Tracy Harwood 01:01
hello and welcome to our 200th episode of The And now for something completely machinima Podcast. I'm joined today by Ricky Grove, Phil rice, you know, and Damian Valentine. Hello there. And I'm Tracy Harwood, so this episode is where we do our year in review, this has been our fifth year. Can you believe that our fifth year? Amazing? 200 episodes. I can't believe it. Yeah. So, I mean, I've got a lot to say. But do any of you want to go first with your reflections on the year?

Ricky Grove 01:47
Sure, I will. I think there's been an interesting shift in the Machinima creation. In fact, I'm not so sure we can actually use the term machinima anymore, although people do make pure machinima out of games, the technology has advanced so far I clone unreal several other engines that it's morphed into something else. And I think the most significant event of the year for me was seeing and learning about the films of neural viz on YouTube, because it is the first time that a completely AI pipeline was used to create absolutely hilarious, unique and creative videos that rival anything I've ever seen in Mashima, and the fact that he was able to overcome The Uncanny Valley effect in in using AI tools and create such hilarious and funny and satirical videos, to me, stood out as the event of the year for me, because no one I know has ever done that. He's sharing his pipeline. He has posted in our extensive review of his films, we talked about his pipeline. I think Phil has been trying to utilize some of that. That event stands out as the most significant one of the year for me, there are other things I clone has developed. I still working hard to create a pipeline that's very popular. As we see, Unreal has been taking off. I'm glad to see that there seems to be more films that put an emphasis on story over form, which I'm really, really glad to see, although in our last episode on the Unreal film, that was a bit of a step back. But I think overall, I think we're seeing a better quality of machinima, and I'm really glad to see it. So the year was was exciting, I mean, but neural viz stood out to me as being the most, one of the most extraordinary things I've ever seen in machinima. And I'm really happy to hear what you guys think about all that.

Phil Rice 04:28
Yeah, neural viz was, was a big deal, and he, he's still creating stuff. He's, he's got a second, at least one other, I guess, story framework that he's has done some films in, and that is one that is simulating, kind of looks like a early 1980s television news cast, team, so with a with a main anchor person, and then cuts to the weather guy, cuts to the on scene person, whatever. And he's used. It just in in the original the glurans series, he's he's taken advantage of moments to make little subtle social and political commentaries, which we've talked about is one of the great, great purposes for sci fi, for a sci fi context, is to do that in a less offensive way, right? And with the newscast, he definitely does that. And it's more, it's more of like a metaphorical commentary, commentary on current events, right, right. Very subtle. And, yeah, the fast pace of it, and the the writing that he just he's, he's got a real knack for this very tight dialog, the I'm sure that if we, if we thought hard about it, we could think of filmmakers, and, you know, Hollywood filmmakers as examples of or directors who cut dialog that way in certain films or whatever. And this, to me, seems faster and tighter than anything that is typically done. It's definitely tuned for the modern era attention span, right? It's assuming you're paying attention. In some ways, I feel like some of the videos, it's so fast that it's assuming you're going to watch it more than once, because it's going so fast that there's no time to really you laugh over jokes, right? So, yeah, it just is, just wonderfully done. And he calls it the

Ricky Grove 06:37
nonoverse. Okay, yeah. Yeah, N, O, N, dash, O, dash, V, E, R, S, E, the nonoverse.

Phil Rice 06:46
Very good, very good. So, yeah, it's just, I think, in all the back and forth that there's been between the, let's call it the human artist community, and the AI is an art form community, lot of angst. There a lot of battling, a lot of name calling and lot of, I mean, there's, there's anxiety underneath that. That's understandable, right? So I think what has always been something that will move that dialog forward is someone to actually make something good. Yes, you know, weird will get you only so far. And you know, any goober can go on there and make something weird, but to make something that actually meets some of the criteria of art, it says something, it moves you to something. And to see someone do that, I feel like, is what moves, moves the conversation forward to maybe an eventual reconciliation between those, well, those divided communities right now, and I think he does that.

Ricky Grove 07:53
I agree, but, but I have to say that I projected, about a year ago, when we were talking about AI, that we were awaiting major legal decisions about it. Two major legal decisions have been made in favor of the original artists, and it has put AI on notice, and now mid journey is being sued by Warner Brothers, yeah, that's a big one, and I have a feeling that now they've created precedent judges who may not understand the complexities of fairy use and AI databases and how scraping technology works, may defer to those precedents and decide in the favor of the original content maker. If that trend continues, it might be hard for someone like neural viz to use the databases that he's been using before, or even some of the some of the figures, like in this nanoverse, you might have some troubles with that using his the databases, the of the tool sets that he uses. So that's a that's an ominous precedent. I think that it's going to affect AI going forward.

