Ricky Grove 01:01
This is Ricky Grove, and you are listening to and now for something completely machinima podcast, a podcast dedicated to machinima and related real time Technologies. I'm here with my pals, Phil rice and Damian Valentine. Hey there. Unfortunately, Tracy won't be with us this week. She's off on a peacemaking mission with Trump to Ukraine, trying to solve that problem there. But I don't think even Tracy, with her great background material, is going to be able to give them a perspective. So good luck, Tracy. Good luck. Before we start, Damien had a big announcement that he wanted to make. Go ahead.

Damien Valentine 01:43
Yeah, Star Citizen is hosting a machinima contest this month, so you need to submit your films by the end of September. It's not the first time they've done it, but they've been advertising on their social media. And basically they want to do some comedy in world adverts and things for in world products and stuff like that. And I thought, Well, that seems like something that our listeners might enjoy a chance to enter, but yeah, these are short turnaround time for the deadline, so that's why I wanted to mention it now. But we'll have the link in the details on the forum in the show notes, so you can check out all the actual details of the contest, but if you do answer, please let us know, and we can talk about your entry next month. So we'll be giving an eye on the contest as well. So any any entries that catch your eye, we'll we can talk about them when they're made available to see.

Ricky Grove 02:36
Thank you. Damien, that sounds like a fun contest that Star Citizen. Creators should be very happy about that. Are there any prizes or anything for the winners? Uh,

Damien Valentine 02:48
they're going to be giving away some ships and other in game items character. And there's a lot of controversy with starters and people paying real money for ships, but you can buy them in game for in game marinate money as well. But I think, you know, for a context like that, it's a good price. It's not a real thing. But, I mean, I I definitely enter if they were going to give away a real spaceship,

Ricky Grove 03:12
yeah, for sure, yeah. Well, that's great.

Damien Valentine 03:17
As a deadline is Tuesdays, the 30th of September. So you when this goes out, you got about a whole month to give it a try. So good luck.

Ricky Grove 03:26
Excellent, excellent. Thanks for the news. So we're going to start off with my film, the film that I chose, and so I did some quick research, and I came up with an interesting series of artist interviews, non fiction film that was created in Second Life. I've chosen an episode called machinima, episode three, Lynette Walworth, and it's put together by Draxter Dupres from Second Life, and it was done in 2013 now we don't have Tracy here to give us an extensive backgrounder on it, so you'll just have to accept our short descriptions. But this was a series that was created in Second Life, nonfiction interviews with artists, and Second Life, at the time, was a really great platform for this kind of thing, because you had your various avatars, and you could move your camera around and cut back and forth, just like a non fiction TV show. Lynette Walworth is an Australian artist who does installations, and her focus is on celebrating the human spirit, which is admittedly vague, but still a noble enterprise, and Draxter asks her all sorts of interesting questions about her art. Now, the problem with the film is that it's technically not particularly interesting the upload at the archive.org is not high quality. And then the other thing is, is that this kind of thing can be done so much more easily and better looking, using AI today, but back in 2013 they didn't have that sort of technology. So I was I was very pleased with it. Despite the technical problems with it, I think the questions that Draxter asks are engaging. I found myself caught up in the ideas of the of the discussion. It's short. It does a good job. It's part of a series. I think there are four listed here. All four are worth your time, and it's good to see machinima being used for something other than stunts and silly TV copies and Goofy Movie stuff, where you're actually using a machinima platform Second Life to have a valid discussion about art and its creation. What did you guys think?

