Damien Valentine 01:00
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Now for Something Completely Machinima. I'm your host today, Damien Valentine, and I'm joined by Tracy Harwood. Hello, Ricky Grove. Hello, and Phil.

Phil Rice 01:12
Howdy.

Damien Valentine 01:14
And of course, this week we're discussing a film, and it's your your choice, Phil. So, what have you found for

Phil Rice 01:21
us? Yeah, you know, a long time tradition in machinima, and sometimes we are happy when we see it, and sometimes we aren't. But it's it's to imitate an existing form, you know. So there's a lot of people who make commercials, or they'll imitate a scene from a movie or whatever, and this falls into the latter category. This is effectively a shot by shot homage to the intro to the television series Severance, which is an Apple TV series that I don't know. I don't know if the rest of you have seen it or not, I suspect maybe Rick has. Yeah, yeah. So this is a recreation of the beautifully done original intro to the show Severance, and they've recreated it. It says recreated in Portal, but that's not exactly true. It's using portal assets and look, but I don't think any of it was actually done in the game itself. The game's assets were brought into Unreal Engine, and then he used some Cinema 4D for some of the more more complicated stuff. I imagine some of the the fluid physics that you'll see in this are from that you know that's something that Cinema 4D can can really crank out. So anyway, I am a huge fan of the show, especially the first season. It's got this this strange surreal vibe to it. I don't even know how to classify the story. It's not really science fiction, but it kind of is. I guess that is really the closest thing it falls into. It's a very odd show and very mysterious. And the intro is just beautiful, and I love the piece of music that's used with the intro as well, so I had kind of a a great fondness for you know some shows. If you if you're watching several episodes in a row, you'll you'll skip the intro when you can, and this is a show that I never skip the intro on because it's just it's beautiful and actually has so good it carries quite a bit of symbolism up. what the show's about in a non-spoiler way, but it's it's all very directly tied to this universe, and you maybe don't understand that the first episode you watch, but the more you watch the show, you realize that there it's an artistic representation of the plot of the show. So this recreation was just really well done. I thought that that the the way that they integrated that flow of the original intro into the world of Portal and using all those those symbols from that was just really well done. Some of the strange morphing and liquid physics stuff that I mentioned is just eye popping, mainly because we sure don't see that in machinima hardly at all. Because you know, real time-that's not something that real time is is strong at even today. You know, so. But I just thought it was was wonderfully Polished, and just beautifully done. I mean, just I don't have any criticisms of it at all, unless you want to just criticize that. Well, it's just imitating something else. But I feel like that they added their own thing to it. It wasn't just making the exact same thing. It was an adaptation, if you will. So I'm curious what you guys thought of

Ricky Grove 05:02
it. I liked it a lot. I was very impressed with the the style and the. I know the the opening title sequence very well, and so they captured that. Obviously, they were they really loved that. They wanted to create it in a unique way. It was impressive, and and it's the kind of thing. It's the top end kind of machinima, but I have to say that it was very different from traditional machinima in the sense that it was almost too perfect and too polished. Which you know, it's hard to make an argument about something that's too good, right? You know, but I tend to prefer things that have a more handcrafted look to them. This could have been cranked out by a top-end Hollywood effects house, you know, and and and that's cool. That's great. I like it, and I'm glad it's part of the machinima ouvre. But I tend to prefer things that have a little bit more roughness to them, in a way. You know, we my pick this month I had forgotten was Todd Skullcamp's The Fixer, which Tracy pointed out that we reviewed two years ago, and I just saw her message too late, and so we're not doing it again. But I'd like to contrast that film with this one. There's a roughness to to the fixture that makes it charming, and this film, there was no charm in this film at all. It was just, just so professionally made. And again, you know, you can't make an argument for ex against excellence, but I tend to like the fixer because it has that person. It has that tiny flaws and and things that make it interesting, you know, but I enjoyed it a lot. I thought it was a great pick, and I'm glad you you shared it with us. If

Tracy Harwood 07:07
you want me to go next, Damian, do you want to?

Damien Valentine 07:09
Yeah, go go for it.