Phil Rice 09:13
It is, I think that maybe the type of outcome that we could hope will come of all that, and it's probably a year or two away. But the kind of outcome we might hope from for that would be, if you remember when, when YouTube first emerged, it had to contend with its users making use of copyrighted music, right? And at the time, it was a lot of threats of big lawsuits. And you know, the big music companies are going after YouTube, and there's all this threat of this big battle of these Titans. Well, they ended up working out an equitable arrangement where YouTube got what it wanted, its users can use that stuff, and the record company got what they wanted, the royalties flow where they're supposed to flow. Now it's not perfect, but it's certainly been. Better than if you use a copyrighted song, it's an instant takedown and maybe banning your channel. That can still happen, but it's very rare now, most of the time nowadays, it's okay you use that channel or you use that song, all right, any proceeds you would have made on the video are split or are given wholly over to depending on how much I used, right? You know? Again, that if we were to go back to before that was worked out, that's a pretty good solution, all things considered, you know. And I think that somehow something like that

Ricky Grove 10:33
could be the piece that's a good point,

Phil Rice 10:37
this war between artists who just want to be treated fairly with their work and and some, some of them are just going to want to opt out. And guess what? Music artists can do that on YouTube as well. Like there, you can be a music artist and say, I don't want my music used by people on YouTube, and they'll enforce it, just like they did in the old days. That's why you have to be really careful, because a takedown can still happen. But most of the music publishers have just gone along with, Hey, this is a way we don't have to spend any more money on court battles, on this. This is just a way to get the money flowing to who it's supposed to go to. Now, in their case, most of that money's going to to the music publisher and not the artist anyway. But so with AI, it's a little different, because a lot of a lot of artists whose work is being used with this are not signed with record labels or something. They're just people like you and me, you know, or just independent artists who do whatever. So it's a little bit more complicated, but maybe a solution like that will come.

Ricky Grove 11:42
I think also perhaps databases might be cleaned up, yeah, because a lot of these big places scraped everything. Lisa just got a note from resolution with the Writers Guild on AI chat GBT using 23 of her works as part of their database, and now she's gotten a notice that they've won the lawsuit, and they're going to go through each individual violation and pay her tabulated up. Yeah, yeah. So it might be that there are new databases that will be formed that are a combination of public domain databases and databases that artists have agreed they put like works on right, they've licensed it. And you can have several layers of license, meaning non commercial use, and then commercial use, one level commercial use, another level, where you have to pay the author if you make certain profits. I'm hoping that that'll steer AI database creators to clean up their databases and to get rid of the content that is copyright violated,

Phil Rice 13:01
yeah, now with, with a little bit closer regard to our what, what do we call it? Line of work, yeah, machinima related stuff. What real illusion is doing is, I think, leading the way forward, and that this can be seen. There's an example of this. It can be seen with how they've handled the AI rendering beta that they've been running that works with character creator as well as with iClone. And it's using, I think it leans on comfy, UE, but it can be attached to other data, but it circumvents the whole problem with using these bad databases instead sets up reasonable procedures for someone to create their own data set to stabilize the video output from iClone so it leverages The generative ability, but gives you a privately controllable database. And they've actually worked out like how to procedures of here's how to build. For if you've got a character that you're going to have repeat on the screen and you want it to be consistent, here's how you build what the database needs is needs to make that possible. I haven't seen anybody do that yet, and real illusion has focused all of their energy on that. Now, the AI thing is, it's in beta. It's very buggy right now, like I couldn't even get it to work at all, but I've seen examples, and I've read through all of the documentation on it. And that is the way forward, for sure, a way forward, and I'm really proud of real illusion for getting out in front of this in the ways that they have. They've got something else where they're using AI as a way to more intelligently interpolate between animation poses. So it's not. Just typical that used to be regulated at the level of the skeleton, so the way the bones are put together, then you move the hand and it's it moves. But there's not really any intelligence behind that in terms of, well, what would be realistic for the movement between this pose and that one, right? And so with their acupost thing, they've leveraged the strengths of AI, but there's no controversy at all, like they're not stealing, they're not using anything where artists stuff was used without permission, or anything like that. Yeah, that's really smart on their part. Really, really small.

