Phil Rice 01:00
Hello, and welcome to And Now for Something Completely Machinima, the podcast about machinima, virtual production, and related technologies. My name is Phil Rice, and I'm here with my co-host Tracy Harwood.

Tracy Harwood 01:11
Hello,

Phil Rice 01:12
and Damian Valentine.

Damien Valentine 01:14
Hello,

Phil Rice 01:16
Ricky is off this week. I have not had time to think up a witty reason for him being gone, so just insert your own witty reason here. So this week we are taking a look at a pick from Damian, and this is from this is, I think, unprecedented for us to review two films from the same creator so close together, but I'm really glad you picked this one, Damien. So, tell us about it.

Damien Valentine 01:47
Well, first of all, I didn't realize it was the same creator when I chose it. It just came up as on my YouTube feed, and I thought, you know, that looks quite interesting. I'll watch it, and then I did, and I just could not stop laughing all the way through it. It's kind of, so it's by Michael, is very vintage, and we did discuss one of his films very recently, which was.. we all enjoyed that one too. But this one, it takes place.. it's made with Gary's mod, so it's kind of got that look to it, and it's definitely a very Gary's mod style film. It takes place on a spaceship in a world that's obviously inspired by Alien. There's no actual alien monster in it, it's not, it's not horror film, it's just kind of got that that look, and like the characters are wearing clothes like you see them wearing on the Nostromo, and things like that. The whole premise is there's one crew member of the ship, he's the captain and he's been there's a problem with the ship, but he's kind of lazy and incompetent and a bit of a coward because he doesn't want to go and fix it because he knows it's going to be very dangerous for him, and he just doesn't want to get up, so on the ship there are clones of himself that are designed to be woken up in an emergency, so he wakes up several of them and tells them to go and fix the problem. The thing is, they've got his personality, so instead of fixing the ship, they kind of approach it the same way that he would, and it goes very wrong, but you know it's also a Gary's mod film, so you've got that kind of Gary's mod kind of humor, very slapstick and things flying around that shouldn't do, like playing around with physics and all that kind of stuff, and you know, I just enjoyed this film so much that I had to choose it. It wasn't until I posted it, and Tracy, I think it was you, left a note saying that this, we just reviewed someone, one of his films just last month, and I thought I didn't realize that, but I'm still choosing it, because I liked it so much. So, yeah, that's why I chose it. So, I'll leave it up to you to tell to discuss it.

Tracy Harwood 04:05
Well, I'm really glad you did choose it. It is actually my favorite film of the month, and A Standing Tale from Outer Space

Damien Valentine 04:15
should have named it.

