Phil Rice 01:08
hello and welcome to And now for something completely machinima, the podcast about coughing machinima, virtual production and related technologies. I am your horse host, Phil rice, and I'm here with my co hosts, Damian Valentine and Tracy Harwood, hello. Ricky is not with us right now, and to be completely honest with you, we're not entirely sure why that's that's all we've got to say about that. We hope that he's going to just interrupt and show up in the middle here, but we'll see. So this week, we're going to be talking about my machinima film pick for this month, and it is a doozy. It is called Back to the Future unhinged version made by a channel that goes by the name of Landon's animation wheelhouse. Now some of you have seen this, I'm sure, because it's actually got, got a fair bit of attention about, I want to say 700,000 views or so, pretty close to that. This is, this caught my attention. This is all, all thanks go to the YouTube algorithm for delivering this. I wasn't searching for it. It just popped up. And the thumbnail grabbed me because it kind of had the look of the esthetic, which I personally really enjoy, which is the Machinima look. It looked like something video game ish. And so I was kind of surprised to learn, after watching it and reading the description, that it's not made in a video game at all. It's it's made in Blender, but I think made deliberately with that esthetic that we tend to like. So the story is, I don't know how spoiler ish, should we be here? It's going to be hard to talk about this one without being spoilerish. So if you're concerned about spoilers, maybe pause and check the link in the description for the video and go watch that first, because there's no way to talk about this film without spoilers. But essentially, it is a it's a short set in the world of Back to the Future. And so you're following Doc Brown and Marty in the DeLorean and they are traveling through through time. But even more so than in the way it went in the movies, sometimes the the time travel goes horribly wrong. And they end up in all manner of places and times that cause some mayhem, cause some acutely historical mayhem, I might say, because, of course, I'll tell you. What it reminds me of is there's a sequence in the the the old movie Forrest Gump that shows Tom Hanks as that character, kind of intercut with all these historical settings at one point. I think he's shaking hands with Nixon president, President, yeah, Nixon or Johnson, and maybe even John F Kennedy, and he's in the Vietnam War, and it's all this stuff where he's inserted into these significant events, right? Well, this is that taken to like a steroid level, they end up getting plopped into the middle of very significant situations that you will recognize most of them, if not all of them, and the Hindenburg crash, for example. And basically the implication, through the way that the events are portrayed, is that they actually caused that, that they actually caused the pandemic, that they actually caused these, these other things, so that. That's, that's fun and funny all on its own. But I think what's most compelling about this is the the style. And I don't just mean the visual style, we've already touched on that, but the it's, it's one of the the few movies in our scope that I've ever seen that it feels like there's a lot of accidents, like a lot of it feels unplanned, like it feels as if they really are being thrown into this. And everything that's happening, everything the car bumps into, and explosions and this and that it's just wonderfully done. And the fact that this was, there's not a single thing in here that was an accident. This is all keyframe, scripted animation is just brilliant. It's, it's, it's like nothing I've seen. And his channel, this channel, Landon's channel, has a great number of videos in this style and of this type of theme, and they're not all Back to the Future related at all, some really wild stuff and and it's, it's a unique voice, if you will. His his way of telling these stories, and unhinged is the perfect adjective for the feel of it. It's very frenetic. It's very chaotic. And again, the fact that this was crafted and scripted, I think maybe that contributes to the video game feel. Because sometimes in in machinima, true machinima that's made in a video game, like in Grand Theft Auto, for example, sometimes a sequence of events, it's just accidental. You go through and you happen to crash in a particular way, or you go up on the curb or whatever, and it's all just accident. So you just keep it. You're like, Oh, cool. We'll use that as our footage. But there's no such thing with this. There's no game engine that was underneath this. This was all planned and executed. And it's, it's a very unique feel. The sound is, is terrific as well. And there's, he uses the, I'm going to call it the Machinima equivalent to the Wilhelm scream, which, if you know film at all, that's that, that one scream that is in countless movies, it's the same exact scream. The story behind it is that it's, it's, it's kind of a practical joke, like an inside joke among sounds engineers in Hollywood to see who could insert that. And I can't remember what the exact origin of doing that was, but it's in at least one of the Star Wars movies. It's, it's, it's in most movies, you'll just hear that one sound. He doesn't do that with the Wilhelm screen. He does it with a Doom, the original Doom, like from the 1990s Doom pain sound. This kind of a that's in there, just inserted sometimes absurdly so like where it doesn't even really fit. So, yeah, wonderful little touches like that. It's one that you almost can't not watch more than once because it's going so fast and the humor is going so fast and the dialog is going so fast that you'll, if you're like me, you'll end up laughing over some of the content and have to watch it again. So I just found it terrific and refreshing. And what actually, Tracy found this a few weeks back and put it on the board and says, Hey, if anybody wants to, or Has anyone seen this, and it was already on my board to pick, so it came to both of us in a different way. And yeah, what did you guys think