Damien Valentine 15:37
Yeah, the headshot plugin uses AI as well in the same way, because it's not generating a face that's in some database. Yeah, it's a photo you provide. That's right, your photo you provide that it does, but the AI is used to interpret the photo and then model

Phil Rice 15:54
turn into skin. That's right, yeah. And it's very, very effective. So yeah, my hat's off to them. They've really, I think they've shown the way forward for companies, frankly, as Unreal Engine. I'm sure Epic is dealing with, okay, how do we handle this with our kid? I'm sure unity is wondering the same thing, especially in the game making community. There's a really, really vocal anti AI sentiment and community that's out there, right? Very much. So if they're going to put their toe in that at all, it's got to be really ethical, even then they're going to have challenge. But I think, you know, unethical, that's, that's an unwinnable battle. So, right? Anyway, yeah, that's, that's interesting for me. I think the the, the probably the most significant event in the last year was the film flow, winning an Oscar. And this was a film that was created entirely in Blender using the real time tools within blender. It's it, basically, when I say that, I say it's, it's something that anyone, that someone could have done just one person on their computer. Now this team wasn't just one person. The director will be the first to say that, but it was a very small team, and using just all the freely available stuff that's in blender. And if you haven't seen the film, it's, it's, it's magnificent, it's, and it's highly stylized. It doesn't look like anything. Doesn't look like it doesn't look like blender like you wouldn't, you wouldn't know from looking at it, oh, that's blender like you might be able to to identify hallmarks of a certain Unreal Engine demo or film or something. It's got its own look. That's, I don't even know how to describe it. Really, it's, it's, they did their own thing, and that's, that's pretty that's, that's pretty exciting. Now, me, personally, I don't, I don't give a crap about winning Oscars or something. But the key is it was right in terms of it, if we're going to try out a measuring stick for what are the capabilities here, this is a feature length work that can compete with, with with other, with these big animation studios. I think that's important, not really monetarily, necessarily. You could interpret it that way. But I just look at it as, hey, if there was any doubts anyone had about, is blender really capable of doing what you can do with cinema 4d or Maya or any of those? Yes, it is. It's very capable.

Ricky Grove 18:34
Yeah, and then it's a big push for the open source community. Yes, absolutely, absolutely, because that has been rising and rising and rising, and I'm so glad because I was with Blender when, actually they first started out, yeah, and I interviewed the leader of the group several times when I was an active Digital Arts reporter, and to see blender achieve this level of notoriety and support, and financial support is only going to blossom. Yeah, and I think blender will move into the world of AI to some extent. And if they're going to do it, the ethics behind it will be rock solid.

Phil Rice 19:17
Yes, anyway, that and that. And I'll just, I'll also just echo Ricky's sentiment that even though I, I don't think I could put together a film list quickly that would illustrate this, there is a sense that there's more emphasis on story and less, a little bit less of the tech demo stuff. I think that's, that's a net good thing. Yeah, it's, I'm very, it's very unscientific. Again, I can't, I don't have a list to back that up. It's just a feeling. But I concur completely with the feeling that, that it's that way, and I think that that's a very good thing. The tech

