like, I don't think anyone's going to make their own dune fan film or anything like that.

Tracy Harwood 42:17
Well, in some ways that's disappointing, because I was kind of, you know, I was kind of expecting that we might see something like that now to sort of having had the chance to talk to you about it, I'm guessing that's probably not going to be seen. We

Phil Rice 42:31
might get surprised, but an eye on

Damien Valentine 42:33
it, I think, yeah, there are what I'd have liked to see, instead of an MMO is a game, either single player game, like Phil was talking about or a game that had limited multiplayer, so you play with maybe four people at the exactly same you're on a racket or Co Op. Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah. You have to build your settlement and survive together. That would be fun, and you don't have to worry about other people attacking or getting in the way. It's just you and your friends on a private server doing your own thing. That would have been fine, and that'd be good for machinery as well, because you could then have this whole server to yourself to do whatever you wanted

Phil Rice 43:12
to do. Honestly, I it will not surprise me at all if we don't see that type of game set in this world to come at some point like just because this game was made doesn't mean they're the only ones who can license the IP and make something and some kind of a co op squad game. We've, we've talked before about how those are just really popular right now. This is this. This would be an area that would be, I mean, can you imagine you and three friends, and you're a group of Fremen going up against the Harkin and or whatever. Yeah, that could be a lot of fun.

Damien Valentine 43:43
All of you trying to learn how to ride a sand worm without getting eaten by it, right? Right? There's been a couple other June games in the past, but the ones I found I enjoyed most of the strategy games, where they again, ignore the story, because they let you choose which house or faction you want to lead, and then it's up to you to fight to control Arrakis. Those are really fun, and you don't need to worry about the story, because in that kind of game, the story of the book doesn't really matter, because it's up to you to conquer the planet yourself.

Phil Rice 44:16
And those were, am I remembering right that at least one of those was it kind of had the vibe of like the old Command and Conquer games, Yeah, same those real time strategy type thing, yeah, yeah.

Damien Valentine 44:27
There's a one that got released, I think, about three years ago. It's called dune spice wars, which is a mix of real time strategy, but on a more empire building level, so you have to manage your settlements and conquer territory, but it's all done in one map. That's a really good fun game as well. But again, the story doesn't matter, because if they focused on retelling the story, not only have you seen that, there's only ever going to be one outcome, whereas, yeah, right, you can choose which factions are present on the map, so you can mix it. Match, and there's more factions in the game that can be on the map, so you've got a lot of flexibility there. And then you got the replay averted, because maybe you play as the harcons and you win, or maybe you play as the fragment and you win, or the fragment could go to war with your tradies and team up with the harkonnens, and you got all that kind of stuff happening that it's kind of a what if sandbox, which for a strategy game, I think that is essential, because you want that kind of thing, but that's not really much helpful for machinima, because even though it's a big 3d game, you're kind of limited for the camera angles, because it's mentally top down. And the you know, the little troops you see running around, they're not very detailed, because it's not really designed for that kind of

Tracy Harwood 45:43
look, but not unless you drop them into Unreal,

Damien Valentine 45:45
yeah, but then you're playing that's a completely different game, completely.

Tracy Harwood 45:49
I agree. I agree. Well, look, there's fine. There's one final thing that I just wanted to share, because this kind of intrigues me. Actually, I was really interested to see that Fortnite has adopted a slightly different take to the classic definition for machinima on its developer documentation, its definition states the use of real time computer graphics engines like that used with Fortnite to create a cinematic production. The word Machinima is a portmanteau of the words machine and cinema. Now that's interesting because, of course, it's it very clearly alludes to the professional approach to using engines, albeit it doesn't exclude gamer based creative works either. And I'd say from that, it's nothing like sitting on the fence. Then perhaps, though, what they should have done is have a look at the hundreds of publications and journal articles that there are out there about what Machinima is before creating a new track along a well trodden pathway. Or, for example, even take a look at the interview transcript that I did with Epic's Chief Technology Officer, Kim libreri for the book that Ben and I wrote about the pioneers in machinima. So there you go. Another definition for machinima. Anyway, that's me done this month. What have you guys got on