Tracy Harwood 07:11
Cool. Okay. Well, I've got quite a bit to say about this actually. Interestingly, because I didn't start once you know once you've got this film set up for us, Phil. I thought I'm going to start with having a look at the actual intro, the original sequence, so I know a bit more about what I'm looking at because I hadn't really followed the series. It's one of the things I've got lined up, but I've not really sat down and had a proper look at it. So I'm going to start talking about that, and then I'm going to draw some comparisons with it. So, in the original, the opening title sequence isn't really just a stylish set of credits. It tells you what the entire series is about before you've even met the characters, and that's unlike quite a lot of television series, of course, because this is packed with lots of hidden spoilers or references to specific kind of plot points. The sequence is actually more conceptual than it is factual. I think, as I understand it, it was designed by Oliver Latter, who's also known as Extra Weg, and he created it apparently only after reading the first episode and discussing the scenes with Ben Stiller. So it doesn't even illustrate the story. It's basically about the psychology of the story, and I think at the center of everything is this kind of idea of fractured identity. We see kind of multiple versions of this character mark appearing throughout the sequence, with these versions of him kind of multiplying and merging and disappearing, and it's a it's a visual way of expressing the central premise of what that shows about. That one person has effectively become two separate people. His, what did he say? Outy and his iny aren't simply different personalities. They're genuinely disconnected lives that kind of happen to occupy the same body. And the architecture, I think, is fascinating as well because there are, you know, there there are these kind of places in that environment, they kind of loop endlessly. They, you know, these are places that kind of lead to nowhere. There's rooms that kind of transform into other rooms, and it all behaves rather dreamlike rather than a kind of physical space. And and I think even before we see, you know, I mean, it's just endless corridors and and and what have you. I mean, the the I think the title sequence really is sort of telling us that this is a world where normal logic is just no longer going to apply, and then you've got this kind of character himself throughout the sequence. He's kind of. Doing odd stuff, he's kind of floating or falling or being carried or dragged around, and he barely appears to be moving under his own control. And that's really subtle way I think of communicating something pretty fundamental that this is about, which is that he doesn't have agency. Interesting, he's kind of trapped inside systems that can't really be fully understood, and I think that's important when we come to the machinima-like version of it, which I'll come on to in a minute. There's one image I think that really stands out, which is that kind of black, gooey liquid that keeps appearing. It's never really fully explained directly what it is, but I, I think it, I think it works really well. I think you can read it as kind of maybe grief or suppressed memories or maybe even anxiety or I don't know. There's some kind of influence happening through this character's life that this portrays, and it kind of leaves you asking: Is it blood? Is it death? Is it oil? Is it darkness? Is it fear or doom? I don't know. And and you know, from what I understand, you only know when you watch these episodes of it, and that's why I think it's really intriguing and works so well as a as a a trailer for it, really, or the or an introduction for it, because I think what it's doing is it's procedurally presenting you with this separation of memory and emotion, but yet they don't have anywhere to go, so it's kind of there's a symbolicness about about how they kind of seep out somehow.