Damien Valentine 19:55
demo kind of videos are good to learn the software, but they don't. I. Give you a good film, right? So you know, if you need to practice something, then fine, but if you want to make a good film, you need to do more than just show off your knowledge of how to animate something in Unreal or whatever platform you're using, you need to actually have a good story or a good concept or some kind of good message that you want to put out there, depending on what kind of film that you're making. Yeah, for me, there was a film that I watched, and I didn't realize it was a machinima film at the time, but when I found out about it, I Well, basically, I was watching it, and I thought there's something very familiar about this. And I have talked about this film before during one of our new segments, there's something about the animation that was thinking, you know, I could make this in iClone, or I've seen something similar in machinima films. And then I watched the behind the scenes of how they made it, and they were using Unreal I did not look like an unreal film that like the last week we were talking about the unreal film, and they all have a very similar kind of look that we see. So this film is, it's part of a big franchise. It's the predator killer of killers. And I watched it because I like the predator films, although some of the more recent ones have been a little bit prey was really good. But before that, there was a bit of franchise fatigue there, where they were trying to recapture the vibe of the first film. And that's not really how you continue a franchise. You need fresh ideas, even using the same monster, but you need new stories, new characters. Don't just stick people in the jungle again to try and recapture what the first film did, because that was a very unique film. You can't just do it again. So anyway, I watched this animation film, and like I said, I did not know it's machinima, apart from something was nagging at me that this has looked very familiar, and then I think it's at the the Summer Games fest, or something like that, where they were promoting it, and they were talking about how they used unreal for it. Really, I didn't know that. So I found this sort of 10 Minute behind the scenes video where they were talking about, they want to do this anthology film about predators coming to earth in different periods of history. So you got three stories, the Viking story, and then there's the 17th century Japan story with sort of Samurai Warriors. And then there's a world war two story, and then there's kind of a fourth story on the planet, where the survivors of those stories are brought together. And you know, they're right, if they want to do that live action, it would cost a fortune, because you've got three you've got four different environments with all the costumes, everything that you have to recreate. And you know, just doing one of those is a very expensive proposition for a live action film, but trying to do for once it and then they were saying that by doing it with Unreal, they didn't from concept, getting the idea of wanting to do something, to having it ready to release, took 18 months live action. It'd be double that. Or if they were going to do traditional, you probably double that again for the rendering times and all of that. So 18 months is they were so impressed by how quick this was. And I think I got the impression that the studio who made this film, they want to do more unreal films like this, not necessarily predator films, which is good. I mean, I think they should branch out and do other things. Predator was a good way to start, but it's got a very unique art style to it as well. It's not this photo realistic attempt to recreate something they've kind of got this. And it's not the, it's not the Pixar cute animation style as well that we also sometimes, you know, the stylized look we often see with this is kind of the opposite end that we sometimes see with Unreal and other blender and these other things. It's kind of the way I would describe it. Is a moving painting. It's just kind of something about the way they texted it, and they probably put some filters on it as well. But it looks like a moving painting the way it's all animated, and it works particularly well with the Japanese story. It just something about that setting and the art style just works perfectly for it. That's my favorite of the stories that they did. And the other part of it, I thought, was it's a shame that Hugh Hancock isn't around to see this, because this is the kind of film that he was talking about wanting to see being made machinima, being used to make a big, bigger budget film that wasn't being done. You know, we know that he approached studios to do it, and he didn't necessarily have the best luck trying to convince them to adopt what he was trying to convince them to do. But I think I don't know what his views on predator was, but I think he would have loved. This film, just for what it represented and the future of it. So I watched it again recently so I could talk about it for this year review. And I was watching again, knowing that it was a mission worth film, and trying to think about, what can I learn from this to make my own films look different and not necessarily go for the photorealistic style. So I kind of want to play around with icons and try different styles and change the textures and the characters and all of that kind of stuff, just to play around with it. So I would recommend watching this predator film, even if you don't like predator or horror films. It's not really that horrific, actually. But just watch it, even if you just watch the trailer or part of it, watch it and see what you can do, because it's just different, and it's different from Predator films that we've seen before. It's different from icon, it's different from Unreal films that we've seen before. And so I think there's a lot to learn from this, and I'm quite intrigued to see what this studio does in the future, even if it's a sequel to this, or something different, or whatever they do, I want to know, because I really like this film, and for me, this was one of the big moments of the year for machinima, and it kind of completely caught me by surprise.

26:15
Yeah, that's great, yeah.

Tracy Harwood 26:18
But Shall I do my thoughts?

Ricky Grove 26:21
No, I think we've covered everything.

