Phil Rice 01:00
and welcome to And now for something completely machinima podcast about machinima, virtual production, and this week. Ai slop, no, I'm just kidding. I'm your host, Phil rice, and I'm with my co hosts, Tracy Harwood, hello and Damian Valentine, hello there. All joking aside, we do have a ai ai generated video as our pick this week, and Tracy tell us about

Tracy Harwood 01:35
it. Sure. Okay, so this week, it's called we vlogged the fall of the Empire, and it's a complete season of shorts by a Creator called galactic archives, and it was released in the middle of June, 17 of June. Now this popped up on my feed a few weeks ago, literally just a couple of weeks probably when it first came out, in fact, and it seems to have been a channel for just about a month, amazingly, but has already achieved over one and a half million views and has posted 17 videos. Now, there's no clue who has created this that I can actually find at the moment. I have absolutely no idea who galactic archives actually is. It's aI generated, and an example, really, of what I've called my cinema M AI cinema, where the internet is basically the ludic environment for the creative work and the tools are the generative AIS we've been talking about for absolutely months now. It's quite a different proposition to the glory ons that we reviewed a few weeks back by neural viz, which I think is still one of the most interesting AI generated works we've seen. That's primarily because this one is based on the Star Wars Canon, which, of course, you know, there's, there's, there's millions of pieces of content, wikis, fan pages, all sorts of stuff all over the web. So you can easily see how that material could be used to generate some different types of content, of which I think this is an example. Now, what's impressed me with this, far from it being slop, although you might disagree, is actually how good it is. And yes, it's a bit glitchy, and it's got loads of anachronisms in it, but to me, that doesn't really seem to matter too much. It's, it's about these two Storm Troopers, Sam and Jeff, as they stumble from one galactic disaster to the next. And, you know, I think from from the description, it's everything from end all nights to jazz Palace to Cloud City, hideouts and pretty much everything in between, from what I understand. So why doesn't it matter that there are glitches in this? Well, I think that's for a number of reasons. One is that Canon is pretty well known, and another is that it's comedy, and because it's short, along the lines of, do you remember the fast show, series of sketches from what would that be the 90s? Or the be an American equivalent? Phil, I'm sure that you're going to tell us about that in a bit. But you don't actually need more in the in this sort of rubbery scenery, to get the drift of what's happening, and it's in that sense, it reminded me a little bit of space 1999 however, there is some consistency that you can draw upon. The characters are roughly the same. Yes, the costumes are a little bit different, but they are generally things that. Recognized as being stormtroopers, and the voices are consistent throughout. It's a very abridged story told in these short clips, just a few seconds long each, but it's stitched together in such a way that the style comes over as being a deliberate choice. It's a vlog, so it's very much a meme about a genre of creators on YouTube who have this kind of dumb ass. Let's get, let's do this, whatever may happen to us, kind of approach to talking to their audience through a camera. And you can see that, you know, they can fall off a cliff with a camera up in front. They just don't care. It's it's that kind of approach. Now, obviously it's been made using a range of different Gen AI tools. Or I assume that, although it doesn't actually make it clear which those tools are, I'm guessing it's going to be vo because that's the one that's doing the rounds at the moment. And this is of a period in time. It's kind of hot on YouTube right now. And I guess in some ways, then it's also making a bit of a meme out of the tool set as well. I would have thought it was using 11 labs for voices. Don't really know, but that's a distinct possibility. But I would say clearly here the current limitations of the animation Gen a eyes, it's, it's that set of limitations that lend themselves to this kind of flogging esthetic, which I think is, is especially interesting. So, so, you know, they've got this sort of, they've got it as a creative limitation, but it's also a framework through which they're doing the writing. The voice is interesting as well, because it might, I don't know if it I don't know if it is, but it sounded very Matt Damon like, and it sounded and looked and had the esthetic style of what you saw in the Martian film. I don't know if that's where the you know, where the whole sort of idea comes from, but it has that kind of look and feel about it too. In fact, there's a whole troop of these creators generating these storm trooper vlogs, which are seemingly quite in demand at the moment. There's the there's another dominant one which is being picked up in the media, and that's being called, being called storm trooper vlogs. This one is by, as I said, galactic archives, different group of folks, I assume, a different group of folks. That is, there's apparently an entire Instagram set of pages and channels that have hundreds of 1000s of followers already, even though most of them are less than a month old. And that's on the back of an 11 minute long Star Wars fan film that was made using ais that kicked off this massive debate earlier in the year on how Gen AIS would be used in the film industry, and also Industrial Light And Magic's release of a Star Wars mood board, what they call a mood board by a guy called Landis fields, which was shown as part of a TED Talk back in May, which I'll put on the show notes. So you can kind of see how these these big studios are thinking about how these tools might be integrated into their workflow. What I feel is a little different with this particular series, however, is the attitudes the Creator has towards its audience, which is not at all what one expects from the industry itself. They're not good at this sort of stuff. The description ask for comments from viewers about what the creators should do next with the characters. So it's actually about audience participation too, right down to the inclusion of a character that they can include in the series. And that's a superstar, smart sort of way to integrate film and internet affordances into a creative process, speeding up the creative process with these kind of generative tools, in a way, I think perhaps in a less obvious way, it's kind of similar to what neuro viz has done as Well, but in a you know, these guys are more overt with the way that they actually engage the neuro visits been so neuro viz has just responded to the way the audiences has, has accepted the content and enjoyed it and then riffed off how the audience has fed back about it. This guy, this set of folks, guy, girls, whatever, are actually calling for. What do you want us to do next? So it's a different level of interaction, I think. And as far as I can tell, they've got quite good music with this as well. I don't know whether that music was especially commissioned for this. It's. Certainly made use of somebody that has a track record with Star Wars, cinematic themed music, a guy, a guy called Samuel Kim, which I think is also very interesting. So yeah, I'm not sure I'd describe it as slop overall, but what did you think

