Damien Valentine 01:00
Hello and welcome to another episode of now for something completely machinima, I'm joined by, oh, my name is Damian Valentin. I'm joined by my co host, Tracy Harwood, hello, Phil rice, you there and Ricky Grove, alright. So this week, we're going to be talking about Phil's pick, which is a very interesting film. It's I found, indeed, really enjoyed it, so I'm not going to talk about it. I think

Ricky Grove 01:29
Phil should quite a relief after last week. Yeah, yeah.

Damien Valentine 01:34
Well, we'll see. But I'm not going to talk about it, because this is Phil's pick. So Phil, please tell us about this film you've found for us, sure,

Phil Rice 01:42
absolutely so so many of my picks over the last year have been from the algorithm in some way. I guess I've trained it right, because it's delivering up just wonderful stuff. This one came in from a someone who wrote into the show, and kind of specifically asked, Hey, would you take a look at what was it? The author themselves, Tracy, it was him, yeah. So the creator on YouTube goes by the name, I hope I'm pronouncing this right. Yago. Yago Yago Muriel, yeah. And the film is called the murderer. Now, I had a difficult time choosing which of his to do. He's done several films in a similar style with a similar method, and it was hard to pick because I liked several of them so but ultimately I landed on this one. And I think, I think he has said, Diego has said that this is the one that that he kind of puts forward as that he's he's happiest with. So it's called the murderer. It's, Think, Do you remember the old television show, The Outer Limits? Oh, yeah, or maybe less so Twilight Zone. This is, for some reason, this feels more Outer Limits, meets Hitchcock, definitely David Lynch, because there's this surrealism that goes on with the film. I really don't want to spoil much about the plot of this, because it's quite an experience. And for me, it did not I had, I didn't have any luck predicting where it was going. And to me, that's one of the most delightful things that we can stumble upon on the show here is to be surprised, you know. So it's a ride worth taking. But the general premise is that there's how to describe it without spoiling, but there's the you've got this woman, and there's these crows, and I just don't want to do yes,

Damien Valentine 03:57
I think, for our viewers, go and watch the pause this, go and watch the film and then come

Phil Rice 04:01
Yes, yes, do that. So the whole thing is black and white. It's, it's, the story isn't really noir, but the film type kind of evokes that, that use of black and white, and what's,

Ricky Grove 04:20
I guess this is an ultra universal horror film esthetic.

Phil Rice 04:25
Okay, very good. So it's made with Gary's mod. I forgot to mention that, and that's important, especially in light of some some picks that we had from last month where we kind of it feels like we explored two ends of a continuum of what's what one could see from Gary's mod. And my pick was the typical zany humor one right where it's kind of cartoonish and weird and probably as m dot stracy. Strange as you can get without being m dot strange. You know, it's like just, it's, it's, it's janky. It has this weird feel to it, right? And then we saw someone take Gary's mod and make something that was so polished and good that they actually marketed, if you will. They talked about the film. They published the film as if it was made with another source engine toolkit to see, I think, part of partly, just to see if they could get away with it in some way, you know, because it was so well done and so out of the ordinary. And here again, is yet another where, okay, if you've watched enough Gary's mod content, you will you'll know that's what this is. There's some certain looks to the characters that are, you know, that evoke Half Life, two animation, the movements and such, yes, but this has been stylistically used in a way that I have never seen done in Gary's mod. It's very much clearly an homage to classic filmmaking techniques like you will see this. You will see this filmmakers influences in this film for sure. It's, it's, it's wonderful the use of light and shadow. And there's something really magical about when that's done right on black and white. It's really something. And I just, I just loved this film. The score is, is kind of a classic sound that you would expect from like, the Hitchcock era. It's, it's, I can't remember who the name of the Rick. You'll probably know this, the name of the composer for psycho. Can't remember. I can't remember, but it's like, I'm just like, that, my own forehead here. Yeah, it's, it's, it's that era where it's, it's orchestral in nature, for the most part, and there's this kind of looming sense of dread. This is, this is, this is the feel you get when reading Kafka. You know it's, it's just unnerving and unsettling in a in a completely different way than last week's film. Was right it for me, it put me on on the edge of my seat. And I, I've really been on a David Lynch revival kick for the past year anyway, so this was just, it was like the perfect little gemstone to be, yeah, yeah, plopped in my lap. You know? It just fits with that sense of of the surreal and the strange and dark. It's very dark story. It has the feel of a tragedy, and the way that the characters move and emote is uncanny in like, the most delightfully unnerving way, that's the stairs and and it's just, it's, it's splendid. I'm really, really excited to hear what, what all of you have to say about this one, because I and Diego, thank you for for bringing this to our attention. I don't know if we would have stumbled upon it on

