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-hosts, Damian Valentine.

Damien Valentine 01:11
Hello,

Phil Rice 01:13
Tracy Harwood.

Tracy Harwood 01:14
Hello,

Phil Rice 01:15
and Ricky Grove. I'm going to insert cricket sounds there. Ricky is off this week, but we hope he'll be rejoining us very shortly. So this week we are talking about a very, very little short film that Tracy picked out for us. Tracy, why don't you tell us about,

Tracy Harwood 01:41
yeah. Well, probably it's a good job. Ricky's not here, because we, I think we all know what his answer to this one might be. Actually, this is this is a GTA five longer short called Stolen by Dark Frame Films, which was released actually a couple of years ago, so it's a couple of years old. This is what attracted me to it, was the synopsis of it, because I thought it got some really cool ideas in it. I'll read this, share this bit with you, because this, this I like this, he says, with the Rebirth Project emerged a new technology that made, made possible, made it possible to transfer the human mind to new receiving devices. The idea gained popularity after the appearance of the term body donor, which allowed some minds to abandon their sick body for another that accepted the exchange. John Bell is a former soldier who travels across the country in search of his daughter's stolen body, hoping to return her consciousness to its rightful place. I love that as a teaser. I really did like it, but the bit that sort of made me think, oh, are we sure? Is it's 30 minutes long, and I have to say right out that it feels 30 minutes long. Have to say that, but I stuck with it, and yeah, I do think the ideas in it are really good. Yes, I think it could be shorter. Yes, I think you know the editing, you know, could be improved, but but the central premise of it and the ideas within it, I think quite cleverly done. Now, let me just say this, what's the production company again? Dark frame films is actually a guy called Kevin Fernandez, whose nickname is Shepherd 41 and he's done a couple of these kinds of films now, but I couldn't find anything after this period of time, so, so far as I can see, he's not done anything in the last couple of years, which, given how much effort has gone into this, I can well see that these longer projects just take too long to do, and maybe he's kind of moved on as a consequence. I couldn't really find anything too much out about him beyond the fact that this is the piece of work that he's done. Right, let me, let me tell you about the film. Then, so this is this is really a focus on this one central character, and all the, the action, including all the narrative pieces, all take place around this one character, which I think is kind of interesting, because this character does not actually say anything at all throughout the whole film. They're not, not as far as I could detect, anyway. It's just the action around him that the action explaining what he is doing. Thing and all the bits and pieces that are going on all position this this this character and that struck me right from the start as being a little bit John Wickish, I don't know where, where fundamentally what you're looking at is the focus on the impact this character has on those around him, perhaps not so much on the character himself, and that includes, I think, ultimately the daughter character that kind of comes into the story at the end of the plot. So I thought, what, what we've got here was a really interesting world-building approach with it, the I think the ideas immediately, particularly, you know, right at the beginning of it, immediately positions it in this kind of transhumanist sci-fi territory, you've got a, got a, you know, a clear set of references to a body which is no longer really a stable identity, but this kind of container and transferable platform, and that is where the title clearly comes from. It's kind of working on these two levels, though. One is that you know you've got a body that's been been stolen to house the consciousness of the daughter, and the idea of something being stolen as a sort of a self persona. I think I think that's that's the bit I was really intrigued by the Rebirth Project. I felt was kind of very cyberpunk. We've actually commented before on films that are using GTA to convey cyberpunk type themes, and I'm kind of intrigued by that.