Damien Valentine 08:50
of it? It was on my list to pick as well, but you beat me to it. Was it really? Yeah, so I was going to choose this. I thought about changing my pick last month from what I was talking about to this. But I said, No, I'll save this one for this month, but then you can beat me, but I'm glad you did. It's got that it does have that machine of a field to watching it. And I kept thinking, this could be done with GTA five, like, I know it can't, it wasn't, but it's, kind of got that feel. If you were going to make this with any mission in the game, any mission platform GTA five would be the one you choose, you'd probably have to mod it to get the DeLorean in. I'm sure someone's done that. I'm sure, yeah, yeah. And it's just the way the characters move, especially Doc Brown his you know, the lip, the mouth movements are really exaggerated that you get in that kind of old school machinima style where you don't have a lot of control over, you know, the facial movements, so they tend to be very exaggerated, or they just go to the maximum extreme of whatever you're going for this, does it? But. Of course, as you said, this is blender, so everything has to be done manually. So it's done on purpose. And you know, he's captured that machinima feel with this blender film perfectly. And I'm big fan of the Back to the Future films, so it's fun to watch from that perspective as well. Because I don't think we've, I don't think I've ever seen Back to the Future in any kind of machinima form before all the time, the entire time I spent in the machini community, I don't think anyone's ever made a back to the feature film, at least not one I've seen. So that kind of stood out

Phil Rice 10:34
as well. I think there was one in the quake movie Days made in Quake two, but it was very primitive, nothing, nothing, nothing, terribly memorable. But I seem to remember something like that. It was very brief short around the same time that Hugh did a, he did a matrix inspired short. Remember that in one of the was it in the Lith tech film producer or something? It was in some kind of primitive engine at the time. And that was, there was quite a few of these directly movie inspired things that were being experimented with at the time. And I think that I saw one back then. But who knows where it is? And I mean, it's, it's nothing compared to this, for

Damien Valentine 11:15
sure. Yes, definitely not. Primitive.

Tracy Harwood 11:18
Might well be on Internet Archive. That might be, could be, let's

Damien Valentine 11:23
have a look. But yeah. And that Doom sounds being overused in completely inappropriate places for that kind of sound effects. It's perfect. First time I heard it, thought that's that sound from Doom,

Phil Rice 11:40
so you recognized it right away, too. Oh, yeah, and then

Damien Valentine 11:42
it just kept happening throughout the film. Yeah, it was hilarious. Yeah, I'm glad you did choose it and we did get a chance to talk about it, because this is a really good film. One thing I found hard to watch is I really like the DeLorean car, and throughout the film it gets trashed. So it's hard to watch that, because I'm here. But even that is really well done, because Landon is going to have to modify the car model so bits of it are falling off or getting wrecked and damaged. So that, again, is more hard work, because I don't imagine too many people have, if you weren't looking for a DeLorean 3d model or the in particular, the Back to the Future one, you're probably going to find lots of models out there. I don't think too many people are going to have made one that was falling apart, because that's not the goal of recreating a famous film car. So he had to do that himself. I would imagine all that someone,

Phil Rice 12:44
yeah, separating out meshes and things, yeah. So

Damien Valentine 12:48
again, that just shows that the level of work that it went into this, to go to that much trouble,

Tracy Harwood 12:55
yeah, do you want me to do mine a little bit? Yeah, great. Okay, well, I love this. He's made it for the 40th anniversary of the film. 40th anniversary, I couldn't believe that may it was originally released in 1985 unbelievable. Now on his website, not only does he have links to his films, but he also has his artwork and some jams that he does. Apparently, he does a jam every, every week. And I'll put a link to his jamming channel, which is also absolutely amazing in terms of the way that he goes about just covering, you know, well known songs. Really, he's, he's an outstanding creative pretty much, with everything he does, very evidently. I also really enjoyed the description that he's got for for the channel here. He says he's a guy that likes to make movies, original animated series where the content animation and sound design is done in house, and the only law he has is that the animation breaks the rules. And by that, by that, he means he's dedicated to making animations about vehicles, mechanics and crashes.