Tracy Harwood 26:25
I'm sorry I've got a little bit more to say. Yeah, well, from my perspective, I think I don't necessarily agree with you, Ricky. I think Machinima is alive and kicking, and I think the year that we have just worked our way through demonstrate to me that Machinima is indie story makers and storytellers of their they're there and they're absolutely rocking it. I think this past 12 months have been really busy. From our point of view, we've we've released 51 episodes. But I think what I've particularly enjoyed each month is not just that we've talked about new work that's more recent, recently published, but we've also reflected on how it contrasts to older works, and that's your picks, Ricky, that we've discussed every month, which hark back to work that some of the pioneers had produced, sometimes 2025, years ago. I think also our omnibus episodes, as you guys have said, have been a really important inflection point for us. We I mean, there's so many films that have hit our desks, we just can't cover all the films that we would have liked to. But in our omnibus episodes, we've been able to reference some of those additional films, but we've also tried to cover some of the the tools and the development of the technical, technical tools, if you like, and and especially generative AI as it has found its way into the filmmaking processes that we're so passionate About. So our omnibus episodes are a different thing, but help us to cover a few more films as well. In terms of the films that we've looked at, I think there are two different aspects, specifically in the creative practice that we focused on now. One is the retrospect. Retrospective the you know that Ricky's picks for each month, which in actual fact represent, really how we might think about preserving or remastering or recontextualizing those kind of classic works. And what we're doing in those episodes really is emphasizing memory and the lineage of the works, and that's really quite important when we come to looking at all the other episodes each month which are really focusing on innovations and How diverse machinimators really are, including things like exploring ambiguity. Phil, also things like visual symbolism, voice and music, and how that's been evolving, and how AI has been integrated into work, and also things like virtual production and workflows. We've touched a little bit on that as well. We made some key predictions for this year, about AI, about virtual production, about shifting definitions, and about audio. And I think it's been really interesting that everything that we talked about as being predictions for the. Is pretty much being actively realized in the Machinima works that we've been reviewing, which to me, really reinforces machinima as both heritage practice and original heritage practice as well as it being cutting edge cinematic frontier. So I would say that, but I'm going to go further here, because I think some of the areas that we've highlighted are really quite important. Now, you've talked about generative AI as being a key part of the tool chain. I completely agree. I think it's also forced us to think about the definition that we give to machinima. I've called it my cinema with an AI in the middle of it, because it's still machinima, but the tools are definitely being used in novel ways to support the creative animation, if you like, of the of the films that we're we're viewing, and it's being used in many different ways, from from saw and runway, way style sort of videos, to Unreal Engine puppeteering plugins to things like, I don't know, we saw an AI first studio, and so on. So it's been a big theme all the way through the year. I think the other thing that we talked about is the kind of creator tools being more consolidated and they're getting easier to use. We've seen more mod tools and discuss more mod tools this year than I think we've discussed in the past with contemporary work. We talked about steams built in capture and record features. We've also talked about things like the merger between sketch fab and fab, which, frankly, just just lower the sort of friction from asset discovery to capture. And I think that's been quite interesting as well. You know, policy and platform governance has also been something that we talked a lot about. You remember, earlier in the year, we talked about YouTube's AI disclosure rules coming to the fore. We've also talked about various legal rulings around AI and copyright and art and what have you. And we've also talked about studio and game publisher conduct policies in relation to the constraints and considerations for film filmmakers. So policy and governance has been far reaching, not just specific to Gen AI tools really. Then the other thing that we've talked about is virtual production and machinima. You know, in the book, we talked about them being two ends of the same kind of creative practice. But actually, they haven't really been that. You know, you've you've got legacy industries using virtual production, which is quite different to the techniques and approaches used by machinima creators. And that in some ways, you know that that continuum over the last few years have kind of got longer and these extremes further apart, but actually this year, I think we've seen that close up again a little bit more. And I think that's evident in the way that more filmmakers, live action filmmakers, are using the tools and then developing new ways to think about how they exploit the real time filmmaking process. And I think that's that's closer to machinima than they have been in the past, right? And as you said, Damien killer of killers, I think we called it the world's first big budget machinima. To me, that's the start. I mean, it's unlike flow, which was a an indie studio that that created that piece of work, but I think we are now seeing more big budget interest in machinima techniques again. I mean, they dabbled with it a long, long time ago and called it previous, and now they're dabbling with it and actually calling it filmmaking, real time filmmaking, or virtual production. So there's a renewed interest in it from some of these bigger studios, again, which is which is interesting. And we've seen, you know, filmmakers from those studios not calling themselves that particular studio, but calling themselves indie creators and making machinima type content, which, you know, they're almost trying to do it under the radar so they can test and see how how the platforms work. We've commented on on that quite a lot, which is an interesting, you know, I think that's an interesting thing for a couple of reasons, not just the fact that they're using the tool set, but also. So the fact they're trying to test how the platforms, distribution platforms, work, and we, we've also said that these platforms don't work particularly well for indie creators, and that's very evident even with, you know, with these big studios putting content out through that form. Now, the other thing I would like to say is that I think the engine and genre diversity has definitely expanded again. We've commented on that year after year, I think, and this has been another year of us reviewing, I'd say, probably, some of the most sophisticated work that we've seen across everything from, you know, flight sims to war Sims his you know, historical reenactment type things to Starfield to Red Dead Redemption character studies to Unreal and I mean, absolutely, probably, I mean loads and loads of different games that we have never really commented on before being used, which I think is evidence of creators treating games engines as flexible stages, really. And I think that's highly noted throughout the course of the year. I also think we've seen a move, small move, perhaps towards retro and preservation,