Damien Valentine 08:23
our own. Well, I'm glad you mentioned some of those classic TV shows, because one that came to my mind, it's not necessarily the atmosphere that created, but the way it was filmed, like the camera angles and so on, was the original series of Star Trek. You know, when they those episodes where they go to plan it. And they're the filming location is a real place. It's not on set. They, you know, they go out in the forest or anything. Just something about the way the shot reminds me of that. And obviously this is in black and white, which the original series would be, and those other classic shows were all produced in black and white. And, you know, there's just something about it made me think of that. And I thought, you know, you don't see this done so much anymore. There's certain camera angles and things that Hollywood uses, and they're copied by TV and film studios all around the world, but you don't see those kind of angles. I don't have the exact I don't know the names of them or anything. It's just that style from that era of television and cinema. And you know, it's nice to have that done on purpose for this, the film itself, it's kind of without giving away too much of the story. It's very bizarre, it's kind of creepy. Don't really get any answers about what's going on, which I quite liked. Yes, I love that too. Yeah, it's got the, you know, the animation oddities that you expect from Gary's mod. And, you know, we talked about, you talked about that one that's we saw last month, that was really polished, that was hard to believe, actually was Gary spot. And then this one is very obviously Gary's mod, but it's also on purpose, and it adds something. To this film. It really works for it. And you know, I like that. I enjoyed the story. I enjoyed the mystery behind it. I enjoyed that we don't get those answers, as I just said, and I thought it's really well put together, but it's one of those films that you have to go and watch it to really understand what we're talking about, yes. So I Yeah. I can't say too much without giving away too much, so just go and watch this and enjoy the experience that you'll have.

Tracy Harwood 10:32
Well, obviously, this is not a guy that's messing around with Gary's mod. This is a guy that's really trying to create a mood. And I think he exceeds, you know, he succeeds very well with with doing that. Although I have to say when I, when I started watching it, I thought the premise of it was vaguely absurd, you know, shooting seagulls and this kind of existential kind of horror, you know, mashing these two things together was kind of odd. However, the phone, the film, kind of really commits to what it's trying to do. And that commitment, I think, is what gives this well, it's what it was, really what makes it succeeded, and it's the commitment that clearly does a lot of the heavy lifting for it. There's a really specific lineage here. This is obviously, you know, Source Engine, melancholy. We've seen a few of these kinds of things. There was one or two zombie things that we've seen done in a similar kind of vein. However, what you can see here is this is, this is taking quite a lot of its influence from the Dear Esther mod that's within that engine. And you can see the kind of the coastal spaces, the lonely, windswept nothingness that exists in that kind of mod environment. And what you get from it is this environmental sort of storytelling, which clearly plays out over any kind of explicit narrative, because there's very little narrative, as you have said already, Ricky, and what Jago has done is he's used this kind of washed out Lighting, these sort of muted palettes, and these really long lingering shots of space, rather than going for a lot of action, because there isn't a lot of action, it's just intense in the way that it's portraying what it's portraying. So the, I suppose what you could say is the limitation of the engine is what becomes the style and and it really sort of leans into the stiffness of the models to do what it's doing, and its outcome, I think, from doing that is it's uncanny in what it's achieved. I mean, these space, this kind of sparse environments definitely convey that kind of sense of isolation, and the texture repetition that you kind of get becomes the kind of rhythm for what you're seeing. And it kind of feels as a consequence of that sort of, I suppose, what would you say, accidental art house through the constraints of the of the engine itself. And I actually really love that. The way that that's been done is is very clever, but the subject is absurd. You've got this kind of weird presence, at least taken at face value through most of the film. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna sort of say a little bit of spoilers here, because I think it needs to be said. But, yeah, the assumption I'm making here is that you'll have watched the film before year. What we've got to say next? Because these birds have roles. It's got it's about birds. The birds have roles, and they have voices, and you've got a seagull speaking, which is inherently stupid and ridiculous, but the film pivots into this kind of really super uncanny thing in such a way that it is in no way funny. What you're seeing isn't funny at all. It's that kind of tonal discipline that I think is really quite impressive, and how he's achieved it is astonishing. It's the structure I think that that kind of feels like it's building on really mundane activities where, you know this main character, this woman, is reading and shooting birds, but then you kind of have this sort of disruption. These birds speak, and then this kind of thing escalates into something super uneasy, and what you get through it is this sort of vague sense of guilt, this kind of, you know, maybe it's a consequence of the intrusion. Of the sort of irrational into the everyday. It's not really spelled out, thankfully, which gives it that kind of slight. I'd say student film meets creepy pasta ambiguity.