Damien Valentine 10:24
Samuel Kim produces lots of he takes established style with themes and does his own sort of take on it. And all really good. Sometimes there's several piece of music he's done several different versions of has his own skills progress. I don't know if he does commissioned work, but he does have it. So if you want to use his work, he has this sort of process, you can contact him and ask permission, and then, my understanding is he's usually pretty good at saying yes, fair enough. So the glitches between the helmets, I was thinking about that, and I think it's probably because in the films you got so many different variations of the white Stormtrooper armor. You got two sets of clone troopers, very similar to stormtroopers, but the helmets and the armor is different between those two. Then you've got the original Imperial Storm Troopers from the original films. And then in the sequel trilogy, you got the first order Storm Troopers, which are basically they wanted their own design so they didn't have to pay royalties to the original designer of the storm trooper armor, because a Lucasfilm doesn't actually own that storm the rights for this original Stormtrooper design, the person who designed the costume still has the rights for it and can sell Stormtrooper merchandise without Disney having any say in it. So they created this first order stormtroopers, so they didn't have to deal with that. And then you got the various other variants of storm trooper. Rather, there's a scout troopers, and then there's Storm Troopers for different environments, like the snow troopers and on hearth, there's a lot of them. Yeah, yeah. And it's good for selling toys, because you get different variations. So my theory is that the AI software has seen all of these, but it doesn't know to keep them consistent between the cutscenes. So there's one bit worth that looks like part of a first order storm trooper helmet there. And then there's a bit where on the nose section there's a black line, which is like line advisor. That's the clone trooper piece that's somehow on there. And you have to really know your storm trooper armor to be able to pick out where each one is from. But I think that's why it gets glitchy. It's just because the software doesn't know to stick to one variant, and it just kind of blends them.

Phil Rice 12:46
Is there a variant Damien just to not to sidetrack it? But is there a variant of Stormtrooper helmet that has no shaded eye area, because that was a very common glitch throughout it is that the the sometimes the trooper would turn his head and all of a sudden you can see the eye, the human face, through the eye holes. And sometimes the eyes were going in different directions. And other than maybe a situation in one of the Star Wars, maybe in the sequels where somebody's helmet got broken. Other than that, you really don't, don't see the the human face in there. I was curious where that might we think that might be coming from, and it was very common

Damien Valentine 13:28
in the Ahsoka TV show, they got the zombie stormtroopers, and one of them gets hit in the face, and it kind of shatters part of the armor, and you can see, like, the undead person inside. Okay, maybe it's part of that. There are no real answers to that because that they only appears in the very last episode, so we have to wait till season two to really understand what it was. But they're very obviously brought back to life as zombies, but they can still shoot and act like Stormtroopers. So I don't really know where that's going to go, but we have to see. But that's probably where this day I picked up that one from. Or there's a couple of times where Darth Vader's helmet gets smashed as well, and you can see his face inside. But I don't know if that would have worked, because he's obviously Darth Vader or not the storm

