Ricky Grove 01:00
everybody. My name is Ricky Grove, and you are listening to the And now for something completely machinima podcast. We do podcasts on machinima and related real time technologies, and we choose films and review them and discuss their making and their background. We've done my film, we did Phil's film, and now we're going to do Damien's film. A quick note about Tracy. Tracy's off saving lives again in Paraguay. I don't know why she does it, but she goes off occasionally as a, I don't know, a Red Cross kind of thing, and she brings in downtime. She shows him machinima film. So I guess she's working machinima films into it. Well, good luck, Tracy, we'll see you too soon. Damon, tell us about your film, right?

Damien Valentine 01:49
Well, oftentimes when I choose a film, I have a very long, complicated story about how I found it. This one is a case of a friend sent me a link not to be on the show, just to you might find this funny. So I watched it, and I do like the John Wick films. But what really struck me was this is so well edited together, the footage from the live action John Wick film against the Red Dead Redemption footage. It's one of those we've seen other videos like this before, where they've they've taken a movie character and they put them in a video game as the background, and it's usually interacting with them. And some of them are really good. Some you could tell not a lot of effort has been put into them, but this is one of those ones that a great deal of time has been spent getting this, the compositing right, but not just that, but choosing environments from the game that match the lighting of Keanu Reeves, so like this film, they're dark, and you have lights on one side of his face, like in the thumbnail, he's kind of turned into one side, and the side that's away from the camera is lit up, and the other side is dark. A lot of those films like that. So you have to find footage in Red Dead Redemption where the lighting matches that, and every single shot is just perfectly lined with that live action footage. Because obviously you can't change the lighting on the Keanu Reeves because he was filmed that way, and there's not really much you can change the color of it, but you can't change where the shadows fall on his face or anything like that. And they chose moments from the game that perfectly line up with what the clips for the clips of Keanu Reeves are doing, like some of the gun fights, he dodged behind some cover, and then he turns and shoots around behind him. And then in the game footage, there's someone who's also tried to dodge behind they get shot. And, you know, there's lots of stuff like that. There's a conversation pieces where he's talking to someone. It looks like this from the same scene, even though, obviously, one's from a live action movie and one's from the video game. And I thought, Okay, this isn't necessarily the best film we've ever seen, but from the technical perspective, it was so well put together, I thought, I'm going to choose this. It's just a bit of fun, even if you've never seen a John Wick film or never played Red Dead Redemption before, it's just it's so well put together, and that stood out to me this month. So yeah, what do you think

Phil Rice 04:11
I how? That's what I kept just saying, how did they do this? The lighting thing I hadn't even given as much thought to, because the thing that just blew me away was having worked in Red Dead Redemption two, how did they coordinate all this action within the world of red, Dead Redemption two, as if it was coming from John Wick, all those shots being fired and bodies being hit, or it just, it's mind blowing. Yeah, the amount of time that. Must have gone into this is, is really stunning, you know, as an idea, yeah, it is. It's something we've seen more times than I can count, you know, the concept of and some of them are little silly things, very low effort, you know, Michael Scott in Mass Effect, or something like that, right? So, and those are entertaining and in, like, a meme way, right? That's just a, this is a juxtaposition of two things, and it's, it's it's funny, and it's very easy, like, there's no how, really. I mean, maybe it's how they get their composite so clean sometimes, sometimes it doesn't even look like they paid much attention to that, you know, it's just whatever. But as far as choosing, you know, the the lines that Michael Scott, for example, or Leslie Nielsen, would say, and then the lines that the game would say, well, that's just careful paying attention to the way the lines line up. And, oh, okay, we can have him respond to this with this. There's a sophistication to that, yeah, but this is totally different. You know, a live action guy shooting and another guy falling. And it's not just editing, you know, it's not like we see, it's only we see John Wick shoot, and then it cuts to the reaction the guy falls. That's easy, right? You and I, the three of us, could do that right now. No problem. That's easy. This is on the same screen. He's right there, next to somebody, and shoots, and that person reacts and falls. How? And frankly, it wouldn't be John Wick if it was all shoot and then cut to reaction shot. That's the whole point of John Wick is long, takes unbroken takes stuff happening right there on the screen, you know, a mix of Kung Fu and gunfire, and it all just happens without a lot of without relying on just fancy editing tricks. And somehow they did that in Red Dead Redemption two, and I have no idea how they did it, like the planning that has to go into that, because these are not all just Damien, correct me if I'm wrong. And Ricky, you too. These aren't just cut scenes from the game that they used. This is it's a lot of gameplay footage. Some of them are cut scenes. Some of the dialog stuff is in game cut scenes, and I get that. But the action stuff, a lot of it is not even the the iconic opening winter scene where it kind of kicks everything off right, that that's the scene that, if you've only played Red Dead Redemption two for 15 minutes, you got to that scene that first come to the house and things go wrong, right? And so that was sophisticated enough, but I could at least visualize where your character is in that scene, and where the shooting happens and all that. And okay, I get to but then when it starts going into the open sprawl of the game, and all these scenarios are happening where that, that high level of apparent interaction is going on, it's, I'm just mind blown like, I've I I don't even know what to think like. I don't know how they did it.