Tracy Harwood 11:50
I love the imagery within it of this guy sort of being asleep, and the and the sort of tiny versions of himself continuing to work, and there's also kind of this broader critique within it of this sort of influence of corporate culture, which again I think is an important piece. In in effect, what it's saying is Mark's the furniture. He's not what it's about. He's something else. He's he's become the office equipment within it, he's reduced to another object in the in the workplace by this corporation, and it reflects, I think, the way that the corporation treats people, not so much as individuals, but as a kind of interchangeable components in a much larger machine, and I think that's ultimately what makes the sequence so unsettling. It's not not behaving quite as it should. I mean, gravity is changing, people are shrinking, bodies are folding in impossible ways. The animation is really what what you expect to see when you're looking at the uncanny valley type stuff. Everything looks familiar, but nothing ever is, and it creates exactly the same feeling with the characters throughout the series, as I understand it. But you know there is something wrong, and you can't kind of figure out why. So you know it's preparing for you for something kind of you know deep and emotional, and you just kind of you're you're compelled to watch it because of because of that sort of bizarre opening sequence, right? Now to the video that we're we're just talking about here, the the you know Phil's pick this version of it that that our creator here has generated, inspired, and through the portal engine. Really, now on the face of it, I think what you're looking at is a recreation, and as you say, you know, probably scene by scene, it looks pretty close to what what has been portrayed in the original trailer, but I think this is doing something else. It's I think it's reinterpreting it through the language of another medium, and I think it's really cleverly done. Actually, notwithstanding, you know, it's it's it's slick because I think it is, and as I've got a bit to say about the creator as well, which I'll probably reflect on that point. So, if we think about what these recreations are normally, you know, they're normally done for visual accuracy. You can kind of reproduce the same shots, the same kind of camera movements, the same composition. And this film certainly captures much of that sort of what I'd call visual rhythm. But what makes this interesting is that the meaning changes because it's now operating through the mechanics of portal. In portal, the metaphor used in the original changes completely. Instead of the subconscious becoming the landscape, the landscape itself is becoming. The machine, the character isn't imagining impossible architecture. They're physically trapped inside it. I know it's not inside the game engine as such, but it's inside the, you know, it's trying to portray the ethos of the portal game. Oh, excuse me. I think that's a really elegant shift because Portal has always been a game about systems. Every room is an experiment. Every movement is measured. Every puzzle has already been designed by somebody else, and every apparent choice has been anticipated. So where Severance visualizes kind of psychological control. Portal visualizes systemic control. The machine isn't represented by gears or factories. The machine is the environment itself. But excuse me. One of my favorite substitutions comes right at the beginning. That dustbin that's replaced by the companion cube, which has kind of got its own symbolic history within gaming culture as an object that the institution encourages you to become kind of emotionally attached to, even though it's ultimately just another component in an experiment. So instead of saying that the work consumes us, the film begins to ask how institutions manufacture our emotional investment in the systems that control us, and I think that's much more of a contemporary question, quite a bit cleverer than the original. In fact, the portals themselves are where the recreation come becomes kind of particularly, you know, metaphorically just in this kind of context. I think in the game that they are simply mechanics; they're tools for solving puzzles. But but as soon as they're placed into this sort of cinematic context, they are the metaphor.

Tracy Harwood 16:55
Every time the character passes through a portal, we're not just moving between locations. We're we're moving between different states of reality. So you know the way that he drops through portals, the way that he moves through the space, the way that he's consumed by the by the space. It it's really cleverly done. In fact, what you're looking at is sort of space folding in on itself, and and I think what you're looking at is distance disappearing, sort of cause and effect things become really unstable. It's a different type of uncanny to the original, and I think it echoes the relationship between the inny and the outy of severance. But instead, what you've got is memory being divided. It's reality itself that's reorganized. You've got identity becoming something that's expressed through this space, and that's something that cinema couldn't really have done before games introduced mechanics like this. That recreation also captures one of the strongest ideas from the original kind of sequence, which is repetition. We repeatedly see multiple versions of the protagonist in Severance. Those duplicates represent fractured aspects of his life. Though here they are quite different. He means something different, but it's continual repetition, which you can only get in a game-like environment. I think they feel like test subjects, and they're not even represented as Mark. You know, they instead of it being him as it is in the original, it becomes Chell, who's that you know that that lead girl character in in the portal game, where the person is you know she's just another data point in the aperture science experiment, and that architecture that you see even contributes to that kind of feeling. Portals, test chambers are these kind of clean, clinical, kind of completely empty bits. The you know the walls don't just surround the character; they kind of regulate what they can do. Everything kind of has that purpose, and the environment itself becomes kind of an active participant in the story. And I think that's one of the biggest differences between these two pieces. You've got these offices in the original that are kind of bureaucratic, but in the in the portal version, you've got Aperture Science, which is far more procedural. You've got Lumen controlling people through secrecy, and you've got Aperture controlling people through systems. And even Glados represents a different kind of institutional authority, which I think is really, you know, it's really cleverly done. You know why pick a game? Why pick Portal if that's not what your intention is? I think I think this is a you know really deliberate and delicious choice that this this guy's made, and I think it what it what it's what it demonstrates. I think is that games are not just places where you know stories can. Be told they're they're actual conceptual systems, and I think having appropriated portals mechanics or the sense of what they are, the filmmaker has created a really clever visual language for exploring bureaucracy and identity and labor and kind of this idea of institutional power, and then to the guy himself, Brian Kissing himself. I think to to your point, Ricky, his background really explains, you know, why why he's come from where he has and why this is so good. He's an Emmy award winning editor and post production supervisor, so he's going to come at this as a filmmaker first and a gamer second, and you can see that I think in the precision of the editing, the framing, the pacing, exactly the way shot flows into the next. He's just not simply capturing gameplay; he's kind of constructing cinema. I think what I find particularly interesting is that he doesn't treat games as cheap film sets in that in that in that way that a machinima creator, you know, who starts with the with the games does. He he kind of treats them as a sort of expressive medium in their own visual language, rather. And I think therefore what he's doing is kind of rather asking them the question of how can I kind of recreate this shot? He's asking, how can this game reinterpret the original idea? And I think that's a really important distinction that we're seeing come through. In actual fact, I think it's in a couple of selections this month. I think it's it's obviously in your your pick, even though we've reviewed it in the past.