Tracy Harwood 06:51
We've looked at one or two where the games have been melded and merged in what's being presented, but, but also one or two, where GTA is the standalone, and I'm, I'm guessing the reason for that is that cyberpunk itself perhaps doesn't have the breadth of environments that can be drawn on in the same way that GTA has. Now, you guys might expand on that a little bit, because I don't, I don't really know that for sure, but certainly what you see in this is both urban and rural settings being used, although I think it's mainly city-based, and yeah, I find that kind of what would you call it, extraneous kind of world building on a GTA type environment, I think that's really kind of fascinating. There's this kind of corporate military experimental technology culture that's being referred to, and I again I kind of tapped into that in relation to some of the real world debates, actually, that we're having around AI and kind of neural interfaces and digital identity, and what have you, life extension, and you know things like biometric ownership. Who owns what of your body these days is seemingly increasingly contested. Not that I think this film actually addresses any of those particularly well, but it certainly raises them, and then actually really only deals with them in a more sort of, you know, it presents the solution as being we've got to battle it out, we've got to fight it out. I think the action structure is driven by this, you know, sort of this recovery mission, this idea of, you know, there's a body that's been stolen, we've got to defeat those controlling it, or somehow we've got to control those exploiting the technology, and kind of restore the rightful consciousness in the, in the body, and I guess, therefore, what you're looking at is more of a revenge film, apart kind of rescue film, apart sort of cyberpunk kind of film. That John Wick thing definitely came through for me the more I kind of got into it. The highly kind of, there were elements of it that were for me quite highly choreographed. You got this kind of quite a lot of close combat and stylized revenge, and what have you, and then this ending, which was kind of intriguing. It's not really about who wins, but it's more about what makes a person themselves, and again, I thought that was a really interesting question, perhaps not particularly well dealt with, but certainly well raised through this whole film. To me, the ending felt a little bit like because, because, because of the length of this, because of the, you know, the fights. Seemed to just go on for an unnecessarily long period of time, but it almost felt to me like the creator actually changed their mind about what they wanted to achieve with it halfway through some of the scenes of this, and that never felt clearer than right at the end. It almost felt like they had a different ending plan for it, and then in the end did something else with that, so for me it was more, you know, it was more the ideas and some of the execution of it than it was the whole of a story, because it, it definitely went on too long. I thought the editing could have been sharpened, the narrative could have been clearer throughout. I'm not, I'm not suggesting, you know, increase the, the, you know, add voice acting, say, for the central character, because I thought the way that that was dealt with was, it was part of the fascination with it, really, but I really enjoyed the dark kind of electronic atmosphere of it. I like the kind of high impact sounds that we got from it. I love the contrast between the kind of ambient tension and the combat rhythm. It's just that it took too long to play out for me, yeah, that I suppose it led me to a set of thoughts after I sort of sat down and thought about it.

Tracy Harwood 11:31
This guy created a lot of his own mods when he was, when he was making this, and I think the tension that I felt in this might be because maybe this guy was trying to do too many things, which is show off the mod that he created in order to capture the content, as well as show off the content in order to demonstrate what the mod could do, and I, in the end, was was a you know, I felt there was a tension there about what was, what was being covered as the focus of what was being shown, so there you go, there's there's a few sets of thought, I'm not saying this is a bad film at all, because, because I liked it generally, especially the ideas of it, I thought there are some editing problems, I thought it's some sound problems too. You know, there's some bits that were noticeably louder than other parts of it, and some bits that just did not work in terms of the sounds matching what was going on on the on the screen of it, but I'm kind of being nitpicky here, really. I'm really more interested in what you guys thought about it, and you know whether you agree or disagree. Over to you,

Damien Valentine 12:49
right? So, Tracy, you're right about the cyberpunk thing. There are a lot of locations in Cyberpunk 2077 that would have worked perfectly for pretty much every single scene in this film, from the all the other stuff to going outside the city, that there's that, if in the game, there's actually more outside the city than there is in the city, except most of it's desert, but there are little tiny settlements around that you could explore, so those would be one of those who have been perfect for the raw outside bits, and I did notice some of the character models had been taken from that game and imported into GTA Five, like the smuggler character that he captures towards the beginning of the film, that is one of the NPC characters, you can gang members you can meet in cyberpunk, and some clothing options. I don't know if they lifted the whole character or just took bits of clothing and just took the, you know, the jacket and then put that on a GTA character or something like that. I'm not quite sure how that would work. So, there are cyberpunk elements in, I also noticed some of the corporate soldiers had the umbrella corporations, so those are taken from Resident Evil. I don't know which Resident Evil game in particular those are from, because I've not really played that many of them, but I recognized the logo, and so I know where that came from. So I think a lot of these custom bits that aren't in GTA have been taken from other games to fit that story. This film could easily have been made in Cyberpunk, except for one problem: is there's no cinematic camera mode, there's a photo mode.