Damien Valentine 14:15
Oh, he's certainly done that here. He's

Tracy Harwood 14:18
certainly done that here. He's certainly done that in a lot of the other stuff that he's made as well. So it's, it's pretty, pretty incredible in this one, obviously, we see, I'm going to do a bit of a spoiler here as well. So if you want to pause, fine. We see Doc drive like a maniac with Marty in a passenger seat, which apparently damages the DeLoreans flux capacitor. That's that's kind of what happens. So they've lost the ability to pinpoint the date they're going to now, Doc thinks he can fix it if he can get the part he needs. So he continues to drive like this idiot, causing Total Mayhem wherever they go and along the way do. That. I mean, this is the bit that is just so so brilliantly done, so brilliantly written. It just in the most hilarious way. I mean, it turns out that not only is the DeLorean tough enough to endure this massive beating that it gets, but also the bubble in which this car emerges when it travels through time, can even withstand the vacuum of space, and they they kind of do all of this without dying, which is hilarious, but what I think it demonstrates is just the most delightful storytelling you can imagine. It's rooted in the type of film and game content we all absolutely loved when we were growing up. And this is, you know, you both mentioned it, actually, it says shades of Grand Theft Auto. And I think perhaps a bit of b n g film wrapped up with this kind of classic 1980s film. And it also takes us to places in history. No, we just never thought this would go and I think, in the process, expands the law of what that flux capacitor is as perhaps the world's most important time traveling device ever made. Really, I mean, it caused the Hindenburg disaster. It caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. It's the reason the iceberg hit Titanic. It caused the pandemic, and in the future, it's clearly the cause of the Independence Day catastrophe. And on top of that, he's invented type 304 steel, which is used in most modern kitchen sinks today, and is also the outer skin, I believe, with the dragon X spacecraft that Musk shoots up. And on top of that, he's also discovered triple layer duct tape, which is, which is his solution to his problem. I mean stitching that lot together. What, what kind of a mind does this guy got? It's, it's really. The editing is beautiful. The voice acting, I think, is amazing. The shots and the positioning, and particularly of the camera, in the in the way that the shots are done is just outstanding. The sound design, I thought was, was incredible, really, but so too was the characterizations, which, you know, really tapped into the doc and Marty characters that we all know and love. But then on top of that, he's got suspense. The effects are there, the writing and the storytelling. There's just everything is just so well done. Do you know, for me, this was right up there with the modded, wacky West that we reviewed a couple of years ago, probably one of the craziest machinimas I've ever actually seen that was made in red, Dead Redemption two, obviously, this is made in in Blender. But I would say what he's drawing on here is the physics of a bunch of tools that he's used within blender as well, which he's probably not talking about. So yeah, for me, this is one of the best shorts that I've really seen. I think what impressed me so much is actually the depth of understanding of some of the original aspects of the narrative, arc and story and the relationship, if there's there's bits in this where the where the relationship between Marty and his nemesis, Biff, and the grandfather character are all kind of alluded to, and also in the context of various kind of future technologies, all of that in the mix, and they're so Well done in this those kind of level of details are so just It's brilliantly put together. There's, for example, there's a bit there where there's this kind of exaggerated movement and facial animations, which you you sort of picked up on Damien, which are, you know, they're not doc from the film, but they are very dark, just exaggerated. Yeah. I mean, it all adds to the qualities of the film. I also thought the movement of the characters, which kind of indicated some of the some of the aspects of the story, was also super intelligently done, really. For example, Marty was in that classroom with the door open, and then he kind of turns away with his head in his hand. Really subtle movement and really excellent cinematography, I thought, which kind of demonstrated how clever this guy is with the positioning of the camera for that kind of shot. And similarly, you know, with them, the way the madness of Doc was kind of portrayed. It was, it was, it was just brilliantly done. It showed a real depth of humor and and simultaneously, I think, a real respect for the original work. There was nothing that I could really criticize in it. Um. Yeah, but I will add a little something else, because this is a little story I'd like to tell you. So a few weeks ago, before this kind of came to our shared notes, it did actually pop up in my feed, and I was at the time, I was preparing my keynote for the UK's Institute of Science and technology's annual conference. Now, actually, I'm the chair of the board of advisors for their creative industries and technologies practitioner register. And I was kind of really looking forward to the event, because I was super excited to meet the president of the Institute, who's none other than Dr Helen Sharman. She's a cosmonaut and the first Britain and European woman in space. Now, not surprisingly, I wanted my presentation to be focused on Creative Technologies and the emergent roles of generative AI was something that was going to be talking about. So I thought I would show this film as an example of exemplary creative practice using uncertain tools that embed AI at its heart, such as with the rigging and the animation workflow. I suspect they're deeply rooted in it. So when I presented this, a lot of folks in the room were kind of scientists and technologists, and probably just a few were creative technologists, but everyone loves Back to the Future, right? So I thought this would be a perfect thing to show them, given the diversity, really of interest that would be in that room. So Helen, who had introduced me to the audience, said, Well, that's really wild, and I'm sure, well, I'm not too sure, even I'm not too sure about life in space without a helmet, and that kind of part of it just didn't work for me. Well, I thought, you know of anybody? She's gonna know, isn't she? So there you go. Langdon feedback from a cosmonaut. Should you want to extend the space based component of the story you've now actually got somebody like that to have a have an overview of it, which just just made me laugh. And then the other thing that I wanted to tell you is I did do a little bit of digging around about Landon, and actually, this guy's really interesting. Turns out he's 20 years old, so he's born in 2005 obviously never even saw back to the future when it came out. And most of the content he's created, which is Thomas the Tank Engine inspired, was done before he was 18. Now he's had a passion for 3d creation from being a really young boy. His mother, Patrice, was reported a couple of years ago as saying he drew his very first 3d box and turned it into a train at aged about two and a half years old. Can you believe that his aim, at the time that interview was done, was to try to get to college to study animation and filmmaking further. I don't know if he's achieved that. Can't really find out too much about that, but ultimately, what he wanted to do was to get into 3d movie making. Well, I'd say he's done that, not least through the creative work he's produced. But can you imagine his talent put into different esthetic approaches to contemporary works too? I think this is clearly a young man with a very big future, and I was super impressed that we got to have a chance to talk about it on on the show as well. So great pick. Phil. Thank you very much.