Damien Valentine 47:22
so a few weeks ago, a few months ago, rather real illusion, announced character creator five that is coming in August, and they just put out a feature preview video, which is about five or six minutes long, and it kind of goes into what's coming up in this new a big leap forward in character creator, and they're talking about how the how it's going to be a lot easier to create your characters and put them into Unreal there's a big focus on that unreal connection. And it's automatically they've updated the way that the skeletons the characters work so they're more easily compatible with what unreal five is doing. And I think there's a bit where I said character creator characters are going to be immediately possible to send over to unreal to be used. Basically game ready. And then they showed us some footage of a character they created, doing some leaping over boxes and things in Unreal environment. And all the the soft cloth fabric was all moving with it. So it was all is all done. Basically, you export it with one click. And they got your character ready to go. What caught my eye personally was the facial muscles, like when character creator four was released, the flexibility the face was very impressive. But then the other similar engines immediately overtook them, so character curator and iClone has been a little bit behind as far as just how flexible characters can be. So they've upped that again, and now they've kind of called up and like, if you're watching me talk, and you can see my the way my mouth moving, it's not just very stiff, it's it moves slightly. Sometimes it's slightly off. You've got that, and you could be a lot more expressive with your characters. I'm very excited to try that out, because I was, you know, I was equally excited when catch before did that, and then I saw what other like, unreal and some metahuman within a couple of months, they just surpassed and I thought, I, I still like using character creator, but I would like to have had that extra power. Now, of course you can, so that is a exciting thing to be get to play around with when it gets released. And they're also talking about extra muscle textures, so you can make character. Look older, and there's a slider for, I don't want to say size bodies, but shape bodies like they had characters back and they're just in the sliders. And they had things like the shoulder bones could stick out more, and you could they could come out like that, or they could be flatter and they could be more pronounced, or you can change the angle of them and things like that, so you get very different shaped characters very easily. And you could change the tone of the muscles on this the body on the skin textures very easily as well, which I know you can do that now, but this is more powerful. So yeah, I'm very excited for this, and I'm hoping at some point we'll get announcement for iClone nine as well, because icon eight has been out for quite some time now. But given real illusions track record, I probably announced that tomorrow, after we finished recording, because that's happened to us many times before,

Phil Rice 50:58
I will say, and I can't I, unfortunately, I don't have the reference to cite here. But when I was looking at character creator five reading up on it, there was somewhere in there was an official statement by real illusion, like where someone had asked, maybe it's in the the Frequently Asked Questions page for CC five had asked, is I clone nine coming in 2025 and they pretty definitively said, not in 2025 okay, so they didn't say when, but they said it's not going to be this calendar year. So we, I think you and I were both kind of hoping maybe it would be like November or something, you know, so

Damien Valentine 51:39
they could still announce it, that's true,

Phil Rice 51:43
that's true. They could just be that they're deflecting. But it, but the way that it was worded, it sure sounded like, okay, iClone nine will not be released in 2025 it was like, surprisingly clear, okay, so,

Damien Valentine 51:58
because there was a special offers for character five, and I'm kind of thinking maybe I should wait and see if there's a package between them. Oh, that's what I was doing too, yeah, but maybe not. There's still some special offers right now before launch. So

Phil Rice 52:15
in that same thing, by the way, one of the questions that somebody asked was, does this work fully with iClone eight, and their answer was a very definitive yes, it does. So that's good,

Damien Valentine 52:26
yeah, and it kind of useless for us if it didn't. So yeah, all right. So yeah, that's that's very exciting, and I look forward to giving that a try in a few weeks time, right? So my next I got three pieces of news about cyberpunk, 2077, the first one is the edge runners. Anime is getting a season two. I have to admit, I haven't got around to watching season one yet. I love the game, and I watched the trailer for edge runners, and I felt this is a little bit too graphic for what I wanted to deal with at the time, so I haven't got around to yet the game,

Phil Rice 53:01
yeah, it is the one that was on Netflix, right? The animated one that's on Netflix, yeah, man, it's, it's, it's a fair stretch beyond the R rating. Yeah, right.