Tracy Harwood 15:13
Maybe I'm not sure the film itself knows fully what it's saying, but it knows it wants to say something unsettling, and it's that that counts. What's brilliant, above all, I think, is the Edit, the soundscape and the old movie music. It's eerie, it's strange, and ultimately, with a twist that's shocking and really quite horrific, nothing you see is what you expect it to be. And to be able to achieve that level of storytelling with such limited content? Well, it's, I think, nothing short of brilliant. The editing, for me, is doing a lot of the narrative work by by building the tension through, you know, these sort of you know the duration of these shots. It's letting the silence carry meaning, which is also very clever, and it also does something else, which I think is very clever, which is resisting the urge to over explain what it is you're seeing. And you can tell from that, I think that the Creator really understands that editing is storytelling. It's not just stitching things together, and it's, it's, I think it's that aspect of this that puts it above a lot of machinima that we see. So let me just tell you a little bit about what I thought about the performance of it, which is, you know, in terms of machinima, it's always kind of this weird sort of hybrid of voice acting, of model posing and this kind of edited illusion. But here, the voice work carries a lot of the emotional tone and it's it's shifting from kind of normality to unease. There isn't a lot of voices other than through these variously spoken, very disjointed birds saying one word murderer. So there's very there's very little Spanish made. It's it's Spanish largely. And as I said, they're kind of disconnected from each other, which is, which is intriguing. Think that character animation is really limited by by design, but it's been you sparing sparingly enough. I suppose that the animation and how little of it there is doesn't actually collapse the illusion that you get from from watching it. And the birds as characters, I think work precisely because they are just wrong. They are just wrong. And it's that, I think that gives it this kind of Lynchian quality to it. It's not expressive enough to be natural, but it's not static enough to be kind of inert. And I think it's that that creates this sort of Uncanny edge. I think the pacing is probably the strongest element. It's it's clearly deliberate, like I said, these shots linger long, much longer than you expect. The cuts are kind of used to withhold, rather than clarify. And there's this kind of attempt at a rhythm which isn't really about continuity, the themes of it, well, it's obviously about violence. Is it about control, though, is it about arbitrariness of killing things in games, and it's possibly all of those things. But I think it's also trying to transcend the engine itself, to evoke this kind of atmosphere, rather than tap into the spectacle of meaning that you know you can derive just by watching it at kind of face value. And for that reason, I felt that it wasn't kind of necessarily a fully formed idea. It kind of emerged and in a very interesting way, because it's not polished in a way that we see some of the work like, like the Gary's mod that we were talking about from last month was very polished. This is not and I think ultimately, with the soundscape, it's you are harking back to those older, black and white style horror movies, where it's the psychological themes that were so powerful as you never really saw an awful lot on the screen. And same here really. It's, it's, it is a black and white old movie. It's immediately for me, invoking memories of films like the birds, although that wasn't kind of black and white, but also things like Night of the Living Dead, which kind of had that slow kind of escalation and implied gore. And it's not obviously trying to scare you, but it's definitely trying to make you feel uncomfortable thinking about it later, after you've watched it. And that's very old school, and I'm. Really love that aspect of it, the twist in the final part of the film, I think, is absolutely fascinating. And I am going to say what I think about,

