Blog - Page 17 of 52 - Completely Machinima

Update (August 2023)

Tracy Harwood Blog August 14, 2023 Leave a reply

This week’s update is all about the virtual production pipeline and digital cultural history.

VP Pipeline

DaVinci Resolve 18.5 (and .1 fixes) has finally released, and Blackmagic Design have a comprehensive support centre you can make use of here (only for the pro version license holders). The version includes a bunch of new features for integrating AI genie content and collaboration. Here’s an overview, courtesty of MrAlexTech –

Unreal Engine has an ever-expanding and truly talented community. In this tut, Jonathan Winbush (our feature image this week) shares his approach to creating procedurally generated towns using PCG and blueprints inside UE and Cargo (Kitbash3D). Winbush has a wealth of material on his channel, all free, for anyone to pick up and work with, so there’s really no excuse not to learn Unreal Engine –

Boundless Entertainment has release a course for filmmaking, pre-viz and VFX. Its designed for taking beginners to more professional levels in 10 days… mmm, lets see! Its not free, like many of the YouTube tutorials, but for $180 it will undoubtedly suit some learning styles.

Finally, if you want to share your VP process and also learn from others, Nvidia has a new #StartToFinish challenge running til the end of August. Its focussed on those working with the Omniverse platform, with a chance to be showcased on their social media channels. You can find out more about it on their Discord server.

Digital Culture History

We were interested to see a post on the BBC’s website that reported on NoClip’s Danny O’Dwyer rescue of hundreds of hours worth video content of gaming history from landfill. The collection mostly pre-dates YouTube, and comprises of footage and media clips that were cut from being shown on TV or websites. You can see Danny talk about his gold strike here –

We look forward to seeing what Danny digs up as he goes through the material over the next 10 years or so.

Back to the Future, that classic 1980s trilogy we all love for a whole range of reasons, is BACK again. This time, its as a Musical at the Alephi Theatre in London’s West End and the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway, and in 2024, a North American tour. Its also fascinating to hear the rejection story of Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis’ original film script – rejected over 40 times before finally being signed. There are certainly many lessons in here for creatives today, not least the process of adapting film FX to theatre, for which MoveAI/Disguise for mocap and virtual production techniques are being employed –

A first in the UK, with a 5G screen test for a dual-location virtual production method for real-time performance capture –

S3 E89 Half Life 2: Daydream (August 2023)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes August 9, 2023 Leave a reply

A performance by a camera ham, shutterbug or just a plain histrionic narcissist? This week’s review discusses an older machinima that has highly contemporary themes in it: carry-on-regardless, daydreaming, whatever, so long as the virtual camera is rolling. The film is called Daydream (2009) set to the titular song by Lovin’ Spoonful, created by Mystfit and made Valve’s Half Life 2. Needless to say, we loved the humor but what makes this machinima interesting is that it was a scripted production created by running a path sequencer inside the game, harking back to the early days of how machinimas were made but so is reminiscent of how contemporary tools such as iClone and Unreal now work.

This week we also begin with Ricky talking about ultra-wide monitors, using it to play Elden Ring (a mod required) and the #SAGAFTRA strike; and, Phil gives an overview of his remastering project of the Machiniplex collection and his homage to the great Hugh Hancock, founder the #machinima movement, the upcoming showcase of Bloodspell and also his own response to some of the hoopla that Hugh created at the time of its release in 2006!

YouTube Version of this Episode

Show Notes & Links

Film, Daydream by Mystfit, released 6 January 2009

Gigabyte ultra-wide screen and Elden Ring mod, by Nexus Mods

Machiniplex Collection, remastered by Phil Rice – https://bitly/Machiniplex

Bloodspell trailer for Phil’s showcase channel –

S3 E88 Minecraft: Wither Storm War (July 2023)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes August 2, 2023 Leave a reply

This week’s film review focusses on a story made with building blocks and without voice acting… and yet, what a spectacular story! The game world is Minecraft of course, and the story is based on Telltale Games’ episodic release called Story Mode. Made by @SquaredMediaAnimations , we discuss the production values emcompassed within the film, why we think adding voice acting would have enhanced the film and a number of other things we nit-picked but conclude that its really no wonder Squared Media are one of the top machinima producers in Minecraft.

YouTube Version of This Episode

Links and Notes

Film, by Squared Media Animations, released 6 May 2023 –

Bloopers reel for the film –

Projects Update 2 (July 2023)

Tracy Harwood Blog July 31, 2023 Leave a reply

Our final post this month takes a look at more projects made in Unreal Engine. Once again, we are blown away by the incredible diversity of creative work made with this engine and the power it unleases among its ever growing community of users. It is not always cheap to do, but it can sometimes be free! Check these out.

Scaled Up

Planet Earth as an 80K digital recreation, designed for ‘orbital scenes and cinematic scenes of Earth, this model is available as a download in the Unreal Marketplace. It took creator Tuomas Hakala (aka MegaMammoth) two years to create and boy does it show. Its not a cheap asset to buy at £550+, but if this is something you want to include in high fidelity work, its surely worth it –

Leo Torres has re-created and upscaled vision of his beloved Skyrim Whiterun world. He has made some assumptions about what the world might scale to, stating that although its hard to tell just how big the population of the game might be, he is pretty sure it will exceed what was seen in the game! He’s used experience and fan facts to produce something that is ‘lore-scale’ – wonderful, even if its not playable –

Highlighted

Another Unreal short is DISTANCE by Machina Infinitum, a 3D fractal short made using a plugin the creator has built for UE5 called Essence. Their intention for using the tool is create realtime renders, typically for VR. Its on the Marketplace here at a very reasonable $40, and check out the video, released 17 Oct 2022, here –

Freedom!

We’ve been talking about no/low cost movie making since machinima.dot.one (1996 actually) so its great to see that mantra being picked up by others. In this case, Taiyaki Studios have made a short demo, called Airship DJ, in UE5 and another on how they made it. Check out the films here –

Film, released 21 July 2022 –

Explainer featuring Cory Williams, released 21 July 2022, here –

S3 Special: Machiniplex Intro

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes July 28, 2023 Leave a reply

In this episode, Phil introduces the Machiniplex [Remastered] Collection, a curated selection of machinimas from the early years. Machiniplex was a site created to host classic machinimas at the point that Machinima [dot] com began to assert its energies over the community as a corporate entity. The site was a community endeavour, with both Ricky and Phil playing a pivitol role in managing the project to preserve the original content the community had contributed to the early original Machinima website… until such time as it ran its course. In this ep, Phil and Ricky reminisce about the origins of Machiniplex and its contributors.

To celebrate the release of the curated collection, we have each selected a film we recall with particular fondness and discuss its significance. Phil has remastered each of the films using AI, not always a perfect process, so we also discuss his approach and techniques in bringing the original works up to 4K standard.

We encourage machinima fans everywhere to check out these films, not only were they brilliant in their day but in terms of storytelling, remain some of our favourite creative works against which we often draw comparisons when reviewing latest films.

YouTube Version of this Episode