Damien Valentine 53:13
So the game does have gone graphic. Is it's kind of graphic as well, but Right, nowhere near what I saw on the trailer for the anime. So I haven't got around to it. I'm sure I was at some point before two comes out, but gotta be in the right frame of mind for that, I think. But it's interesting to see a video game getting a second season of an nma adaptation. So the next thing is, it's not available yet, but someone is creating a multiplayer mod for the game, and it's been tested closed, testing in a small group of people. You can't play with the missions together, but you can explore the city together.

Phil Rice 53:54
Yeah, that matters. Yeah, that's great.

Damien Valentine 53:58
There's some video that showing it off. And that's great for machinima, because you can get several people together to act out the characters, you know, the old style, one person's the camera, everyone else their own character, that kind of approach. So when that's available, I'm sure we'll cover

Phil Rice 54:17
that. Since it's a mod, I'm going to assume that this is you set up your own server and it's private, yeah. Oh, that's terrific. That's really good for machinima, yeah,

Damien Valentine 54:29
as we're saying about the dune game, I was pushing for a private service for that, for machinima, exactly the same thing, you've got the circuit to yourself and whatever mods you want to install, and you could probably have mods to control aggressive NPC so they don't get in the way if you don't want them to be and stuff like that. So there's a lot of potential there for machinima. So I thought I want to mention that even though the mod itself isn't available yet, I think it's something that could be very useful in the future, when it once it's available, and then the. Had one, which was a big surprise, because CD Projekt RED had said that the final patch for the game had been released some time ago. They actually both definitively announced that was the final patch. The 2.2 update added the last features they were going to do. Well, there's now 2.3 which is also, very definitively, the very last match for the game that adds new vehicle

Phil Rice 55:27
starting now.

Damien Valentine 55:30
Yeah, so tomorrow, the 2.4 patch will be announced. Now it adds new features, new missions, new cars. So this isn't just a small bug fixing patch, this is a decent amount of new content, and you new controls for the camera, photo mode, which I've been playing around with. Also an auto drive feature so you can get in your car, set the destination, press the auto drive and the car will drive to the destination. And I was playing around with that as well. And also, when you're in auto drive mode, you can turn on the cinematic camera, so you get an external view of the capital of the car, and it will switch between different angles as you're driving around. If you get attacked or there's a problem, then it will switch back to manual control, which is quite handy, but I've been playing around with that, and there are some glitches with the also drive thing, because I was recording Some footage to go with the show's intro, and one of the clips I recorded cars driving along gets to a crossroads. Another car comes in front, so my car tucks, bangs into it a little bit, then swerves out of the way onto the the sidewalk, the pavement, and you got people diving out of the way and screaming, and then the car doesn't know how to get off the sidewalk, so it just kind of goes straight into this barrier leading up to some steps, crashes, bounces off, and then tries to go into the wall. And at that point, I stopped, because I think this is not going to go anywhere good, but it's just, I'm glad I was recording that, because it's not what I expected to happen. But anyway, I've tried it again and set a destination on the other side of the city from where I was. It took a few minutes to get there, but it's nice just to sit back, play around with the different camera controls and see parts of the city. It was night time. It's raining, so you had all this. It was lit up, but also very foggy, and it's all the rain effects on the ground, and puddles are forming, so it's reflecting all the lights and all the other traffic was going along. And so it's nice just to sit a nice way to sit back and enjoy the environment. But I think that's another tool that's going to be useful for machinima because these extra camera controls, so I'd be interested to see what comes with those. But yeah, that wraps up my news for this month. All right,