Tracy Harwood 14:36
Yes,

Damien Valentine 14:38
but you can't really make a film with that, and I know we've seen that mod that has some kind of camera controls in it, but it still doesn't let you control the characters to this kind of degree that you would need to tell this story, so that's probably why he didn't make it with Cyberpunk, because just visually it looked impressive, all of the locations and the car models that. All in cyberpunk, it's just not being able to actually get them to do what you want and move the camera the way you'd want is the reason why it wasn't done, and which is a shame, because obviously GTA is a much older game than Cyberpunk, so if he'd made this in Cyberpunk, it would look a lot more visually stunning. I mean, this did look visually stunning, especially for a GTO five game, given its age now, but if it had been made for Cyberpunk, it would look even better. Unlike you, Tracy, I didn't feel like this is a long film. I started watching it, thinking, oh, this is going to take forever, and then it finished. Oh, that didn't.. I didn't realize half an hour had gone. I got really absorbed into it.

Tracy Harwood 15:41
Oh, good.

Damien Valentine 15:41
There's a lot of story elements that, again, would feel right at home in the Cyrupunk 2077 world, like the whole downloading the personality and swapping bodies and all of that kind of stuff. That's actually sort of one of the plot points of the game. What he's done is very different from the game, but just like the general idea of immortality and transferring consciousness and stuff, so there's that. I thought it was very cinematically done. I think he made excellent use of the cinematic tools that are in GTA Five, which again made me wish that cyberpunk had that. I know I keep going about cyberpunk, but it's just cyberpunk is a great game, and they fixed up all the launch issues, but it's still missing those kind of cinematic camera tools that I think would just.. if that was there, I think you'd see a huge amount of cyberpunk machinima. I know we've looked at some before, that's been really well done, but if those tools existed, there'd just be so much out there, because there's a lot in that world to make use of. But I keep going distract for that, and we should be talking about this film. I really enjoyed it. I liked the story. I did like the way that the main character didn't say anything. I felt like that suited his story, not to say anything, because he just didn't have anything to say. All that he had left was his actions and what he wants to do, even at the very end, and he's kind of resolved it to the best that he is able to do. It's not necessarily a happy ending, but it's a conclusion to his motivations. He still doesn't have anything to say, because what can you say? All the story is told to the other characters that he has interactions with, or you know, they talk to him, or they're talking to each other, but you know that that works for this. But it's also quite tricky, because we talked before about some films where they don't have a single word of dialog at all, and just how difficult that is. So this is kind of similar in that you can't explain the main character's perspective from his lips, but you still know as the story unfolds why he's doing what he's doing. Is you're just getting it from other people, and I think that was really well done. Tracy said that he hasn't really done anything else since, which is a shame, because I really liked this film, and it'd be nice to see more from this filmmaker. Not necessarily a sequel to this, because I don't think a sequel would work, but he's a very talented person, and it'd be nice to see more. There's one thing that let me down, which sure will be no surprise from anyone who's had my previous comments over the last couple of months, and I didn't know this until the very end of the credits. Is the voices rule AI generated, and I feel like, you know, the people out there who like to do voice acting, even just for fun, that you could approach to do this film, so I thought that's what he had done. I didn't realize they were AI-generated until the very end.

Tracy Harwood 18:49
Yeah,

Damien Valentine 18:50
but yes, that's it. I enjoyed the film. It's that one niggle thing that irritated me when I saw it in the credits, but yeah, I enjoyed this, and I can't choose my film as my favorite, so of the month, because so this is my favorite of the month.

Tracy Harwood 19:04
Oh,

Phil Rice 19:05
why? Why can't you?

Damien Valentine 19:08
Because it makes it sound like I picked this film. I hate all of yours.

Tracy Harwood 19:12
No, it doesn't.