Tracy Harwood 36:26
or retro style machinima and preservation of that kind of content. We, for example, we've looked at classics that are being celebrated, such as Paul Marino's, I'm still seeing Breen, which was 20 this year, we looked at some demo scene routes which the creators of that actually got in touch, and told us a bit more about how that work was was made, and where it came from and what they're still doing, which is very interesting. We've also done some World of Warcraft retrospectives, which also are fascinating in terms of exploring, really, I think, exploring what has been done, but looking at it through the frame of contemporary practice, in order to sort of, you know, evaluate the trajectory of it and the lineage of it, and that's that's quite interesting, I think. And then we've also touched on remastering technologies, and some of these generative tools are really useful for doing that as well, but they're also, for example, being used to revive older worlds for new films. And we're seeing some new cinematic remixes and nostalgia driven projects through the use of those tools, but keeping the roots of machinima quite solid, I think, in the in the way that they're going about doing that. And then the other thing I would think is worth commenting on is the meme esthetics, you know, the backroom type stuff, which influences style. Now, I think, you know, memes have long been part of, you know, the sort of response video type thing has long been part of the YouTube culture ever since it launched, really. But I think the generative AI tools have lent a whole new lens to that. That is something we haven't really seen too much before. I mean, you talked about the gluons and neural visits work. But there's also, you know, the Star Wars vlog series, which I think was fascinating, not not so much because it was Star Wars related, but it really drew on established creators like AFK, which, you know, have their own community of followers. And I think, I think I don't know how much longer that will run as a as an esthetic form, because on the one hand, it demonstrates Not, not great originality, but on the other hand, it's very much tapping into the Machinima type of, you know, game law, kind of culture, I think, which, which is, which is fascinating. I wanted also to say that we've seen through the year some very distinctive creator types with very identifiable backgrounds, which I think is worth commenting on. We've obviously got the legacy pioneers that we've touched on, people like Paul people like Baron suster and Todd storkamp, for example. I mean, these guys were clearly very early amateurs who helped define machinima and their works were very clearly defined by ingenuity, of of well, ingenuity, should I say, under very distinctive technical constraints. Um. And we've treated these as cultural anchors whose influence really persists, and it does really persist. And some of those guys have, you know, obviously transitioned into professional creative careers, but they are legacy pioneers that we still hold a light to in terms of reviewing the creative work that we look at. And we should never lose sight of those guys as being the Pathfinders in many ways. And then there is this sort of contemporary indie creator. And these are, these are folks like the director of Do you remember that the film we looked at called rally. It was made in Unreal as well. These are, these are contemporary creators. I think they do come from live action or media arts backgrounds, and they are clearly producing very conceptualized, small scale works driven by mood and and ambiguity that word again, and I think what we've done is describe these guys as hybrid storytellers. These are guys that are blending film techniques with real time engines, and they'll use, you know, their animators in the Tom jantel sense of the word, which I think is very interesting. We obviously also have the fan law builders and these guys go from strength to strength. Really, there's now so many games that are so beloved and and so extended that, you know, the worlds that the fans create is almost indistinct from the game franchise itself. I mean, it's, it's, it's a really interesting sort of virtuous cycle of creative energy that's gone into into the development of the games through the fans, which I think is fascinating. I you know, we, I suppose we'd call these guys cultural translators in many ways. They, they demonstrate the the utmost of fandom, I think, and long may they continue to do so, we've also picked up on the experimental AI creators, you know these, these are guys that are, are using all sorts of generative tools. Neural viz, of course, is the most outstanding example that we've picked up on. But in our omnibus episodes, we've picked out 10s of different films doing different things using different techniques that are really worth looking at as a kind of a back catalog. If you wanted to take a look at how it's evolved as a creative medium, I'd say these guys are technologists and tool experimenters and generally solo makers. They're not really machinima teams doing this kind of thing. They're more indies artists, I would suggest, very experimental in the way that they're working. And I'd say these guys are what I would describe as boundary pushers trying to redefine what authorship might mean in the context of machinima, probably. And then finally, we've got the big budget guys. The Predator thing is quite interesting from that perspective, obviously industry, obviously professional. We talked some time ago about Aaron Sims creative also working on this kind of stuff as well, and they're testing out real time workflows using a range of techniques, typically often using Unreal but not exclusively, and they're large scale cinematic machinima projects. And I'd say these are watershed makers, really. And I think ultimately these guys are the only ones that are going to bring machinima into the mainstream and legitimize it, because others follow them. I think, in terms of the other, the other thing that I wanted to comment on is, is, is the quality of the work that we've looked at, which is, I think, very interesting, because we've seen, we've seen a lot of different types of content, and we've commented on it in terms of cinematic quality, in terms of narrative, in terms of voice, and in terms of music. The big thing, like you said, Phil right at the beginning, if you were to sum up what we were about, you'd think this is a podcast about ambiguity. The big thing that's come out for me this year is this sort of, you know, this sort of atmosphere, this strategic ambiguity, this minimalism, and, you know, the use of mood in. To overcome technical limits, and we've talked a lot about the emphasis on tone and framing and mise en scene, I think, instead of plot, and that's been, I think the most outstanding thing that we talked out talked about, pretty much each month we've had some aspect of that to cover. The other thing that we've touched on pretty much every month too, is cross engine narrative. And, you know, we we've seen people mixing different engines, different tools, to create their own kind of pipeline. I think that's been fascinating, and it kind of reinforces the idea that these are pick and mix tool sets that you can use for whatever purpose you like. The other thing is to do with symbolism and visual storytelling, and we've seen a lot about symbolism, about atmosphere and visual tone, and we've seen how that's been used to create a kind of an emotional weight to stories. That's something you've picked up on a lot, Ricky through the course of the the year. We've also talked about legacy and how it's important to, you