Tracy Harwood 21:44
It was in the fixer. It's certainly in my pick, and it's also in Damien's pick. There's evidence of that trail trail of thought. I think that goes through all of our picks this month. Ironically, again. So yeah, that's my analysis of it. I had to go to the original to have a proper think about it, but I really enjoyed going through it and thinking about it in a in the way that I do. Wow, you

Ricky Grove 22:11
always you always come up with an amazing insights into the stuff. I feel kind of stupid sometimes for my comments. It's pretty. Yeah, it was really pretty. And Damien, I've got to follow that now. Yeah, sorry, Damien. That's what I said. Good luck coming up with anything that's insightful there.

Damien Valentine 22:31
Well, actually, the first few things Tracy said of what I was going to say. First of all, I have not actually seen the show yet. It's on my list of things to watch, but I just haven't got round to it yet. So I watched this version first, and I thought, you know what, I should probably go and watch the original opening sequence to get an idea of how it compares. So I looked it up on YouTube, I found a copy, and I watched. I thought, you know what, this is this is a shot for shot recreation, but they've put the portal spin on it, so it's not like they're trying to recreate the exact characters from the show. They're putting the portal spin on it, and from what I know of the show, that is a very appropriate portal is very appropriate choice for that because they've got some similar kind of similar kind of feel to it, which when I watch the show itself, I'll get a big show about that or not. I was very impressed by the way it was done, especially like those liquid effects. That that's something I feel quite envious of.

Ricky Grove 23:38
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Damien Valentine 23:40
Yeah, I really liked it, and it has bumped up severance a little bit on my watch list. So you know, that's obviously a good. You'd like it. You'd like

Ricky Grove 23:51
it. I mean,

Phil Rice 23:51
you'll both you'll both enjoy it. You and Tracy both. Yeah. Yeah. The the loop thing is very interesting, Tracy, because yeah, first of all, that is a central expression of the theme of the show in various ways, but the entire-if you notice-the entire video itself is a loop.

Speaker 1 24:11
He's

Phil Rice 24:12
the character starts in bed and ends in bed.

Tracy Harwood 24:14
Yeah,

Phil Rice 24:15
you know, so it's a day, the or a night, depending on how you look at it. Maybe both. The music is full of looping harmonic sequences, especially that descending chord pattern that feels like it's always falling. You know, it's just yeah, yeah, wonderfully, wonderfully composed. So anyway, yeah, I'm I'm glad you enjoyed it, and yes, definitely bump it up on your watch list. You too, I think you'll so so falling,

Ricky Grove 24:42
falling could be an interesting metaphor because Alice falls down the hole,

Tracy Harwood 24:47
yeah,

Ricky Grove 24:48
into sure craziness, you know. So that that that thing of your falling, that's an interesting metaphor. I also like your distinction, Tracy, between a gamer. Based machinima and filmmaker-based machinima. I mean, I'm really happy that machinima has broadened its audience, but I still have an old flame in my heart for the for the gamers who who work so hard to try to overcome problems. I mean, Unreal Engine is almost unfair in the amount of ability it gives you to do things and creative facts. There's there's a certain ingenuity I find in Todd Stullcamp's ability to take the the structure of the gameplay in Sims 2 and actually use it to to tell a stylish story, and and and I would argue that Todd was able to combine the instincts of a game maker game player with filmmaker chops. So he's that's one reason why I think he's an unusual artist because he combines those two, but I do have a soft spot in my heart for that type of of machinery. Probably the reason why I'm still browsing in the archive.org. I have to

Damien Valentine 26:13
admit, as much as I like using iClone, there are times when I'm using it and I'm thinking, you know, sometimes this is these kind of shots are really fun to make in a game and trying to figure out how to get the same thing, but you know the character animation is extremely limited, and you're kind of limited by the maps or the character models that are available to you, and you know stuff like that. So you know there are times I really miss that, but yeah, I don't think this is somebody