Phil Rice 19:15
Yeah, the so that that's exactly why this wasn't made in cyberpunk is the lack of filmmaking tools, and what makes GTA five so spectacular isn't just having a cinematic camera in the game, it's the ability to recap, that's what the Rockstar editor really lets you do, that there's not any other other than GTA four, there's not other games that are doing that. I don't know why, but it records the sequence of events, and then you can go back afterwards and set the camera perfectly, however you want, and apply filters, and do all this stuff. He made full use of that here, um. A cinematography I loved in this, I liked the editing, but I think I may be a little more forgiving of the editing because I'm aware of some of the limitations of Rockstar Editor that would account for the short length of cuts generally like you only get to record a certain amount and then it moves to the next demo and if there's a lot of action then the demo gets shorter it's it's it's it's length is determined by the density of the activity going on in the video how many characters and cars and such are visible so you, you only really get to work with it generally speaking in these little clips that if it's a, if there's not much going on, the clip can run a minute, there's a lot going on, the clip can run 15 seconds, you know, so, and as he's capturing these scenes, assuming he used the Rockstar editor, I have to think that he did. So, there's that limitation, and then there's also the limitation of you have to keep the camera when you're recaming, you can't venture more than a certain fixed distance from the character that recorded the demo, it just stops you, right? So, those are tough confines to work in. I think all things considered, he did a really nice job on the edit camera-wise. The only thing that really just rubbed me wrong was the camera shake, because simply because it just felt like there was that it was just routine patterned, you know, that it was like a setting that had just been flipped on and forgotten about, and so every scene has the exact same camera shake, and I believe it was applied in post, not in Rockstar, because I noticed that the pattern of the shake sometimes would not be broken when there was a camera cut, meaning that he applied it across multiple clips, right. And okay, maybe it looked too stiff with just all straight shots, but go ahead and take a little time and make you know there's ways to tweak that to where it, the whole idea of camera shake is that it's supposed to emulate handheld, not that it's supposed to emulate a Leslie organ speaker or something, where it's just a sine wave, just constantly do it. So, just, just a thought, it takes a lot more work. I'm not gonna lie, it takes a lot more work to emulate real handheld, but if you're gonna do it, then that would be my recommendation. So, yeah, this, this movie is, and it's, it's story is reminiscent of here's the films that came to my mind as I kind of got a sense of the story, Taken with Liam Neeson, Man on Fire with Denzel Washington, John Wick definitely most of Steven Seagal's work in the 1980s Mel Gibson in my favorite role I've ever seen him play a movie called Payback. These are all a character who's had something taken away from them and they're out to get it back. There's different variations on it, of course, but that's that's the template, and that that story keeps getting retold, because it, there's something about it that really works, that draw, that resonates, that people enjoy watching. So,

Tracy Harwood 23:33
well,

Phil Rice 23:35
revenge, revenge too, yeah, and those different ones are like, sometimes it's more about the recovery of what's lost, and sometimes it's more about the revenge, and sometimes it's a mix of both. So, so I like silent films. I don't mean, you know, old, I mean I like Charlie Chaplin stuff, but that's not what I mean by silent films, right? I like films that let the, let the visuals do the storytelling, even for part of the film, you know? The opening, I don't know how many minutes it is. I want to say it's like 15 minutes of There Will Be Blood, Oscar-winning film Daniel Day Lewis opening 15 minutes, not a peep from nobody, and it's the most.. I can't take my eyes off the screen. It's the most gripping thing, you know. Our introduction to the villain in No Country for Old Men, another Oscar-winning film. Very, very, very little dialog. The visuals are just doing the storytelling on it. Robert Redford, All Is Lost. If you haven't seen that movie, go see it. Almost, almost no other characters in the movie either. He's a, he's a man that's in a boat lost at sea, and he's just trying to survive. And so, obviously, there's no one to talk to. Occasionally, he lets out a word, he. Were there, but not much, and of course, Redford is, you know, was was who he was, just master, and a more recent one that my wife and I just watched a few weeks ago with Mads Mickelson, it's called Arctic, that one is on either Netflix or Prime, I don't remember which, similar scenario, he crashes a plane in the Arctic, and he's alone, and has to figure out how to survive, and it is just brilliant, and there's hardly any talking at all in that, in that, and it's just wonderful. So, I have a real appreciation for that, and I love it in machinima as well. I tend to recommend it to machinima makers for a very practical reason, and that is it makes it instantly can make your film more internationally appetizing if language isn't the barrier, you know. So, there's obvious benefits to that. That being said, halfway through a 30 minute film, before we have any indication of why this person is doing what they're doing, that's just too long to wait. So I'm kind of Tracy, you said you'd feel like it's too long. Damian, you said it didn't feel too long. I'm kind of like in the middle. I don't think the film was too long for the story, but I think it felt too long because of some of the decisions about how the story was told, and the big one is that why you know we're watching for 15 minutes this man, that just because we've stuck with him, we assume that that's who we're supposed to follow and root for the protagonist, right, and we, we have to assume that this guy's important because the camera's just wherever he is, right, and he's going around committing acts of violence and murdering people and and collecting data for something, but and there are there are little bits of exposition, like, but they're so vague, they're they're more about the world building, what, what, what the situation is in the world, the opening text, same thing, it's it's setting up the world, but we don't know why he's doing what he's doing, and that bothered me. That makes it hard to latch on. Now I'm not saying that there should be some opening exposition dump at the beginning that tells you here's the guy, here's his mission, here's what he's doing. No, dangle that, you know, stretch that out, but give us something.