Phil Rice 58:10
so this month, I came across a video from a creator whose work was was one of my picks. I've lost track of how far back now, but a couple of three years back, it doesn't his work. Doesn't really it's not machinima. It's he used this tool called Absinthe that lets him do like this kind of primitive looking painting over the frames of real video, and then it will interpolate between those, and the end result is this kind of cartoon type look. And the video that we reviewed was one where the premise of it was when you return to a play of RPG, video game for the first time, or whatever, and he's going through all this scenario of Huzzah. And it ends up being comedy video. And that's that's his main thing. His main approach is this very quirky comedy style. The creator's name is Joel haver. I've been following him for quite some time. He does mostly live action stuff. He's an independent producer. Releases all his stuff on YouTube. His most one of his more recent releases is he's talking about the fact that he actually got approached by one of the major streamers. He's not allowed to say who, because of NDA, but basically, and they have fun with that in the video of him not being able to say, but he produces this video talking about that in the style of that animation, which is what they wanted him to do, the show, for this streamer to do. And apparently there was a substantial amount of money involved and all that. And he turned it down. On, and he talks about why, and it's an absolutely compelling conversation delivered with it's him and his friend basically end up turning it into a skit of sorts at certain points that's very humorous, and he's done

Tracy Harwood 1:00:19
it anyway. What's that he's done the animation anyway?

Phil Rice 1:00:23
Well, the thing is, is he's been doing this animation on his YouTube channel for a while. It's just that they wanted him to do a show, so, but what he wants to do is produce a full length, like feature length film using that animation style. And he wants to do it on his own terms. He didn't want to do a series and have basically lose his IP so he talks about exactly what he thought about and how he weighed that and evaluated it. One of his more compelling traits is his transparency. Over the years, as I've watched his stuff, he's just really open about behind the scenes stuff and how things work, and considerations that they make and choosing what content to do. He's got a Patreon as well, at which I'm on and and he's even more candid there. He's just a really likable guy, and feels like a trustworthy source, and who happens to have, you know, gotten to a really nice level of viewership on YouTube, and so he's encountering stuff that most of us don't see, and he's, he's just telling all about it. I love that about him, so this will link to this particular film where he goes into that, but it's a pretty interesting story about the offer and what that would have involved, and his thought process on why he decided that wasn't a good idea, even though it would have meant, in some ways, achieving the dream that sometimes machinima makers will talk about of, Oh, I get to do this now, and it'll pay the bills, right? And here he was offered that on a plate, and came up with reasons why maybe that wasn't as good a deal as he had thought. You know, very fascinating stuff. He's into a lot of themes that we've touched on, even even today, about loving the process. That's that's a big, big takeaway from it, in AI news, I found something interesting that's kind of the converse of the court related story that you had brought up Tracy this one, there's basically some a group of Hollywood Studios is pursuing a lawsuit against mid journey, a biggie, a big lawsuit that basically, if, I mean, if they had their way, the Empire, the entire the platform, wouldn't survive right now, of course, mid journey says that they're not worried. I don't think that the verdict on this one, I don't think it's been ruled on yet, so it'll be interesting to see how it plays out, especially in light of this precedent that was apparently just set where we actually saw a court rule in favor of the the AI company. So it's one to keep an eye on. We'll, we'll include a link to that in the in the news. Fender is a company that's been making musical instruments for goodness decades and decades. I think, I think bass guitars and and regular guitars are probably their the instrument they're most known for, but they create them all across the spectrum, and they have recently released a free eight track digital audio workstation, or DAW software, a multi track audio software, which eight tracks is is that's enough for most uses for for machinima, for sure. I've long been a proponent for the benefits of doing your audio for machinima outside of your video editing platform, because typically, with a true DAW, you can do some additional things to get a better mix and better effects and things like that. And with with a true DAW like this, you can actually, I believe this one supports MIDI. I'm not sure about that, but frankly, if you're a musician, you've already got a dog that you use anyway, right? You're using Logic or Cubase or something like that. So this is more for maybe people who just need the ability to mix multiple tracks of audio, or would like to delve into that to get a better sound mix. This is one worth looking at, simply because it's it's free, and the manufacturer is pretty reputable, so it's called fender Studio. You can google for that, or we'll include a link to it as well. And finally, in the in the mod category, Damien talked about the stuff that's going on with cyberpunk. There's been a mod that's been around for Grand Theft Auto Five called Natural Vision. It's been around for a while. Its focus is almost entirely on improved shaders for the game, which means more photo. Realistic look to the game and Natural Vision enhanced has been released. And there's a demo video showing GTA five with that running, and it is really spectacular. So GTA even, I mean, GTA is more than a 10 year old game now, it never looked horrible, I don't think. But, you know, the vanilla version of the game looks a little dated. Rock star themselves have released an enhanced version of the game that's got better and Natural Vision and third party shaders like this. It's even better like it to me it, I think it puts it on the same par, realism wise, with some of what we've seen with with cyberpunk run at its max settings, maybe a little less, little less glitzy looking, because Cyberpunk is a much more visually interesting atmosphere with all the futuristic and all the extra lights and things like that, but it's quite impressive looking. Is this