Tracy Harwood 04:17
Well, I just thought I would, because you know the Outer Space bit is the key to it. I didn't see alien in this at all. I have to say, I did. I mean, I get where you can see that, but I didn't, didn't actually see it. I mean, I love the whole premise for it. The one incompetent man makes more of himself to avoid doing work. Just what could possibly go wrong? I think the joke is not just cloning, though, but it's the, it's that sort of delegation taken to absurdity, and it's that absurdity, which is so, so well done, you know. So this guy decides to make more of himself rather than become more competent and. And and solve the problem, I mean, the satire really is that is kind of the failure of, you know, the bureaucracy of it, really, the failure of leadership, the avoidance of responsibility, and this kind of fantasy that technology can kind of solve these flaws, these character flaws in these five biological clones that this guy then you know gives life to at the press of a button, I mean the very way that they're ejected from their pods to you know it just is, is just so brilliantly well done. I mean, the kind of the the idea of what labor might be, the the you know how panic is dealt with among these five, these you know, the their various different kind of egos and their approaches to solving problems. I mean, what I think is really well done in this is that somehow he's managed to create six different personalities out of this one character, and you can see that there are very distinctive personality threads in each of them, him being the original, and then these five clones, that's that's, you know, that just taps into what Gary's, Gary's mod is kind of all about, too, you know, this sort of this idea that you've got these repeatable, posable, manipulable assets, I mean, the humor is very deep in this. I think it's very well done. I love that opening shot, that sort of spaceship crisis, that explosion of kitchenalia that just sets the scene for it, even though you don't kind of.. well, in fact, you know, when I first saw it, I was thinking, what's the series that's just being made at the moment, just the guys just finished filming episode three of it, that we're all kind of chomping at the bit to kind of watch, gosh, it's the name of it, it's just, you know, I forgot the name of it, anyway. He's just created the third episode, and it's got the same sort of start, roughly, as that to it, and then it just goes completely awry. You know, the thing that I liked about the start of it is that it very much evokes kind of what you call it, mid century sci-fi magazines, and this kind of exaggerated B movie trailers that we were all kind of fond of, and it's, it's got kind of definitely got that B movie esthetic about it, which it taps into, and I, I kind of felt it wasn't so much alien as it is more red dwarf and maybe Futurama, and these kind of workplace sitcoms that you might kind of, you know, see. Yeah, I mean, I absolutely loved it. I think the clones themselves, they're wonderfully a wonderfully comic ensemble together from this kind of one identity, and I think Michael is really leaning into the G mod strengths with its, I mean, it's proper slapstick, as you say, and Ricky would, would have loved that sort of slapstick, sort of side of it. I think you know, these kind of awkward physics, these stiff bodies, these kind of ragdoll timing, these exaggerated gestures, these, you know, deadpan pauses. I mean, the, the editing is what's outstanding with it, comedic editing, it's really well done. I like also, there's a kind of a serious-ish sci-fi rhythm to it, in terms of the, you know, the alarms and the countdowns and the, the, all the, you know, the sounds and the and the and the threats that are associated with it, but it's these kind of characters that, that, that really, you know, that really sell it.

Tracy Harwood 09:26
I think I suppose the ending, I have to say, I'm not going to spoil the ending, but it is an anti-climax for me. I was expecting the ship to be saved or destroyed, or I don't know, the commander learns something or nothing, but in the end it does none of those things, and I, and I guess really that is probably part of the, the joke of it too, the, you know, the slapstick nature of it is the fact that it doesn't actually. To you know, finish a story, but, but gives you something else entirely, so I was, I was kind of not surprised, but maybe disappointed, I kind of wanted the absurdity of it to just sort of go on a little more, and then the other thing that I just want to sort of mention something about, really, is the soundscape, I mean, that you've got all these sort of space opera serious bleeps and blurps, and all that kind of stuff, that you know, the machinery of the ship that you can kind of hear, and I think the voice acting is is outstanding in it, as real, as I said, real comedic timing, and some classic sounds in there as well, like the whiz noises and the screams, and all that kind of thing. Brilliantly done, but also you've got this, this kind of comic contrast with the with the mundane elements as well, so you've got these kind of awkward silences, and the abrupt cuts, and you know, all of that sort of, you know, the overblown sort of classic music bits and pieces that are in there as well, all set against the trivial content of it, and then I think the other side of it is the, the, you know, the physics, the physical comedy of it, that you know, the footsteps, the doors, this, you know, the sounds, all of that, all kind of the soundscape as a whole is, is very well done. This is a guy with a lot of talent, I'm super impressed with all of that, and given how gappy and you know, you know how the content itself works, how you know how jagged it all is, you know, you really buy into this because you can really, you know, you don't, you don't need to see a smooth flow of animation, and I think you know, Phil, you picked something months ago, which, which was to do with an absurd tie that was, you know, very, very similar kind of level of humor, but done so well. Gary's mod is perfect for this kind of thing. So, yeah, I think it's, it's, it's silly, of course it's silly, but it's a really technically competent Gary's mod space farce, and I loved it. Like I said, it's my favorite pick of the month. So, thank you very much.

Damien Valentine 12:31
Glad you enjoyed it.