Phil Rice 27:39
He looks at a photo of his daughter, maybe we don't even have to know who it is, but he looks at a photo, or he has a quick flashback of memory of, and it doesn't have to be on the nose, it doesn't have to be detailed, but just something to give us indication of, okay, whatever it is he's doing, it has something to do with this thing, this person that he's after, he's looking for somebody we don't need to know anything else, but to know nothing, that's a big ask, I think, for a movie, to just, hey, let's just watch someone kick, kick asses, there's probably, you know, an appetite for that, but I just, I think that if you look at any of those stories that I referenced before, taken doesn't take very long into the movie for us to know why he's doing what he's doing, right? We don't know how it's going to turn out, but we know what he's after. Same thing for Man on Fire, same thing for any of Segal stuff, most of Segal's. If you've never watched Steven Seagal movie, pretty much every Steven Seagal movie in the 1980s is his family gets murdered, and then he's after who did it. That's it. It's like taken, but with, but no survivors, right? So, but at least it's an understandable thing, right. And there's been tons of clones of that, that story, Mel Gibson is Mel Gibson, and payback is basically John Wick, without any of the almost supernatural layer that John Wick seems to have, implicitly, you know, it's something to do with the somebody I don't know took a very small amount of money from him, or something, I can't even remember the premise, but it's, it's established, and this is what he's after, and then he has to go through all this to try and get that back, so, and with, with this film, I didn't know what this guy was doing, or why, and, and was at a point where I was dangerously close to just not caring, and just switching it off, right? That just okay. So, this is just an.. this is just a demo of someone murdering, you know? Who cares? You know, so that's.. that's the thing, is dangle a little bit of the why early on to give us something to go on to. Where, okay, now we know at least an atom's worth of this guy's motive that it's not just revenge, because this wasn't just revenge, in fact it wasn't even primarily revenge, this was a rescue of sorts, you know, so, and if anything, that the only it seems like that he was dealing more with guilt than with revenge, as it turns out, as the story ends up revealing. Right, so sound wise, the soundscape, the basics of it were great. The combat sound effects were extraordinary. There clearly a lot of attention put on those, but no reverb anywhere, hardly any ambient sounds to nothing that gives a sense of the room or space that he's in, and you know there should be a little bit of echo if you're in a big, a big space, and things like that I found were were lacking, and I, because there's so much score throughout this movie, I think it's pretty much there's musical score, I think pretty much every moment of the film, right. And so the tendency there is to think, well, I don't need ambient, that's my ambient, but no, in some places you still need it, unless the score is really loud and dominant, you need something there to give you a sense of the space, you know. There were there were moments where he'd put like a little thing, and it's like something clattering somewhere. I heard once, but that's not enough. It needs you, need more there for the immersion.

Phil Rice 31:30
The mix also is very mono, everything's right in the center, and that's normally that's not an awful thing, especially for YouTube, you don't know what sound system someone's using, or whatever, but there are moments in the film where there are sounds happening off camera that are relevant to what you're seeing on camera, and they were just panned right to the center, and so if you are watching with stereo speakers or with headphones, that's very confusing. The scene that I'm thinking of, in particular, is there's a, there's a point where there's a, there's a guy that's in, like, it looks like an automotive garage standing from a car, and you hear outside muffled sounds of shots and shouting, and whatever, and then it culminates with the door breaks open, and this guy gets this guy gets shot, it's just some guy, you know,

Damien Valentine 32:24
it's not

Phil Rice 32:25
the main character. Well, all those sounds that were happening, and the character even turns and looks to one side of the screen, so you know that's where it's coming from, and yet it's coming straight from the center,

Damien Valentine 32:38
the same

Phil Rice 32:38
thing as this in the same place that his footsteps are coming from, so panning is helpful, and you don't have to do it for everything, but when the general rule is, if the off-camera sound is relevant to what's happening on the screen, you should pan it directionally, as if it, you know, as if it was happening on screen, so to speak, you know, so that's just that's that's that's something that stuck out to me as an I'm a sound nerd, what am I going to say, you know, so also just with general sound effects selection, there was a couple missed opportunities, I feel like the the biggest one was there's two different characters that he takes down that end up falling into a molten vat of I assume it's like metal, right? It's essentially lava, human-made lava, right? And it just kind of sounds like a splash, and I feel like that, that should be a pretty, pretty violent and much more,

Damien Valentine 33:42
more sizzle, more sizzle.