Tracy Harwood 20:11
because you know what it seems to present. You know, with these birds isn't, in the end, seemingly birds that have been shot, but they're human bodies, and it's a twist that you really don't see coming. And what's curious about that is that it kind of makes you feel even more uncomfortable about that central character, a woman, shooting birds in the first part of the story, because that's strange. But worse than that, you don't ever get to find out what actually happened to her or what the relationship was that she had with the people whose bodies are then discovered in their heads that have been chopped off as a consequence. Maybe they were her kids. Maybe they were visitors to the coastal house that she lived in. Who knows? But there's something kind of about that relationship and the state of her mind that then really becomes very troubling in what you kind of reflect on as you've, as you've kind of watched it. I think that's as a really interesting twist to it. It's not what you expect to see when you start watching it. And I think overall, my concluding analysis is that it's it's a really gifted artist and storyteller that's made it. And I think I have watched some of other, some of the other films that Jago has got on his channel, and I think they're equally fascinating and interesting. I do actually know a little bit about this guy, because he sent some comments in when I asked him some questions about what his inspiration is. But before I sort of say anything about that, Ricky, what did you think fascinated?

Ricky Grove 21:53
Well, I wanted to echo the part where you said he's immensely talented. Of all of the filmmakers I've seen this year, he is, he is probably the most talented to take a blunt instrument, which is Gary's mod, is like repairing a watch with a hatchet, to choose such a blunt tool and Then turn it into this beautifully stylistic horror film, reflecting classic era Hollywood, and at the same time, creating mood, creating a combination of of all of those things, to present a story that Is disquieting and as classic as you can imagine, and it was so affecting for me. I watched immediately. Watched it again. I think one of the reasons why it's so good is he combines the visuals with the storytelling really well, the assumption it operates on an old urban cliche that people who live in the country, when they're so isolated go crazy. And I think you have this woman who, at the beginning is looking at a big book of maps, which I think is Africa is on the map, which I think he's trying to say that this is a woman who doesn't want to be where she is. She wants to be someplace else. And in the middle of her reading this thing and grossed in it, she hears the seagulls making noise, and it irritates her, because she's trying to visualize this place. So she gets her husband's shotgun, goes out and kills them and goes back to her book. But then the birds show up and they start talking to her. Now there's different ways of looking at that. One is she may have already disassociated herself from reality, and if she has those birds talking are only in her mind, right? That it's a guilt issue. Now, I think he does a brilliant job of suggesting both could be in this world they are talking because you have, later on, you have this sort of God, bird God, who shows up for vengeance as well. But anyway, that's the motivating factor of the story, and through all of this and her continued desire to punish birds, and then suddenly you see her sadistic and pleasure in killing the birds that her husband shows up, She's gone, brings the cops in. The cops are strangely arrogant. If all will solve this? Oh yeah, she's had a problem, as if it's a woman issue. These, these, these male, patronizing fellow, you know, the cop will solve it, and he doesn't. In fact, the huge bird shows up. It, and in one of the most horrific moments in the film, which is up to that point, really been kind of stylized violence and mood violence, the giant bird tears off the cop's head and then tears off her husband's head, brings the head back and throws it at her feet. Now that is just horrific. Now I've seen other other violence and many other films that I've watched throughout my life, but the way he contextualizes that with the style, the classic style in black and white, makes that scene so repulsive, so upsetting, it's just terrible. And then she gets vengeance on the bird by smashing him in the head. And then it leaves you in a sort of ambiguous situation at the end, with other bodies that she finds you had a good explanation for it, Tracy, but I think the two things, the last two things, I want to point out, one is, if he's a poet, he's a poet in the imagery that he chooses. I saw flashes of Frankenstein imagery from Frankenstein with on a mountain, black and white, silhouetted. He's obviously somebody who knows cinema really well, yes, and he's brought that knowledge into his own creations. In a way, it's in Spanish with English subtitles. The actors are good. The lead character, the female, never says anything. She never she never speaks, which further contributes to the fact that she's a bit mad, I think.