Phil Rice 12:32
Yeah, I think it's my favorite too. I'm glad you brought up Ridiculous Ties, because I hadn't thought of that one. It's the same kind of energy, for sure, that it also reminds me a little bit of the spastic energy of, okay, so what was the.. it was the Back to the Future,

Tracy Harwood 12:50
yes,

Phil Rice 12:51
themed film that was a blender creation, and again, it's this exaggerated comic style or cartoon style, yeah, and this, this is that type of energy. Michael is very vintage. The previous work of his that we reviewed was Wallace Breen's day off.

Tracy Harwood 13:12
That's right, and this is

Phil Rice 13:13
like, yeah, he's he's he's perfecting the craft, like this is better in every measurable way, not the least of which reasons is because it's not in any way leaning on half-life knowledge or anything like that. This is a standalone story. Yeah, it's it's layered in tropes, but that's kind of the point, like you said, that's that's a part of the point of the satire, I think. The reason, Damian, and tell me if I'm wrong, I think the reason that the alien connection may have resonated with you wasn't as much about the atmosphere or the mood, but there is at least one person in it, one of the clones is wearing a USS Nostromo caption, that's the name of the ship in the original Alien movie, right? Yeah, so it could be that, that kind of implanted into it, because, because I caught that right away, too, yeah, so I just, I mean, I don't know what to say. I think this was this best thing of its type that I've seen in a long time. I mean, just, just wonderfully executed. There's so many layers to it, too. There's so many Easter eggs. If you really want to entertain yourself, have some fun with the pause button anytime that there's a custom image or computer screen displayed or anything like that.

Tracy Harwood 14:46
Yeah,

Phil Rice 14:46
I'm there's.. I take up way too much time listing them all. There's so many little references that are just hilarious, and I love.. and some of these things only show up on the screen for like a second. You know, so 30 frames, and yet he took the time to put these things in there for, for knowing that they'll get missed by most, but if someone does scrutinize, they're gonna get some nice surprises. I mean, that's just that's a man after my own heart, for sure. I love that. I love that thoughtfulness. His approach to sound is just wonderful, and it's definitely his own that's part of his brand, like nobody's doing it quite like that. Yeah, he's borrowing techniques from different things or whatever, but the end result is this highly exaggerated sound that evokes, like the old classic Warner Brothers cartoons, you know, Coyote and Roadrunner. There's a lot of exaggerated sound effects there, but they all kept theirs kind of within a certain framework that once you came to understand it, you knew what to expect, right? And it was all exaggerated, but it was also confined and defined, and he just constantly looks for places to just break convention, and I think I think that extra layer that he's adding, I think the term that I would use for it is it's a meme layer of sound effects, so these extra screams, the fact that every little motion, where there might normally be just a foley sound to indicate movement, instead it's like a scraping sound or something just super exaggerated for all these movements. There's little laughters or sound effects that are just inserted that really don't have anything like they're not sounds from the world, right. It's this additional layer that he's put over the top of it. The very first of those, I think, is when the, the spacewalking astronaut near the beginning of the movie misses his target, and there's this exasperated, you know, tirade that comes out, it's from it's a sample from somewhere else, like, and yet it, he just puts it in, and it doesn't have to fit, per se, like there's no, there's no attempt to sand off the edges to make it sound like it, he's leaving the sharp edges on purpose, because it adds to that's just that's the style that he's done, and I really like that. It's very hard to do that, like it would be very hard to emulate that, because it has an element to it that at first glance it sounds accidental, but it's very deliberate. All those sounds, everything that he's put in is very deliberate. It's, it's as thought out as those Easter eggs on the screens that I mentioned that you can catch with with hit and pause. So, yeah, I really like his approach to sound. It's definitely part of his own unique style. We've talked about filmmakers kind of evolving into a style to where it's not that they keep repeating the same thing, but there are elements to what what they bring to the table that you can recognize their work from it. I think Tom Gantl is a great example of that, even though it'd be really hard to pinpoint, well, what is it that makes a Tom Gentile film a Tom Gentile film, right? But you just know you can, you can see