Ricky Grove 08:24
Yeah, I'm I have the same feeling. I, I found that my interest in the idea minimal, but my admiration of the technique and skill and putting this together, it's just way, way up there. Yeah, same. I just, I think, in a way, had they added more idea to it, if they had created characters you could empathize with and stuff like that, it would have destroyed the the initial, the effect of the entire film.

Phil Rice 09:04
It's true. And how weird is it that we would say that that's like the total opposite of our normal comment, right? No more of that. But it would have, it would have

Ricky Grove 09:13
destroyed because the idea is a tribute to both the game and the films, and they succeed in that just brilliantly, brilliantly.

Damien Valentine 09:23
There's that one shot where he's running down the corridor. He's got shotgun. He fires, he misses, and it hits the environment from the game, and he sees splinters of the wood, and then he turns and he's he fires again. He hits the person, and it's all the same shot. It's not cutting him between a different shot. You just because he see the person running through and he's running away and he gets hit, and he goes flying on that second hit.

Phil Rice 09:47
So yeah, and I'll just remind everyone here, there are no scripted behavior. Mods for red, Dead Redemption red. Dead Redemption two. And there never have been like, you can't screw. Equipped the behavior of some NPC in the game to behave a certain way, or fall at a certain time, or this is all stuff that was executed via gameplay somehow at the right angle. There's no recaming in red, dead, red, dead, redemption two, so it the camera and everything and the action all had to be, right, just like it does in real life, right? You know, you can't recap live action footage and Red Dead reduction two has a very similar limiter in in because just it wasn't ever built, even the developers themselves haven't released those tools for it. What everyone would think they would right? Everyone would think, why is that? I still think, why is there not a director mode and a rock star editor for this game? Well, probably the thing that's made it so impossible for modders to pull that stuff off is probably the same thing that's it's something about the way it was built. It just was never constructed. With that in mind, I hope they, I hope they never make that mistake again with a game this, this cinematic, yeah, it feels like it's an injustice that there aren't filmmaking tools built in when that's, that's what rock stars, that's their hat tip. You know, that's their thing. Yeah, they've been, they've been the GTA five is just far and away, the best in game machinima tool set that we've ever seen like in terms of ease of use. Yes, Source Engine has the higher level tools beat by a long shot, but in terms of just use. But no, it's not. It's it's crazy difficult to get good results out of and so that much more respect to the people who do. But yeah, GTA five Hallmark was man, you can just with it's very easy to learn how to do it. And yeah, there's some limitations, but they can be worked around. So yeah, it's always been a real head scratcher to me. The whole reason I was excited about this game when we saw the trailer for it, however many years ago that's been now, was envisioning what we could do with that, with the rock star editor, right? So I hope they don't make that mistake again. Anyway. All that to say, These guys did this without that tool set, and there's no mod tool set. I look regularly. I keep hoping against hope that somebody will there's just nothing. They have the same problem that Minecraft does that mods get broken all the time by program updates and stuff like that. So it's it doesn't exist. This was just execution. And it's, it's just mind blowing, yeah,

Ricky Grove 12:49
what was the name of the group who created the film Damien?

Damien Valentine 12:53
Uh, well, it's been uploaded by Eli, handle b dot wav. That's the name of the YouTube channel.

Ricky Grove 13:04
What does it say in the credits? Do you know

Damien Valentine 13:09
Eli handle b dot 12? He's linking to his his Kofi page and his son called boosty on a Patreon. Yeah? So Eli handle b dot WAV is his identity.

Ricky Grove 13:22
Well, he I don't think he did it entirely himself. He had to have some other folks helping him out. Do you think

Damien Valentine 13:29
or Damien, there's some credits, but it says just credits to the translators. And then there's a whole series of different names and different languages, which I am not going to attempt to pronounce. Some of them are even in let's as I recognize.

Phil Rice 13:44
So yeah, and the mod c. The mod c credited our rampage trainer, which is probably the most full featured. If you don't know what a trainer is, it's basically a graphical user interface to to certain cheats and stuff, so you can spawn things and stuff like that. He did use that. And then he's using something called the RDR, two camera tools, which I think gives you a little bit more control over the camera, but it's not like a recam tool or anything like that. There's still you can position the camera for live action type stuff. But you can't, like, reuse that or replay it or whatever, so, yeah,

Ricky Grove 14:26
it's the most, most skilled technique in there is his compositing. Yes, that's it. I mean, yes, fucking genius level compositing. Excellent. Well, thank you, Damien, that's an outstanding choice, and very, very inspiring too.

Damien Valentine 14:45
I got you enjoyed it, yep,

Ricky Grove 14:47
and we'll have a link to it in our show notes. You definitely have to watch that. It's great. And Phil, maybe you could provide a couple links to those two mods you mentioned. That would be x. On Absolutely. If you have some ideas or thoughts, send them to us at talk at completely machinima.com Also, our full show notes for this will be at completely machinima.com Tracy will be with us soon. We'll be discussing our year end review, where we talk about those films that we've looked at over the year, and any trends or ideas, technical or otherwise, so we'll be grateful to have her back soon. Thank you, Phil and Damian for your discussion. My name is Ricky, and we will see you next time bye, bye, bye. You.