Ricky Grove 26:51
But the most important thing I want to say is the style. We talked a little bit about style in the last episode with m dot. Strange style. This style is is creative people take different things and put them together in unique ways. He Iago has taken classic Hollywood cinema, horror films David Lynch and his own appreciation of Russian cinema, which oftentimes has those moody landscape shots as well, and put them together in a weird story, in a way that is believable, despite the problems with Gary's mod animation in particular, and made a compelling film that's the the best movie I've ever seen in Gary's mod now. Now Gary's mod in particular, and the last thing I say, Gary's mod in particular has an animation issue. When you film in Gary's mod, you have to do it like stop frame, meaning you you take the image, you take the next image, you change the figures position or thing, then you go to the next image and take it and you do it like stop frame. Now, classic animation tools have these ability to be able to just the the rate at which the animation occurs. You can do graphs to make something start slow and finish quickly, or have an even move. There's no such thing in Gary's mod, so they go quickly from one pose to the next one. That works. He's managed to have been able to make that work. But I think the movie would have been even better if he would have been able to have some in between graph animation, just a little bit to take away because, because he's, he's, he's creating a story that you're involved in, and suddenly you see that crazy animation, and it takes you out of it for just a second, just a second, and then you're right back into it, because It's so good. So if anybody at Gary's mind is listening, please come with a way to do in between poses with some sort of graph or something, because it will make something much more believable. I just love this film. I think it was absolutely magnificent. I I saw that. I saw animals, his next film. I watched everything that's on there. I think he's a gifted fellow, and I hope that our comments are supportive and enable him to be able to continue making movies.

Phil Rice 29:30
Yes, let me throw in a couple things here, Tracy, then you can you were going to share with us some of what he shared with us when he

Tracy Harwood 29:39
Oh, you do it, if you can.

Phil Rice 29:42
So first of all, I had a very different understanding of what we were looking at when they showed the bodies laid out on the ground at the end. Because if you look at the sequence of the movie, it's the one police officer comes to meet with the HUD. Husband. He says, I'll take care of it. They go outside, and then, through the course of the next several, you know events, both of them lose their heads. They're dead. You know, they've been decapitated by the giant, as Ricky wonderfully put it, the giant God bird. I love that. Well, the next time, when We next see back at the house, more police have arrived, and they have two bodies laid out on the ground with no heads. Those are the two people we saw get killed. So there weren't additional bodies. My interpretation was, there's no additional bodies. There's no mistaking of the birds for people or whatever. That's just the two people we saw murdered, and they've assembled the bodies, you know, in typical pre coroner fashion, I guess, you know, laid them out for pickup later or something. And then the other cops are looking around trying to make sense of what they've arrived at, and they attribute those murders to her, because they've never seen this giant bird. Why would they think that a giant God bird even exists? That's kind of the way that I read it. I think maybe both, both your your interpretation, is a lot more intriguing. Like, I didn't, I didn't get that when I watched it, but it's an interesting idea. Definitely, I got the sense that what Ricky pointed out that she's had some kind of dissociation. I definitely felt like that was the point of the birds talking, that that was illustrated. It was giving us access to her broken point of view, and the verb the birds speaking were simply something. She's the only one who ever heard them speak on screen. I think that's because they weren't really right, that that was, you know, she got something that broke in here. I think the video description on the YouTube is a red herring. Whether it's intentional or not, I don't know, but that it sets it up like this. Anna just wanted to read in peace, but after shooting some bothersome seagulls, something changes. One of them speaks to her. It calls her a murderer. That's just that's not, that's not what we see in the film, right? It's not that she just shoots some annoying seagulls. I think Ricky hit it on the head. I didn't put two and two together on the the significance of the Africa book and her, you know, and the the cabin fever, the isolation aspect of it, oh, that, when you said that, it was just like, it just clicked. Like, yes, that's the missing piece for me, of why would she do this? To me, there was no question she did this and that it was some form of madness, and Ricky just really saw what was right there all along, and I just missed it. So I greatly appreciate that, absent the madness narrative, I think that the only messaging that one could the messaging that came through to me as a possibility, if we don't think she's mad, and this is just all surreal, then it would be the human tendency to follow up one wrong with another, rather than correcting oneself. That is, that is part, that's an intricate part of what is broadly termed the problem of evil, right? That just that, that's, that's how we are. What given, you know, you flip a coin to, typically, it's going to land on, I'm going to double down on something off while I did, rather than reverse course. And if you could look at her sequence in that way that you know, when confronted with her guilt through the voices of the birds, instead of having introspection or, let's say, repenting, she instead continues, and, you know, goes and enjoys it and enjoys it, yeah, and ultimately, it leads to destruction of what she loves we would we can assume, I think, right someone she cares about, the only affection she we ever got to see him, her show him was in, I think that was meant to be the motion in the movies where they closed the eyelids, right? And that's how the actor knows to close their eyes. It was supposed to be that kind of moment, but they probably couldn't close the eyes on a