Tracy Harwood 18:30
it, yeah,

Phil Rice 18:30
and I think that he, that Michael here is has developed that it's his own flavor, and while Damien, you may have picked this one this time without realizing it was the same guy, I think that will be harder to do as Michael's work goes forward, because he really is perfecting that, his flavor, just sticking with it and making it more and more deliberate, more and more and better. So, yeah, I love that. I'll kind of end with just kind of a little short laundry list of stuff that I just jotted down while watching it the fourth time, stuff that I loved and appreciated. Yeah,

Speaker 2 19:14
yeah, if

Phil Rice 19:14
you don't, in his first film that we reviewed, I mentioned one of these Easter egg things, where there was a Dan Rather talking about President George W. Bush. You remember that reference, and we, there were maybe there was something else in there that pointed to that era that might, I guess, if you were, if you knew how to study that stuff, we could probably zero in on what his age is, because that, that time period of Bush Gore, the early 2000s or late 90s, that was a very significant era for him, and there's a, there's another hint of that in this. Movie, and that is that banner that's hanging up in the main control room, Rumsfeld School of Third World something or other, right. Well, Donald Rumsfeld was the Secretary of State for President George W. Bush, and a very controversial figure, a figure reviled by the left. So, yeah. yeah, that's that's not an accident, that was there. I loved the classic 1980s gear up scene, when they all go into, I guess, kind of a locker room, and everyone's getting their wet.. I mean, it's.. we've seen that scene 100 times, because in every 80s action movie there was a gear up scene, and there's the, and even had 80s music, synth wave type music going on while they're doing it, just hysterical. The thing that stood out to me the most in that gear up scene was something again that shows up on the screen for less than a second, the close-up of it, but one of them has a pistol, which, or a revolver, excuse me, which, instead of the rotating chamber that would be in a revolver, it's a coil of copper wire, and then there's a small PCB board, the circuit board, like strapped to the top of the pistol, and then a little cable going to a mini LCD monitor on a pistol. What purpose it serves, I would have no idea, because there's no scope, so it's just silly and goofy. But that character, that clone, carries that pistol with them through the rest of the film. You never really get the close-up on it, like before, there is one shot that's very brief, where you can actually see the screen, but I can't make sense of what's on there. There's like one word I can't remember what the word is, a four letter word that begins with W. It doesn't really tie in, it doesn't make any sense, it's not. I didn't take it as, oh, that's a joke, that was just something that was on the screen, anyway. That was a funny hodgepodge of a weapon that I assume he somehow built in with the tools in Gary's Mod, and it's Gary's Mod is kind of known for that ability to stick objects to other objects and make these compound contraptions. So that was quite interesting. I loved when he's at the supply, I guess the supply guy getting, you know, and he's so he's asking for, he asks for a pack of cigarettes and a couple other things, and then he asks for a pack of Eugeo cards, which are, and then goes through them, and is disappointed that they're all the same ones. Now, I've never collected Pokémon or UGO, or anything like that, but I collected baseball cards when I was a kid, and you would buy them in little packs at the dime store, and open them up, and it had a stick of bubble gum in there that was flat and clearly not made for human consumption, but there would be a handful of baseball cards in there, and yeah, more often than not, it's a bunch of ones that you either already have or players that you don't care about, so it was very relatable for my experience. I assume that at some point he must have gotten into UGO or one of those card collecting games, so

Tracy Harwood 23:27
you're thinking he's our sort of age, Phil, are you? Is that I think so.

Phil Rice 23:30
I think so. Yeah, yeah, I would guess he's probably just a little younger than us, but not much. Yeah, interesting, because he's yeah, yeah, and I love that he's in infusing that into a production that is most likely going to be in front of an audience that's mostly not going to get those references because of their age.