Damien Valentine 06:07
Ricky, I think you're right. The second life is the ideal platform for these kind of interviews, where obviously the person conducting the interview and the person being interviewed are in distant parts of the world. There's no chance that they're going to meet and do this face to face. But this is great, because you can have your two avatars in a room, and they actually make a thing about this. They're talking about the wine that they're drinking, and they actually have a shot of some wine on the table, and they said that they got it in real life each they're drinking, but they can't show that, yeah, and I thought that's kind of it shows the limitations in Second Life, but they still worked around it to show, well, it's there on the table and virtually, and this is what we're really drinking. And I thought Little things like that add to it, but you're right. It's and Lynette could show, no she was talking about her art, the installations on the it kind of cuts to live action footage of her and some of the other, some of the projects that she's done, and as she's, you know, explaining what her her art is, and she's talking about her focus is kind of on people who've been mistreated, especially women in Middle Eastern countries who have had to flee right from from persecution there, that seems to be her topic that she's very interested in. And she was talking about different ones she's interviewed. And there's a footage of the ones, the women she talked to, and it's in the wall behind that there's shots of it, so like you're seeing parts of a video on the wall virtually, and then it cuts to it in the that you get the full audience, full screen view. And yes, it's great way to do interviews. I would think this is this would still work. Now I know this videos is 12 years old, and you could do zoom chats like we're doing now to record this, right? But having a a virtual place together. There's a different thing. Yeah, it's and you can, they don't do it in this particular video, but in a virtual environment, you can walk around, and you could set the virtual environment to be themes around whatever it is you're talking about, if you wanted to. Obviously, in this they put some of her art in the background, the walls behind. But that was kind of the limit to what they could do. And of course, Second Life does have some limitations, especially back then. I mean, I haven't tried it recently, so I don't know if it's progressed too far. I suspect probably not a huge amount, but forgive me, if I'm wrong about that, it's just I haven't touched it for a long time. But yeah, this is, this is very different, don't use of machinima. But then we've always talked about machinima doesn't have to be one specific thing. We've seen it used for a wide variety of things. Sometimes it's very dramatic story, sometimes it's comedy bits, sometimes it's silly stunt videos. Sometimes it's interviews like this. And I think it just shows that, you know, the power of machinima to do different things. And, yeah, people are told to do something that they couldn't normally do.

Ricky Grove 09:10
So, good points. Good points. Damien, Phil,

Phil Rice 09:12
yeah, there's, there's actually a tradition that goes back a ways in machinima. Seems like it was a more popular thing in the early days, maybe because it was so new, you know, a new ability. But the first one, the first show of this type, where it's interview format that I can think of, goes all the way back to like the year 2000 it was called Late Night with Toxie and he they conducted the map or the interview on the most popular quake two deathmatch map, there's like an area that's up high on the map, and they just sat in this familiar location and did the interview, and there wasn't much to it visually. It was really about the content of the interview. Yeah. And and the the what they seemed to be emulating with that was more along the lines of American late night TV, where it's kind of, there's interviews, but it's also supposed to be a little bit funny and zany and, yeah, mixing in some humor and stuff, then that was taken really, to the to the next level with the show was called this Spartan life, Oh, yes, which our friend? I think he still lives in New York. Chris was the host of that that was very popular at the time. Yeah. What was the game that that was conducted in? Was it Halo? It was Halo, okay, yeah, and, but again, the same thing it was. There was kind of an attempt to to make it more fun, I guess, not a criticism and not a praise either. Really, it's just just fact. And this interview is more in a category that I would compare more to, like an NPR style interview, where it's, it's, there's nobody's trying to be silly at all. This is like, you know what the Dick Cavett Show or something like that, right? This is a serious talk with a serious artist, and, yeah, I think that the real value of it is the audio, frankly, and video wise, I think it cutting away to the the live action kind of B roll of what they're talking about, saves this video in a lot of ways, because otherwise it's kind of kind of dull. It's not real engaging for a non second lifer. I think that, I think that someone who spends a lot of time in Second Life would have a very different opinion on that, yeah, because they've, they've had conversations like these, you know, they participate. And for people who were there live, it's a very different experience, like when we did the expo in in Second Life, and you would conduct interviews on stage, Ricky, with the the the jury winners and with other people. And yeah, it's a very different experience than than being in a live place, like you said, Damien, because it's, it's, it's an interactive place. And of course, we had some instances where grief for members of the audience tried to add their own entertainment by, you know, donning, donning a pornographic costume and hopping on stage right in the middle and stuff. So there's that good times. Yeah, the interviewer here seems to have solved that issue somehow, probably because he's operating in a private space, or maybe that activity has just dropped off. But

Speaker 3 12:44
do you think it's possible to take the audio of this episode and remake it using AI? I would think there is yeah and and do something like for the

Ricky Grove 12:59
for the actual video, the real life video, put it on a screen, or an old television or something like that, and have the two people watch us, so you could update this, and still, the intellectual and the ideas in the discussion would be valid. There's not as if the old, their old ideas, the ideas of creativity and working with people who are marginalized, are still very vibrant in today's world of ideas. That would be an interesting project.