Ricky Grove 34:25
Yeah, couldn't do that

Phil Rice 34:26
head but, but the motion made sense. So I think what I love most about this is what we've all kind of hit on, that outer limits. Take that as just kind of the marker for this, this era, this type of story. What's interesting about the outer limits or the Twilight Zone or any episodic things like that? The one Damian mentioned is those are all storylines that have been pasteurized, so to speak. They've all been run through committees. They've been put through. Was television okay? Is this okay to be on television? And the end result is this like slightly sterilized version of whatever the original story was. And hey, maybe that makes them more effective as sales tools for television ads, which is all that television execs really care about, right? So maybe it does make them more effective for that. But this is unpasteurized story. It's it's free to be weird and strange and leave things without a nice bow on the end to tie up as the answer. And I think that's why it moved me the most is that it it hadn't been subjected to that cleansing process that makes things all tidy and neat. It's just weird. You know? It just rides the line on that. And for all the we've spoken about this madness narrative making thing make make sense. It doesn't make everything that we see makes sense, right? It doesn't really fully account for the god bird thing, really. And so it's free to be that those things are true at the same time, right? That there is this clear madness narrative going on, and we're seeing but then there's also some stuff that gets so weird that it's like that doesn't really fit into that very neatly, does it? And the film just lets that be that way. Yeah, and I love that. If he had focus grouped this or something, someone probably would have pointed that out. You know, this doesn't really make total sense. You can just tweak this. And he either didn't do that, or he was wise enough to not listen to that advice, because it works better without those fixes to just be it's his

Ricky Grove 36:54
pure creative imagination. Yes, yes. I love that.

Tracy Harwood 37:01
I love it too, and I think this young man's got an awful lot of talent. So questions that I asked were, how long has he been making machinima? And was somewhat surprised that he'd been making it for about 10 years, and started when he was 14. So this is not an older person. This is a young man that's just finding his room for this, and he's clearly inspired by older movies. But the answer that I got to that question wasn't quite what I expected, because by older movies, unsurprisingly, there weren't it wasn't really talking about the black and whites that we're talking about, really, he was talking about Kubrick and Mel Gibson, which I think is kind of interesting. And the comment then was about the reason that he's inspired by them is because each scene they create evokes a strong emotion, often without dialog. So that is, is really, I think, a fascinating sort of reflection on on his creative process, I think, as to the the use of machinima, because there's a bit of a corollary here. You know, obviously this is not somebody without talent, but why do it with a game engine when you know clearly there are other tools that you can kind of use normally. When you see machinima being made, it's sort of because the speed of the creative process is part of the thinking, right? But this is somebody who's come to realize that he doesn't want to make movies quickly. He wants to craft every bit of it that he makes, and I think from from that point of view, it's an interesting choice set of tools that he's using, but I think there's an awful lot of craft that he's learned as he's developing the work that he's creating. Because, as we've all commented on, there's other work that he's doing, and it's, it's also equally deep and thought provoking in the way that that this one is too. I mean, for sure, I, you know, I'd say he's got a very big future as a cult, future classic creator. I hope so. I hope he continues making films, and certainly I'm looking forward to seeing what he what he creates next.

Phil Rice 39:30
And I think it's safe to say he picked up four new fans this week.

Tracy Harwood 39:34
I think he did. Yeah, definitely, and hopefully

Phil Rice 39:37
a lot more we'll be watching with great interest.

Tracy Harwood 39:39
Thanks for some reason bringing

Ricky Grove 39:41
it to us. Yeah, indeed, that was a lovely film. For some reason, my video is frozen.

Phil Rice 39:47
I don't know why I see that. That's okay,

Tracy Harwood 39:50
good, surreal, all right.

Damien Valentine 39:55
Well, that seems like a good place to wrap things up. So yeah, thank you. Phil for choosing this film. It was, I think we all really enjoyed it, so we look forward to seeing more from Diego. If you've got any film comments about this film, or any other of yago's work, or some of the other stuff we've been talking about, please send us an email at talk at complete the missionary.com you can check out our blog and all their details at complete the machinery.com, and we will see you all next week. Take care and from my hosts, Phil rice, Ricky grave and Tracy, see that.