Tracy Harwood 23:51
Yeah,

Phil Rice 23:51
I love that. It's just I'm going to be me. Period. That's that's that's the attitude. And I love that. Yeah, the control panels I loved in the nuclear plant area. Those images, I don't know where he pulled those from, but I suspect there are some photographs that have come out from from the early 80s, late 70s, where that are of the inside of Soviet nuclear plants, if you've ever seen the ins, the way that they, it doesn't look like the Western, the beautiful, like it's just this wonderfully artistic looking set of gages and switches and stuff, it's just a, just an amazing looking thing, if you've ever seen the HBO series Chernobyl, they, they spend some time inside one of those rooms, and they made it look really authentic, and it's just an extraordinary room of its time. I have a feeling he grabbed the images from something like that, from an, from a real nuclear. Plant, because they're exotic looking, and there's so many gages, you know, it's just beautiful. And again, this is just something that the camera just passes by in one scene in the movie, and yet he didn't just slap up a texture straight out of a video game, which usually is not nearly as detailed if we're talking Half Life era, their gages weren't nearly that detailed in the video game textures, so he brought something else in, I think, and it's just a nice little touch there that gives it a little bit more of a unique feel, you know, there's one shot in the film towards the end when you see the film crew, and I just love that. Just all of a sudden, from the point of view of one of the, or I guess this would have been from the point of view of the original, he's looking at this other clone, who is just has just pointed his pistol at another one and said, "You know, I needed that escape pod. And then you cut to behind him, and basically the whole, you see, just almost in shadow, but they're there. The whole, there's whole film crew, there's a director sitting in a chair looking at his little monitor, there's a guy with the sound mic holding it up, it never gets attention called to it. It's just there in a couple little shots, just hilarious little detail. So I loved that. And then finally, the Verizon service charge on the distress call was just wonderfully biting satire, that frankly, you don't have to be our age or Michael's age to get that, because that is timeless. That has always been the reputation of phone companies, but mobile phone companies, maybe most particularly, is that if they can charge you something extra, they're gonna.. I love that. Now, I.. if you notice on that the computer is is notifying him by voice of this Verizon service charge, but the computer garbles the word Verizon, so you don't actually ever hear it say that, and I'm not sure if that was just a happy accident or if he did that on purpose, so that Verizon, which is of course a real company, a very large company, couldn't come after him, but it still shows Verizon on the in the text, so I don't know, but it was, it was a strange little thing that it, it actually doesn't, the computer does not say Verizon, it, it gets glitched in the middle of the word, I don't know if that was on purpose or not, but it's a weird little detail, so yeah, I just,

Tracy Harwood 27:55
I'm gonna say that's on purpose,

Phil Rice 27:58
yeah, very well could be, yeah, so just I don't know what else to say. I just, I just love this. Every time I watch it, I see a little something new. And he just released another. He's releasing quite regularly, and he just released another very short one that is basically just a mock version of an ad for like a Chinese buffet restaurant, that's all, that's what it is, but it's using Gary's mod characters and animations, and his voices, and has his, it's the same style, totally different topic, but like, if I were to show that to you and didn't tell you who it was, you'd say that's kind of looks like Michael isn't, yeah, Michael is very vintage, so yeah, it's exciting. I wish that I knew a little more about him, but I also respect his privacy, so maybe we'll get to speak with him someday, because yeah, his work is pretty fascinating.

Tracy Harwood 29:01
Yeah, I love it, love it.

Damien Valentine 29:03
He's, he's actually released four videos since I saw this one and chose it. Wow,

Tracy Harwood 29:08
four, wow,

Damien Valentine 29:09
yeah. One of them, I haven't watched any of them, because I only just noticed that they're there. One of them, it's called Looking at My Machinima Sets, and it's a like a 33 minute long video, so I think behind the scenes kind of thing,

Phil Rice 29:22
it is. I watched that one. It's great. Okay,

Tracy Harwood 29:24
yeah, he's he's

Phil Rice 29:26
building this stuff out in Hammer, which is the level editor for for the Source Engine, and yeah, he gives a nice little little tour of this. This one, more than any of them that we've seen of his stuff, was clearly a custom set, you know, like this is nothing that's in any of the Half Life games at all, but yeah, he lifts the hood and shows, shows what he does for that, which is pretty great. I love the cinematography in this too, by the way. I don't think I mentioned anything about that, but there's a especially the special effects cinematographer. Free moments like some of those, there's one where the explosion is happening, and he just is just wonderful, kind of a hybrid vertigo shot, you know, where the, the, yes,

Phil Rice 30:10
oh, it's just, just delicious, and again, that's something that lasts what, one to one and a half seconds, but it would, that's not easy to execute, not, it's not like if Damian and I were trying to do that in iClone, we could really tweak it and get it right and adjust the settings or whatever, but there's no such tool like that in Gary's mod, so that was something that he had to execute in the game, I believe, without any scripting, like, because it doesn't have that, so yeah, it's good old-fashioned machinima for sure.