Phil Rice 33:44
That's right. Yes, so there weren't a lot of those, but there were a couple like that. So, so let's talk about story and script. So, if you like this type of story, there's a game that's on Steam. It's called Replaced, made by made by an indie developer called Sad Cat Studios, just got released in the last month or two. Um, it's this type of story for sure. If you want more of this, that's a great opportunity for that. It's a beautiful game, very kind of a mix of retro modern graphics. It's a scroller, but it's gorgeous, and it's this type of story, so just a quick mention of that. The script on this is excellent. The story is great, and like once you get a picture of exactly what happened in the story, and there's this wonderful kind of a twist and reversal of that happens at the middle, in that middle, where the big exposition dump happens, right, where the, the, the daughter is interacting with the resurrected image of this other guy, and those two are having a conversation, while our protagonist sits there, right. You know, the scene I'm talking about.

Tracy Harwood 35:01
Yes,

Phil Rice 35:01
kind of the pivot, pivotal scene of the whole movie, and there's a big reveal there that is like, oh, this isn't quite what I thought, and the only problem with that is that we only just learned of the original what's going on, the original why of why, what exactly has happened, and then two minutes later we get the reversal, so we didn't even have time to kind of sit and get comfortable with our first supposition, because it was revealed too late, so again, if we'd had just a little indication, you know, think about if he'd, if he'd just looked at a photo, and okay, this is a guy pursuing his daughter, so we get 15 minutes of watching him kick ass while we're thinking about this is a father, you know, to rescue his daughter from someone who did something awful to them, and then we reach the midpoint and find out that he's not innocent in this, then it would have just been a real gut punch, you know, so anyway,

Tracy Harwood 36:00
yes, yes,

Phil Rice 36:01
yeah, so that central scene where the expedition finally happens was kind of a, at last we come up for some air, you know, again, I was hungry for a why earlier, and then that's where the AI voices really, really let down the side, you know, Damien and I aren't. We've talked about it many times, and he knows we're not on the same page on this, generally speaking, right? I'm kind of.. I waver. Damien's pretty.. he's settled on his belief, right, and I'm still kind of wavering, but in this case, boy, these just did not do the job, so it's not really about the principle of, for me, it wasn't about the principle of using AI. I say that with respect, I mean, you know that,

Damien Valentine 36:54
yeah,

Phil Rice 36:56
but in terms of, did it work? No, no, didn't work, didn't work at all. Is so flat, very plastic, and all I thought about as all of them were talking was we know people who would have done these roles, like I mean, it's that could have just turned this, taken it to a whole other level.

Tracy Harwood 37:19
Yes,

Phil Rice 37:20
like it just needed human-driven performance so bad, and it felt like such a crime that a really.. this is a really good script.

Tracy Harwood 37:31
Yeah,

Phil Rice 37:31
it's extremely well written, and the story is wonderful, and the twist in the middle is wonderful, and there's some things I would nudge, but still, it's good ideas, you know, and, and really well written, like the dialog is excellent. And then it just gets delivered with this robotic. If you didn't notice it was robotic, you'd at least notice it's amateurish, right? It just doesn't.. it's just not what people that we know could do, not to mention there's 1000s of people out there, you know, that are on Discord and in these communities that'll just voice act because they just love doing it. You don't have the

Damien Valentine 38:12
amateur voice actor community, there's so many of them who would love a script like this because it gives them a chance to really show what they can do.

Phil Rice 38:18
Yeah, this is real stuff, and it's good writing. It's like lines that would be a real pleasure to execute, you know. It feels like they're from real characters with real feelings and real situations, and yeah, and that would have just made the omission of any dialog, I think, any dialog at all from the main character. I think you're right about that, Tracy. For some reason, when you first said it, I thought, didn't he say a line or something here and there, and maybe he did, but he's mostly silent, right? If not completely silent

Tracy Harwood 38:51
out if he did,

Phil Rice 38:52
yeah, that would have made that so much more like a cool choice if there were other great actors there, and

Tracy Harwood 39:02
I agree.