Phil Rice 14:15
trooper, yeah, but I don't know. Yeah, it's hard to say. I think

Damien Valentine 14:21
the Soca one is probably more accurate. Oh, actually, there was, there was a book written about 1015, years ago that had, it's called Death Troopers, and there's also about zombies. And the picture on the front is a stormtrooper helmet, and the part of the helmet is missing, and I can't, I don't think there's a face underneath, but there's definitely a big hole in it, as they kind of briefly experimented with horror, which I did not finish the book. I didn't really enjoy it that much, yeah, but yeah, that's probably where that came from, something I struggle with. And it's not this videos in particular, its fault, but I. There's so much AI generated content now that I start watching a video. And I think if this is AI, I'm just going to stop watching it, because it's just too much. And it kind of brings back the days of every other machine. Where was that was released? Was a halo red versus blue clone. Oh, yeah. And, you know, you watch one of those, you start watching, oh, this is just trying, someone trying to copy red versus blue. Just switch it off. So it off. So I do struggle with that with AI videos these days, but I did really enjoy the otherwise, a really good concept, having the stormtroopers of doing the vlog. And I really enjoyed the humor, but I think I'd enjoyed it more if it had been done with blender or unreal or iClone, I think that would be a good step forward for the series. So if the creator of this are watching, have a look at those tools. And because you can do some really good stuff with them, and you also not have the glitching between the helmets, because you just have the one model that you bring in.

Phil Rice 15:59
Yeah. You'd have consistency for sure. Yeah. You know one thing that one reason why an AI tool was particularly well suited for this is because of the sprawling change of locations that happened. You imagine if you if you were going to do this in blender or Unreal Engine or something, even if you were dealing with matte paintings to cover some of it, that's an awful lot of locations, you know, like it's one thing we've seen a stormtrooper comedy sketch one Damien that you, you gave us a couple years back where it was two stormtroopers, I think, in an elevator, yeah, going, going up and and that's a controlled environment, so you can, you can pull it off, you know, but to the effort that would be involved in recreating, I mean, there's more than a dozen locations in here and buried locations, indoor, outdoor, all different Types of planets and terrain and action going on. So I get it, why this would be alluring to do with AI, because it's comparatively, it's not even in the same category of effort, you know. So I agree with you that it would be better. And I think, I think, I think all of this could be done with that tech that you're talking about completely, it could be, but the effort to pay back ratio is probably gets really challenging for that. You know, where it's not a where it's I mean, they went through all these different locations. Is one of the things that I liked about this the most was the choice of locations that they had these vlogging stormtroopers go through, which is a particularly gratifying journey if you know the franchise, because almost everything's recognizable and you know so it puts them right In the middle of major events starting early with putting them on Gorman during the uprising. Yeah, that was very savvy, because that is one of the most celebrated scenes in all of the Star Wars made for TV stuff that's ever been that episode of andor was critically and audience just huge, hugely celebrated, a very impactful moment. So to throw them right in the middle of that early on, that was smart. And then they took them through a journey of just all these, you know, I'm trying to think of what it reminds me of, maybe the montage from Forrest Gump, if you remember Forrest Gump, where all sudden he's there shaking hands with Nixon, or he's there with President Kennedy, and it's just just flash of putting him in all these historical situations and inserting him in there, and this kind of was like that kind of feel. And those those explorations are a lot of fun. They really are. So I enjoyed that part of it, the glitchiness, didn't bother me. But I think that's because I could tell almost immediately it was aI generated. So I've just kind of been conditioned to just expect that, you know, and I didn't really, I didn't fixate on it, you know, as AI generated stuff goes, this is definitely in the top category of quality glitches, not withstanding. It's, you know, it's, it's really well made. I would guess this is a mid journey thing, but I'm not sure. But I would guess that's the main tool for the video, because I don't think anybody else, I think it's

Tracy Harwood 19:39
VO, is it VO? I believe so they must

Phil Rice 19:41
be used in the paid version, and because the free version couldn't, couldn't

Tracy Harwood 19:45
do this. I believe so because, you know, they're calling for, you know, give us, give us your dosh kind of thing, you know, coffee, COFI, or whatever we call it, okay, yeah, because of the number. Credits that are being used in the in the this

Phil Rice 20:03
would consume a lot. Yeah, there's a lot of trial and error. With any AI tool, there's a lot of trial and error. But with, with what I've experimented with, VO, that's that's just as much the case. It's not any better at getting it done quickly because of the number of iterations you have to go through to get it right. So that is an effort that you can't deny that was involved in, in a piece like this, to to ultimately get this set of scenes took, took a lot of a different kind of effort than it, than it is to to build it out yourself, you know. So the voices are definitely AI generated, and I would assume it's 11 labs, but there are some competitors out there that can do audience, emotion very well and stuff so but I suspect that it's 11 labs, and I expect it's fairly recent 11 labs, there's something about the tonality of the voice of the vloggers. And I don't know how to I don't know how to quantify what it is, but I can tell, like I can identify it. And there's another series of vlogs that's going around right now that is a Sasquatch, and it's a Sasquatch doing these bro, uh, vlogs into his phone as he's going through forests and these different campsites or different situations or whatever. And that too, you can just tell there's something about the voice that's familiar, but not in the same way that like, like a celebrity voice would be familiar, you know, not in the same way that like you can instantly tell when a voice is Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger or,

Tracy Harwood 21:52
did you not hear Matt Damon in that?