Tracy Harwood 26:40
though that that didn't know Portal. I don't know. He

Damien Valentine 26:44
played the game and knows. Oh, I

Tracy Harwood 26:46
think he knew a lot about the game. I think he stood very, very much. I think the combination, you know, how he's brought that world to this other world. I I think he's. I think that's that's massively talented. That's not quite the same as a machinima, really. Not in, not in the same. It's not the same constraints that he's working with. It's the same kind of. It's kind of combination of philosophical thinking. I think. Yeah, he

Phil Rice 27:14
took he took the he took the assets out of the constrained environment and put them into a completely unconstrained environment, and yeah, it's a different set of possibilities. It is interesting, though, because because filmmaker machinima versus game player machinima, it's not just a different process. It's a completely different starting point.

Tracy Harwood 27:33
Yeah,

Phil Rice 27:34
it's a completely different mindset, and those those those limitations that you're talking about, Damien. I mean, that used to be just well. That's just the way it

Speaker 2 27:44
is.

Phil Rice 27:44
Yeah. You know. So if you were if you were working within whatever game and had to make it, those limits were there. And did they inhibit creativity? I mean, I guess, but but only in terms of just defining boundaries. That's not really limiting things. That's just not an your your canvas, right? So

Ricky Grove 28:05
right. When I was in theater at an undergraduate, we were I was at Arizona State University, and there was an old WPA theater that had no fly system, meaning that the roof above the stage was only a couple feet above the stage. Normally, you have a theater has a big space above the stage. That way, they can set up lights that can throw long things, and they can have scenery that comes down and goes up. So, with no fly system, everything had to be done from the side stages. Everything had to be moved in and out. So this guy, this Douglas Scott Goheen, with designer, and it was always a treat to see how he overcame that obstacle in every production. And when I ask him about it, he says, "Oh, I just find it a challenge to creativity.

Speaker 2 29:02
Yeah,

Ricky Grove 29:02
it's the limitation is not a limitation to me. It's an ability to come up. Stimulus. Yeah, yeah,

Phil Rice 29:09
yeah.

Ricky Grove 29:10
So that was the point I wanted to make.

Tracy Harwood 29:12
Yeah, yeah. Well, of

Phil Rice 29:15
all the things that that getting started in making machinima with games has has taught me that's the thing I'm most happy about is that it did teach me to look at. I still have limitations to what I could do now, right? And but I, but again, it's it's in that environment. You you do you have a different attitude towards those limits, and you you work within them or around them as you can, but you

Ricky Grove 29:43
yeah

Phil Rice 29:44
you you find out very quickly that just trying to obliterate them is a waste of time, you know. So yeah, I I what I had no idea this film would would spur a discussion on that. It's very. I'm very glad, and I'm glad you guys liked it. Yeah,

Ricky Grove 30:03
very much so. It's

Damien Valentine 30:04
not just creativity, though, because I found that you know when you're making machinima with a game, you have to kind of think outside the box of how you're going to get the results you want. It forces you, you know, like we've just been discussing. But once you learn that for making machinima film, you start finding yourself applying it to things that are anything to do with cinema or filmmaking, but you know, if you have a problem in life or whatever it could be, it forces you to think. Well, what unconventional solutions might

Phil Rice 30:33
absolutely the skill totally translates. Yeah,

Damien Valentine 30:36
yeah, and you can you'll come up with something, and everyone else will look at you and give this. What is he thinking? And then you apply it, and then it works, and then you really surprise people who would never would have thought, you know, like that because they're just not used to that way of thinking. Yeah. Yeah. Good point. Yeah.

Tracy Harwood 30:55
Brilliant. Loved it.

Damien Valentine 30:58
All right. Well, I think that was a fascinating discussion about machinima and creativity and thinking, so yes, Phil, that's an excellent choice, and I really enjoyed it. Thank you. I think we all did really. So yeah, for our listeners and viewers, if you have anything to say about this film or severance or any of the other things we've been discussed, send us an email at talk@completewithshira.com, and we do appreciate all your feedback. And that's about it for this week from myself, Tracy, Ricky, and Phil. We'll see you next time. Bye.

Tracy Harwood 31:32
Bye bye. Bye.