Tracy Harwood 30:46
Brilliant. No, I could wax slowly about it for ages. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's really.. I

Phil Rice 30:51
did too. I did,

Tracy Harwood 30:52
I guess. You know, I have a comment or a question, and what have you, and I don't know what you guys think about this, but where was it? Where would a creator using this, go, I mean, some of the comments on the channel to me indicated this wasn't a person our age, but a younger person, and if it's a younger person, where would you go with this stuff? I mean, apart from creating your own channel and just just streaming and maybe getting revenue from a streaming point of view. What do you do with it after that? Where do you, where do you take this as a form of creative work? Is it going to go into any of the avant-garde film festivals? No, it's not. Is it going to go into collections, you know, museum collections, and what have you, that are being put together of various types of machinima. No, it's not. Is it? Where is it going to go? Where is it going to.. is it going to sit on, you know, the archive, or you know what happens when it gets taken down by YouTube? Or I don't know. I'm kind of interested, because this is a guy clearly that has an awful lot of creative talent, where the platform for it is not really that obvious beyond where it sits right now, and I don't know where that leaves a guy with somebody you know, somebody with this kind of talent. Don't know what your thoughts are.

Phil Rice 32:20
I think that if it depends on if, if we're framing the question around where does the films go or where does the creator go,

Tracy Harwood 32:30
both the

Phil Rice 32:30
films, I don't know, you're right, like it's I asked the same question about my own work sometimes too, it's like what's what's long term, what's going to become of this, and I don't know the answer to that, but for if he is a relatively younger person, then the animation skills that he's developed with Gary's mod are not going to really translate well to other players, he's gonna have to relearn that, because it's a totally different process.

Tracy Harwood 33:00
Yeah,

Phil Rice 33:00
there will be principles of animation that, frankly, it looks like he already has at least some intuitive knowledge of, if not direct knowledge of, because that's that comes down to how he's presenting the final product, but how he gets there, yeah, that doesn't translate to to any of the major animation platforms at all, but I think learning one of those would be, I don't think he'd ever go back if he did learn one of those, because it's he would have so much more control over the outcome, and probably a lot less headache getting there than what he has to go through to get this, just from knowing what I know from working with video games generally, but Gary's mod specifically, it's more than one time I've, I've had an idea and thought maybe I'll use Gary's mod for that, and just it's such a different universe of how to, how to execute in there, it's really specialized, so but brought more broadly speaking, in terms of cinematic language, in terms of writing, in terms of performing with his voice, those skills all translate, you know, and this is this is definitely on those levels, it's definitely of the caliber of stuff that has been distributed more broadly, things like robot chicken, and you know those variety type things, and frankly everything that he shows here and executes here in terms of writing, storytelling, acting. comedic timing, he could do that with live action if he wanted to, you know. If he had the resources to, totally, it would totally work as a live action thing. You'd need some special effects to do some of the rag dolly stuff he does there, but there are people. You know, there's there's ways of doing that, but certainly down a route of traditional animation, he can totally pull this stuff off. It's just a different, that it's a different way of executing to get the animation to happen, but it can be done. Yeah, I mean, there's parts of it that would be challenging if he went, let's say, to iClone, iClone doesn't have any rag doll physics yet for character bodies. Unreal Engine does, and Blender does, but the Unreal Engine one is really difficult to work with. I've tried it's, it's, it's designed, Unreal Engines is designed to be optimal for gaming purposes, and so to try and use it in the context of, okay, this is a character in a story that's a much more complicated endeavor than just, hey, get this NPC to just fall down when they're, when they're hit, you know, that's that's just flip a switch, and if their body is rigged appropriately and has the appropriate rag doll modeling attached to it, then it will, it will do that right, but to get it to where it's, you know, in this case, it's not just rag doll, it's he's also there's physics being applied to the rag doll, it's getting ejected out of the tube, for example, so some of those things are harder to do in here than they would be in Gary's mod, but most of the stuff that he does he would have much more control over and be able to execute more cleanly, or more, he doesn't, maybe cleanly doesn't work with his style, right? So that may not be the right word, but definitely more controlled. Yeah, so no, I think the skill set that he's got could be used in other ways, but to actually take a Gary's mod made piece and take that to a larger audience or a long-term preserved audience. Yeah, it feels.. it feels like it's probably in the disposable category. Unfortunately,