Phil Rice 21:55
I didn't pick up on that, but I think that there's an element of it that, first of all, there's a, there's a there's a consistency to whatever that is that holds them together as a consistency through it. But it's, it's, there is something synthetic about it. And that's not necessarily criticism. I mean, I use those when I need to as well. But I think that, I think that in most of the scenes, the actual performance, not just the tonality, but the actual performance is also AI driven, because there's certain ways that the inflection comes out that are just not quite human. Not quite there's an uncanny valley element to the voice the way it's performed. It's just not quite right. And I, I found myself at at varying points, having two competing thoughts. One is, that's good, AI voice for AI voice that's good. And at the same time feeling, man, How good could this have been if they just hired two voice actors, yeah, yeah. Like, I mean really, and they don't even with Stormtroopers. They don't even have to sound like anyone. You don't need, like Damien's incredible impressionist that does Han Solo and some other voices form. You don't even need that. They could sound like anybody. And it would work. They just need to be able to to to perform, you know. So I think it would have been a better film with true human voices and and the part of me as a filmmaker that was really leaning hard that way was based on the fact that you don't even have to worry about lip sync. Yeah, you know, you've got, you've got the halo helmet effect going on, saving you all that trouble. So why not just do human voices? You know, have the AI generate the voices and then give those to your voice actor and, say, emulate this timing. Basically, you don't even have to get it syllable for syllable, but here's what AI did with it. Now give it your magic touch, and it would have been a better film, but you

Tracy Harwood 23:59
didn't do that with neural viz. You didn't say that with neural viz, because that was aI generated as well.

Phil Rice 24:05
No, it was my performance. It was not an AI generated performance. It was my voice performed and put through a filter to change the voice. That's different. This is not that's not what they did in this what I'm saying is that the actual articulation is not a human's Gotcha. Yeah, that's what's different. It's a fine line. Maybe, you know, owners Good point. It's a good point. Yeah, yeah. And that's the only way that I've used AI voice for any of for Ralph and Chuck and for odat as well. That when there's an AI voice, one AI voice, I'm performing with myself, basically, and the other one is through an AI filter. But other performances are mine, so I had a lot of control over the inflection, the way things were pronounced and stuff like that. And sometimes AI would butcher a syllable a little bit, and you just have to rerun it, and then, you know, do some editing. So. Them anyway, yeah, it's, I'm, what I'm critiquing is that, that I can tell that the performance was done by an AI, like it. This is a text, yeah, yeah. And that that just that's getting better and better every time these guys release updates. But it's just not quite there yet. And I don't know if it ever will have quite the Magic Touch of a human performance, it may get to the point where we won't know anymore, but I, but I don't think that it will ever be as effective. And in this case, I wouldn't have even used 11 labs at all. I would. I mean, because you have to run for stormtroopers to have the right sounding voice, you have to run them through a bunch of effects that crop off a bunch of frequencies anyway, which, by the way, they didn't do, I know the Stormtrooper voices. You mentioned that they had a stormtrooper sound they did in terms of kind of general Midwestern male voice delivery, right? That's the voice of a Stormtrooper, but they didn't get the effects right at all. Like it's, it's much more of a cropped down radio voice with a little bit of distortion added to it. It's not, it's not as severe a distortion as the Combine soldiers in half life, but it's in that vein to get Stormtrooper voices right. You want to hear Stormtrooper voices sound right. Watch Damien's show. I don't know what you I don't know what your process is, but it works. Maybe your voice actors doing that for you, or maybe you're doing it. I don't know, but it works.

Damien Valentine 26:34
So the guy that did the Stormtrooper voice, he actually has a scout Trooper costume with a voice changer, so easy for that. So you put the helmet on, then record. Oh, that's

Phil Rice 26:43
perfect. That takes care of it all, yeah, if you didn't, if your voice actor didn't have that, you could, you could look online, and I'm sure that somebody has done a tutorial of, if I found it for the combine, you can surely find it for for Stormtroopers. And they would give you exact EQ settings and any effects to do. You could do it in any digital audio workstation. Yeah, so they didn't do that here, but it's not that big a deal. Yeah,

Damien Valentine 27:08
he did it with the helmets on. They did it take without the helmets on, just in case the distortion through the one microphone to the other was too much, but it worked. But yeah, I could have gone and found that that tutorial quite easily.