Damien Valentine 1:06:00
gonna be one of those mods that updates the graphics in a way that you need an incredibly powerful PC to actually run it? Otherwise, don't bother downloading it,

Phil Rice 1:06:10
because I don't know the specifics on that. Yeah, I don't know if I don't know the specifics on that, but the settings are tuneable. So okay, that's good. It should work for most scenarios, but most likely, if you don't have, you know, one of the the GTX, you know, the one of the Nvidia, Nvidia, those latest cards, okay, GTX, is that? What? What? RTX. RTX. Thank you. If you don't have one of the RTX cards, it's probably not even worth messing with, to be honest, because it's doubtful that you'd be able to crank it up to a level that's going to make that much difference. But if you happen to have one of those higher end cards and a good, you know, a good, hard PC underneath it, then yeah, you could get something good out of this.

Tracy Harwood 1:06:53
Remind me, GTA six release

Damien Valentine 1:06:56
next year, but that's next GC,

Tracy Harwood 1:07:00
not for PC.

Damien Valentine 1:07:02
They haven't said anything about PC, right?

Tracy Harwood 1:07:06
Well, what strikes me as interesting about this as a mod you say, is, you know, we've seen the the trailers for GTA six, and we've all commented on the quality and and the, you know, the the realism of the characters and the cinematics and what have you being a step up from GTA five. And I'm wondering if, actually, this isn't just a way of extending the life of GTA five in view of GTA six launching.

Damien Valentine 1:07:42
Well, it's fan made, so, yes, yeah,

Tracy Harwood 1:07:45
well, it is, yeah, no, but that's what I mean.

Damien Valentine 1:07:49
Well, I imagine that obviously, haven't watched the trainer for this mod yet, so the texture is going to be enhanced, but the animations are still going to be identical to exactly what I was thinking. Yeah. Oh, okay, okay, so they're not going to be and the animations for GTA five are pretty good, but the ones for six are going to be so much better equipment and so on. So unless someone actually wants to go and redo all the motion capture for GTA five, but they would need a huge studio level setup to actually match six. That's not going to

Tracy Harwood 1:08:27
happen. I was just thinking of the car chases and what have you.

Phil Rice 1:08:32
Well, that's probably not gonna Yeah. The driving should look quite nice, yeah,

Damien Valentine 1:08:36
but the actual character movement, though, that that's

Tracy Harwood 1:08:38
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get you, got you good

Phil Rice 1:08:41
point. Anyway, that's the news for this month. Yeah, if your listeners, if you've got any comments or thoughts on any of this, drop us a comment wherever you see this video, or send us an email talk at completely machinima.com my name is Phil rice, and on behalf of my co hosts, Tracy Harwood and Damian Valentine, we'll see you next time bye bye bye.