Phil Rice 39:02
Okay, so this is deliberate. This isn't just because I couldn't find a good AI voice for him. This is on purpose. He's silent, completely silent, and we get to ruminate about why he's being so quiet, right? And our thoughts on that change as we learn more about his role in all this right, so yeah, as a father, that really really resonated with me, so and then in the third, what I'll call the third act of this movie, when the talking basically stops for quite some time, then I find I'm having a really hard time following what's going on at all, and I don't know if I'm just old or I was tired, but it just, I just really, what's what's happening now? I think I still know who that is, and who is this? What are you, these new.. what it really.. it got a little too sporadic, and maybe it did go on too long, and that's part of it, but it was just. Just a lot of fisticuffs and sword swings and running around here and there, and it was, it was harder to track, right? So I feel like sprinkling a little bit of dialog in that part of it wouldn't, wouldn't have been a bad idea, because again, there was the sense of, you know, once we get the main reveal in the middle of the movie, now to continue following this character, we need to, we need a new answer to why, why is he doing this, where's he going, what's this about now, you know, and, and I feel like it kind of got a little bit lost in, in all the action,

Tracy Harwood 40:41
yeah, me too.

Phil Rice 40:42
So,

Tracy Harwood 40:42
yeah, and

Phil Rice 40:43
you're right about the ending. I think you phrased it perfectly. I think you, I jotted it down here when you said it. The question basically, there was a question well raised but not as well answered, and I think that's that's really true about about the ending, that I got the general sense of what was going on, I appreciated that forgiveness wasn't instant and implicit. That's a mistake that movies make a lot. Hollywood baby movies make a lot for the sense of wrapping it up and making it a little happier, right? It'll be like, you know, the if it's a couple that they embrace and laugh and kiss, and you're like, dude, you just lost 12 of your friends, three of them were beheaded, what are you laughing about, you know? So there was no sense of that here, there was a sense of, okay, we've made it through this, and this is maybe a new beginning to something, but there's but what happened and what led to this still has a gravity and needs to be dealt with, and that's going to take time. I think that was a very mature aspect of the ending, but it just didn't quite feel as well tailored as that that meaty midsection of the story to me, so I liked the movie. Overall, this is one of those.. I think that we've run into this many times before, where the.. because there's a certain quality standard that's been met in some areas, it tends to bring out a little bit more criticism, but we do that because, because it's so good. So I hope if the director's listening to this, he, he gets the sense of that, that there's, there's really a lot to admire here, and for me, in particular, it's the writing that propels this is, is wonderful, just a wonderful, and it doesn't feel, even though the overall template of this type of story is indeed a template. This doesn't feel just derivative, you know. It doesn't somehow, which means that a new spin has been put to some of these tropes here, and I think that's, you know, that's that's a, that's a good thing, that's, that's what the creative world needs. So, I'll close with one last thing. This is kind of like a little, a little trophy we might hand out at the end of an award ceremony, like a special notice thing, and that is the, this is some machinima first, I think. This is the first what I'm going to call a gruesome cuisine art death that we've ever seen in a machinima movie, when someone becomes meat spray, basically in the blades of a helicopter. I've never seen that in machinima before,

Damien Valentine 43:40
no, and it

Phil Rice 43:42
was way more gruesome than than in Raiders of the Lost Ark, for sure. So it's

Damien Valentine 43:47
funny that was going through my mind when, when that death scene happened as well, was like,

Phil Rice 43:53
whoa. And I just watched Weapons last night, which, good grief, super, super, super, super gruesome,

Damien Valentine 44:02
yeah, yeah,

Phil Rice 44:02
it's a wonderful movie, but my goodness, way, way, way graphic, so yeah, it's anyway, yeah, great pick, Tracy.

Tracy Harwood 44:11
Well, I'm glad you, well, I'm glad you got some good points out of it, really. I was, I was on the edge with this one, because you know, like I said, I felt it had issues, but then I thought, you know, what I do really like what he's done with the story and the ideas. I think, you know, I'd love to see this guy come back and make some more stuff, perhaps with the benefit of our comments taken into consideration. But yeah, absolutely.

Phil Rice 44:38
Well, audience, what did you think? Drop us a comment wherever you're watching or listening to this, or drop us an email, talk at completely machinima.com My name is Phil Rice, and on behalf of my co-hosts, Tracy Harwood and Damian Valentine, and the invisible Ricky Grove, we will see you next time.

44:57
Cheerio.