Tracy Harwood 27:20
Sure, sure, brilliant. So,

Phil Rice 27:22
yeah, overall, I mean, I enjoyed the concept of this film a lot, and for the most part, I enjoyed the execution. I'm kind of, I kind of end up, I think, in Damien's camp, whereas, other than the aspect of scale of sets and variety of sets. I think that's an impediment. But other than that, this could have totally been done in Unreal Engine, or it could be done really effectively in Unreal Engine. All the lighting and everything that's done here is totally doable in those tools.

Damien Valentine 27:53
And just in case the creators are listening and thinking it over you, of course, you do have to build the environment, yeah, but once you've built it, you can use it again.

Phil Rice 28:03
Can reuse it, yeah. So you and if they're going to be doing a lot of Star Wars content, then those sets are going to be really valuable, yes. So if you

Damien Valentine 28:08
build, like, a small and more size, and it's set with some buildings in the desert around, obviously, that's a very popular location. If it's Star Wars, and you may want to use it again, you can do that, but you can also reuse it. In a way, it doesn't look like you're reusing the exact same location, because you can move your characters around the corner to the side of the building, change up the angle. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Change the color of the lighting so it different time of day and stuff like that. You can do that really easily once you built the environment. And, you know, building the environment itself in icon or unreal, it's not that difficult either. You bring in the objects. There are plenty of models for buildings. The Star Wars buildings out there, you can just download some lots, yeah, put them in and they will free, because people just create Star Wars stuff for free.

Phil Rice 28:50
You actually helped me with that in my hair to the Empire. A little satirical short. Early on, I hit up Damien says, Hey, what do I do about sets? And he pointed me to some collections and shared some assets with me, and I had a ton of fun building out, I don't know, kind of a moss Eisley imitation of sorts, this big city. It's all individual placed buildings, like hundreds i Oh, I had it was like putting together a Lego set. It was a lot of fun. So, and

Damien Valentine 29:18
the best part about those moistly buildings is we've seen in other production, Star Wars productions, that style of building is on many different planets. You have to change the color so they don't look like they built the sand. But in the Mandalorian, in those early episodes, when they're on the planet Navarro, it's not a desert planet. It's very muddy, but the buildings look exactly like the mosaic ones. They're just recolored. So you can use these same objects from many different planets.

Phil Rice 29:47
Absolutely. The other thing keep in mind this is, this is a no brainer if you've ever done any creating of stuff like this before, but obviously, depending on how you're going to. Use the set. You technically only have to worry about building what the camera is going to see that you don't have to, you don't have to build the whole planet of Dagobah to get yourself a swamp scene. You know, you build what you need. So that was definitely a helpful approach. And because heir to the hair to the Empire, by short, had a fair bit of jumping around to different environments. And, yeah, the the nice thing that kept that under control was knowing, okay, I know where I'm going to be shooting from, so this alley needs to look good from this direction. And who cares what's back here, you know? So that's, that's, that's helpful. That used to

Damien Valentine 30:36
be my approach, until I went to Ray Tracy rendering with Omniverse, yeah, and I put three Pio in, and he was so shiny, you could see that there was nothing behind the camera. Oh, that's hilarious. So I then had to start building things behind the camera so that it would,

Phil Rice 30:56
yeah, you'd have to do that, or you'd have to load in some kind of a HDRI map that at least got it, you know, to look coruscanti or, yeah, exactly we need, or whatever, right, right?

Damien Valentine 31:09
That's right looking, there's a big gray square, I know, right? Isn't so is everyone else good? It's gonna be watching this. Yeah,

Phil Rice 31:20
fantastic. Anyway. Yeah, it really interesting. Pick Tracy, I, like I said, I've got mixed feelings about it, but I, as a fan of Star Wars, it was hard. I would have had to work really hard to not enjoy this. Yeah, it was, it was a neat tour through scenes. And it's, it's a trope, you know, this is this type of thing has been done in other contexts before, the idea of inserting character, like I mentioned, inserting characters into the middle of these known situations and stuff, but it, it's been done before, because it's, it's entertaining. So, yeah, it was fun. All right. Well, that is our pick for this week. Commenters let us know, was this just AI slop? Or, as I think we've all come to agree, was it elevated just a little bit more than that? You know, I kind of used that tongue in cheek just to just to mess with Tracy anyway. So. But what do you think, drop us a comment or drop us an email at talk at completely machinima.com my name is Phil rice, and on behalf of my co hosts, Damian and Tracy, have a great day. We'll see you next time

Damien Valentine 32:32
say we all bye.