Phil Rice 13:33
Yeah. And I think the tools are all out there to do that for sure. I mean, we've, we've, I mean, we've, we've seen situations where the AI will actually generate the audio as well, which is maybe, maybe a little bit less interesting. This is a real interview, and yeah, they they liven it up that way. The thing that I don't know about with this is today is, I mean old old timers like you and I, maybe Ricky, aren't quite so much this way. But today's viewer typically is a multitasker. So how many people, when this is the kind of content for our show, frankly, how many people are actually sitting there watching the whole show, versus they fire it up, they put it on another tab or whatever, and they listen and while they're looking at or doing something else? Now, maybe that's only exclusive to really young people to like Gen Z and whatnot, right? But, yeah, I think, I think where it works best is as a podcast. You know that their their audio, that's the real that's the content that is is going to be the most rewarding. And really, just like, I think, to some degree, with our show, the audio, the discussion is, is the value, the most valuable part, and the other visual stuff is for someone who happens to be sitting there right, being engaged in that way. And I think that's true for this as well. So, and it was, it was an interesting, interesting interview. And I always like to hear about different. Artists and what motivates them, their approach, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I like that this, it seems like the topic here was less about technique, which is something we tend to focus on on this show. That's our specialty, right? That's our niche, right? This was, this was not as much emphasis on technique, and more about the why behind the art, which doesn't get talked about enough in in internet space, I don't think you know, it's all about, well, how did you do that? And that's fine because, you know, a lot of a lot of viewers are also, would be content creators as well, and they want to know, well, how can I do that, you know, and this was, I think, a lot more personal and a lot more about what drives her. And I found it, yeah, I found it interesting.

Ricky Grove 15:49
Those discussions are always interesting, interesting to me and inspiring at times, depending upon the person. And I seek them out. Your your point about Gen Z and very young people multitasking and maybe only getting a bit of it, I think is well made, but there's still a case to be made, even if that's a larger part of the audience for the validity of this sort of discussion, because younger people tend to grow if they pursue an educational career and want To get educated, they grow into the idea that discussion of ideas are important. So even though you may not catch them right off the bat, it's still valid to go over this and to present it, because there's going to be an audience down the line. And also, there are younger people now that are interested in it too.

Phil Rice 16:40
Oh yeah. And to clarify, when I was talking about that, I was talking purely about how important is the way that this is presented visually, okay, but I think that Gen Zers, actually, they're quite good at absorbing information from multiple streams at once, and they could be listening to one thing and actually processing and identifying with it while their their visual is doing something else. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. I think all people are capable of that, to some degree or another. But you figure Gen Z, they've been raised the society is basically everyone's got a device, you know, so you have to do that, or, you know, you can't function. So it's, it's interesting.

Damien Valentine 17:26
Yeah, I've took myself to I took myself to do that. I started listening to audio books while I've been working on things, because I can enjoy the story, and I can be working on it, and I still absorb the story as I'm doing if, especially if, I'm working on something tedious, and I just don't it has to be done, but I want something to entertain my mind at the same time. So yeah, it's a good way to do it, multitasking, if you can.

Ricky Grove 17:53
Unfortunately, I have a major obstacle that prevents me from multitasking is that I'm stupid. I'm sorry, but I just if one thing comes up, you know, I'm not like a cat. If you ever watch a cat, the cat can do 10 things at once. I tend to have to focus on the one thing, but I understand what you're saying. So that's a good point, yeah. Well, that's our show for you today. Thank you very much for listening. We'll have a link to the Machinima Episode Three Lynette Walworth plus the other dragster de prey episodes@archive.org and also, don't forget the contest that Damien mentions. The deadline is at the end of September, we'll have a big link to that in our show notes, so make sure you follow that and enter if you can. All right, that's it. Thank you from Phil Damian and Ricky and Tracy and her far flung Ukrainian escapades, we'll see you now. Bye. Bye.