Tracy Harwood 37:15
yeah,

Damien Valentine 37:17
I would say there's two sides of it. Let's say he were, if he did decide to take up iClone. I'm using iClone's example, because I'm very familiar with it. If he did learn how to use iClone, a lot of the principles about character animation and stuff are universal in a lot of other animation, like Gender and Unreal, and so on. And I think, because they're so widely used now, future animation platforms that we don't even know about yet will probably adopt those or be some kind of evolution of them, so if he were to learn iClone, that would help him in the future with whatever other software that will come sometime in the future, on the other hand, because iClone is so controlled, you might lose something that makes it work with Gary's mods, like if this exact video was made with iClone, would it be so funny, like there's the scene when the they're being catapulted out of the when the clones first appear and they kind of hit the wall, and they got the ragdoll physics. Even if he animated that by hand and had the exact same animation for the characters, but he did it by hand, would it still be as funny as knowing that that's just what Gary's mod does?

Tracy Harwood 38:36
It borrows a lot from Gary's mod, doesn't it? I mean, I think that game a lot of the I know it's not related to Garry's more, but, but, but it is in what is being portrayed. I think by taking the content away from the game, you lose a lot of sense of it. Actually,

Damien Valentine 38:59
you may learn things about iClone, or whatever platform, yeah, that you can exploit to make jokes out of, because they all have issues. We don't really focus on those, but there are things you can do in iClone where it goes wrong for one reason or another, and if you record that, you can have some fun with, like, a blooper reel or something. But this is what he would, he would find that and make a story out of it. I would imagine.

Tracy Harwood 39:24
Yeah, yeah, I

Phil Rice 39:25
can give you a couple of real-world examples of that. So I was filming a short that involved a character running across the screen, left to right, in front of a mirror, is for a, it's for, it was for a music video that I was making for, for an Al Weird Al type parody of a song. Yeah, but the theme of the video was Zork, basically, and so this character is running across the screen. Well, I didn't know how to deal with nav meshes properly yet, I was still learning that, and so I had the character set to run, but when it got to this point between the meshes, its foot just like just went wacky, it looked like he broke his ankle, and so to fix it in that video I put like a piece of pottery right where that footfall was to cover it, because otherwise it looked great, but then I took that animation scene and recontextualize it, and there was a video that I did last year for New Year's, called Rear View Mirror, which is about this guy who makes these New Year's resolutions to, as one does, right, to, okay, get up every morning, do some morning meditation, and go for a run, and then he goes for a run, and while in the middle of the run, his ankle crunches. That whole video came about because of that bug I encountered making another video, and I just reskinned everything and recontextualize it, and wrote a song for it, and everything. So, yeah, totally, the bugs can do that. The other one, real quick, that I'll mention is in the film that I just had in the festivals immersed, there's a scene where this ghostly figure is standing in front of the guy sitting in the chair, and this, this kind of, I don't know, it like wings and tendrils or tentacles or something, this thing lines rises up behind her, and then you get a side shot, and so this this woman is standing there, but there's like this weird, like Cthulhu-looking thing coming out of her, twitching and moving and stuff, so that was from hair to the hair to the empire. I was, I had imported a model that Damian had pointed me to of this imperial officer, and I was trying to, this was a clothed character, and I was bringing it in, and it's the first time I'd ever done anything like that to try and actually rig it up and have the, the.. I'm going to use the wrong term here, but there's basically a.. to get the skin of the character to behave properly, it has to do with attaching certain parts of the skin to the bones, there's a term for that, and I'm blanking on it, but it's the first time I'd ever done that, and so I'm, I'm in this mesh mode, doing all kinds of stuff with vertices and things like that, and then when I switch back to rendered mode, I had done something really wrong, because, like, this weird, weird contraption of a figure was there, and so I just saved it as a character creator project. I thought I'll do something with that someday.