Tracy Harwood 46:23
know, talk, you know, to go back and reflect on the creative pioneer, the way, the way the pioneers really took the tool sets and use them in novel and creative ways and created their own tool sets in order to push the boundaries. That's one aspect of it. The other aspect of it is to do with AI upscaling, remastering, which I think is really interesting as well. And then we also talked about voice, voice, voice trends, I think is probably quite interesting. We've obviously touched a lot on using synthetic voices, because, you know, these tools as these generative tools, are really quite powerful in enabling you to do that, and they are increasingly clearly being being used. But this, it sparked a lot of debate for us in terms of authenticity and and disclosure, which I don't really think we've we haven't really cleared that one up. I don't think we've also talked a lot about the importance of using human voice acting, which I think we've always described as being absolutely central for a number of reasons, really, but yeah, I think you know keeping keeping actors in the loop is absolutely key, even when you're Using some of these tools, especially for narrative heavy shorts. We've talked a lot about non verbal stuff. And, you know, and Foley design, we we've put more and more emphasis on that through the course of the year, which I think has been very interesting as well. We even touched on it last month, where, you know, that was a whole thread of Phil's critique of the film, which was, was fascinating to listen to. We've also talked about using archival voices, which, again, is very interesting. And we've discussed that in the context of generative AI, where you know is, is that more permissive when you're you're talking about, say, using Carl Sagan voice, for example, it, I think it's a whole thing is sort of up for debate, really. I don't think we've come to any real conclusions on it. Suffice to say that making sure that there are human actors in the mix is absolutely critical. We've also then talked a lot about music and royalty free music. We've talked a lot about custom scores and the fact that generative AI has enabled people to identify original soundtracks to their work in ways that we haven't really seen in the past, because a lot of early machinima was was put to contemporary music of its day, but we're not really seeing that in quite the same way now. I mean, some of it is music videos to a popular song, but quite a lot of it is using original content, even to the point where teams of machinima and other types of creators are coming together to write the film and its score, which is, which is really laudable. And then, you know, the ambient soundscapes, I think, is another thing that we've touched on quite a. Art and minimalism, and how that is conveyed, and how you develop atmosphere and and narrative arc through a more minimalist approach. That's been something that's been really fascinating to follow through the course of the year, and that's something that that Ricky has particularly talked about quite a lot. Yeah, what else do I want to say? I want to say, for example, what are our predictions next year?