Phil Rice 23:38
Yeah, his, his, his feel for Well, first of all, little challenge for those who didn't notice this when watching it the first time, but I would challenge you count how many Camera Cuts there are. It's all one shot. Now, mind you, this is in threed software, so you can do a there were obviously cuts when he would change from one environment to the other. That's obviously, that's got to be a cut, the way that these things work. But it's all one shot, like all this, these shots, you were talking about these, these really cleverly done. But he also had to move the camera, yep, in real time, in in the movie, into the right position for all these different shots to capture all this. So that is so hard to do, because there's so much you have to think about. I mean, you don't have to think about just what you'll see in shot a and what you'll see at shot B, but everything that you'll see between them, and there's nothing that's not been given thought in that a great example is there's a scene where when they teleport into a it's very early in the. Movie, they they jump a locomotive train that's crossing the street, and the train derails and then starts kind of chasing them down. So you see the train behind them, and it bumps them at one point, and all these train cars are going all jaggy, everywhere and stuff. And a little bit later, like a moment later, in that same scene. They're driving down another street and up, suspended between two buildings is one of the wrecked train cars, which we know where that came from. We didn't see it happen, but there it is. And just the thought that goes into what's going on in this world he's created, not just what you see, but what would be happening when we're not watching that later, we'll see the effect of, is just brilliant, yeah, just brilliantly done. So, yeah, I'm it's, it's so impressive, and it's, it's hard to imagine him not finding a place to do this as a profession in some in some manner, maybe not specifically this, right? But the skill sets that he demonstrates here are phenomenal. And I mean, if, if someone were to really nitpick, I suppose they could say, well, you know, some of the, some of the PBR textures, their roughness and metallic maps, were kind of glimmering in a weird way or something. It's like you have to hunt that hard to find anything to criticize here, you know. But every you know, the characters are blocky. Well, they're supposed to be. It feels right for the film. So, yeah, it's, it's just just tremendous. And, yeah, I was just so happy to find I went through, and basically I ended up watching everything on his channel and on his website too. You're right. Tracy, the website's great that the Friday jams, there are these, these live music sessions, basically with him and a friend, or some friends, and quite a quite a talented, uh, young man. So yeah, we'll be very excited to see where the name Landon Fern hold Fernald turns up in the future. Even if you know, who knows in this day and age, you know if maybe, maybe one of the valid roads to success for someone like this is to just stay indie. You know, it's really hard to carve out a living that way. But, you know, maybe that's the way that he goes, so that he can just continue to create unrestrained. Or maybe he'll, you know, get hired by someone and get paid good money, yeah, unlike, unlike most indies make, right? And so, yeah, I'm excited for him, and it was just a treasure. And this movie was only made what a couple months ago is in July,

Tracy Harwood 27:50
I think, released a couple of months ago. I think he's making it

Phil Rice 27:53
a while. It probably took him quite a long time. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, Well, I'm glad, I'm glad you two enjoyed it. I'm sure Ricky would have too. It's, it's, it's quite a little adventure there. And yeah, again, I was really impressed by the the by every aspect of this. It's just got such energy and such careful craft mixed with the sense of chaos, things breaking and flying apart. It's just wonderful. So what did you in the audience think? Let us know at talk, at completely machinima.com, or drop us a comment wherever you see this video, or listening to the podcast. On behalf of my co hosts, Tracy and Damien, I am Phil and Ricky says hello from away, and we will see you all next time.