Damien Valentine 43:17
It's funny, so I had the exact same experience, the first time I was doing that, and I think it was C 3p I brought in, and there's something about his arms that you twist them and they start going like that, you don't want them to, but you just stop it.

Phil Rice 43:35
I still don't fully understand what happened there, but it was one of those things where, okay, I'm gonna have to go back and start over on this, but I couldn't have made that myself if I tried. It was a definite, I screwed up somehow. Spent like an hour for an hour on it, and then that was the outcome. And so I just saved it, and I saved it for like a year, and then when I..

Tracy Harwood 44:00
and now it's prize winning,

Phil Rice 44:01
and now it's part of this, yeah, this prize winning film. So, yeah, Damien, you're absolutely right, every every platform has its its bugs to exploit, but you're also right, there's elements of happy accidents that happen in game engines that we don't really get that experience in a controlled platform, maybe the best end result for him would be something that would be a very long road to get to, and that is you have iClone involved, but you also latch on to a tuned game environment in Unreal Engine that has physics, that has these other things, and you're kind of at some point handing off control from the key framed elements of iClone to letting the game engine do its, I mean, that's that's like a life's work there. Why would anyone want to do sounds horrible? You might as well just make a game at that point. So,

Tracy Harwood 44:56
yes,

Phil Rice 44:58
yeah, so it's a, it's a real. A real conundrum,

Tracy Harwood 45:00
it is a conundrum. I was just wondering where you were going with it, but yeah,

Damien Valentine 45:04
I'll finish off my bit with iClone. Does have physics, and I've been playing around.. well, I haven't, so much more recently, because I didn't really figure out how it works. But earlier on, when I was learning iClone, I was playing around the physics, and I built the spaceship, and I wanted it to made out of several pieces, and I wanted an asteroid to hit it, and I wanted to see what would happen if there's the physics. So I've made the spaceship in, I got the asteroid, I made the asteroid come towards the spaceship, but what I didn't think about was how the individual components of the spaceship would interact when they will have physics enabled before the asteroid even touched them, and it just kind of went like that, and then flying off in all directions.

Phil Rice 45:51
Yeah, physics engines in iClone and in Blender two are, and in Unreal Engine, I've played with them all, trying to find an effect that I was looking for for a video a few months ago. Yeah, they're really finicky. If, if, if edges are overlapping at all and physics gets turned on, they can kind of explode. It's like they repel each other and all kinds of weird stuff. So, I'll be interested to see what the outcome is. If I kind of gave up on physics in iClone after playing with it for quite some time, because I just, I just couldn't get it to look right, but you know that doesn't mean that it can't look right, but I ended up porting it over and doing it in Blender and found a better result there, but that may not be practical for you, so I'm very, I'm very curious to see what you, you end up doing with that.

Damien Valentine 46:43
Okay. All right.

Phil Rice 46:44
Well, that is that is our coverage of extensive coverage of Michael is very vintage. If you have any thoughts for us, drop us a comment in the wherever you're watching this video or listening to us, or drop us an email at talk at completely machinima.com we'd love to hear what you think. So, on behalf of myself, Phil Rice, and Tracy Harwood, and Damian Valentine, we wish you a great day, and we'll see you next time.

Tracy Harwood 47:11
Bye.