This week, we highlight three excellent Unreal storytelling projects, and some other interesting storymaking development projects we think you’ll find just as intriguing.
Unreal Stories
Brave Creatures, released on 2 March, is one of the most inventive and magical stories made using Unreal Engine we’ve seen and it’s not been set on an alien planet full of freakish monsters and travellers in space suits. The creative team, Studio Pallanza (none other than Academy award-winning VFX artist, Adam Valdez) was awarded a Mega Grant to bring this project to life, and it has done a truly outstanding job of it. It will surely be the basis of a new children’s series? Here’s the link –
and if you want to hear Adam discuss the work, check out Jae Salina’s interview with him here –
Promise with Dr. (English version), released on 17 Feb by TT Studio, is another magical story, albeit with a completely different aesthetic. Great editing and storytelling, do check this out too –
Miika is an award-winning film by Ugandan director, Nsiimenta Shevon, released on 27 Feb. This is powerful and disturbing, as only tales of African conflict can be. Beautifully animated by Solomon Jagwe, here’s the link –
Storymaking in Other Ways
This is not a film or an animation, but a fascinating insight into the storymaking possibilities of interactive chatbots and animated robots. In this ‘show and tell’ presentation at SXSW 2023 by Disney Parks’ chair of Experiences and Products Josh D’Amaro, Tinker Bell (Peter Pan’s sidekick) is shown as an animated chatbot in a box and a roller-skating child-like robot is emoted using mocap. These are Disney’s ‘greeters’ of the future, embedded with storytelling capabilities through the design process. What is particularly interesting is that, at least for me, the usual uncanny valley effect had somehow disappeared – what do you think?
In our next selection, MidJourney has been used to conflate two very different yet seemingly complementary storyworlds into a series of bizarre images, one being Star Wars and the other being the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. This work, called Star Wars by MidJourney, by AI Visionary Art, was published on 18 Feb and somehow converts the grotesque and nonsensical creatures into a familiar canon (for some, Damien) –
And finally this week, we share an overview of an InWorld AI driven adventure game called Origins (our feature image for this post), animated using Unreal’s Metahuman characters and presented in the style of a film noir (or rather, a neo-noir). This is vaguely reminiscent of some of those very early games that inspired a lot of machinima creators back in the earliest days, Max Payne for those with long memories. InWorld AI has described its approach as the future of NPCs, but its also their DNA too. The chatbot and naturalistic style interface is a really interesting development for storymaking and storytelling and we’re definitely looking forward to seeing what creators do with this kind of creative platform in future. Check this out –
That’s it for this post, thanks for reading and do share with us anything you spot that you think we should be reviewing on the podcast.
This week, we highlight more creative talent than we can ever hope to include in our weekly film review discussions.
Interloper Ep 4 LIVE
You may recall we reviewed the Interloper series a couple of months ago, convincing Phil that this was ‘for real’! Well, maybe it is, as in this episode, which was streamed live on 22 March in a very interesting approach to storytelling on a ‘grand scale’, Anomidae continues the saga. We certainly concur with comments on the video that suggest this transcends into the paranormal. I’m sure it will enthrall just as much as the first episodes did –
Hired Steel Ep 3
The Hired Steel team are producing some outstanding work, and this is another episode from the TMC team that we first reviewed back in July last year, released on 10 Feb. These guys are going from strength to strength and what’s really great viewing is the way that character empathy is built through the storytelling. Nice work, do check it out –
Little Nightmares Rap Song
JT Music (formerly JT Machinima) released a video to ‘Hungry for Another One’ in SFM, working with Harry101UK, released on 21 Jan. This is a real treat both aurally and visually. These guys are top of the pops for machinima music vids. Enjoy –
Death Train [S2FM]
A great short by Vladislav Zharkov released on 27 May last year, this is actually a scaled back version of a project for which the creator originally had a much bigger vision. Its a great concept and one we would definitely encourage the creator to continue to develop. In the meantime, he’s focussing on the music –
SL The Tragedy
Finally this week, we present a wild west story not from the world of Red Dead Redemption but from Second Life. In this film/music video set to Lady Gaga’s 911, Godiva SL has created a fun and fast-paced story, released on 24 Jan (its also the feature image for this blog post). Its well edited, the horse and hounds even gallop to the beat of the music, and takes you on a real journey –
This week, tech updates cover Epic’s new tools for self-publishing, Omniverse’s USD rebrands, thoughts about the nascent metaverse and some throwbacks to good-old-fashioned machinima creative techniques.
Epic’s Games Store
Surely a move that will make rival Steam squirm, Epic announced on 9 March that it has launched new tools for self-publishing on the Games Store, all on the back of its 68M active monthly users. Publishers will receive 88% of the revenue through sales (compared to 70% on Steam). There are some interesting points raised in the T&Cs, such as the need for cross-playability (across all PC stores), achievement tracking for games, age rating requirements and an affiliate creator programme that enables publishers to share their takings with others – check out the T&Cs on their announcement here. The announcement intimates at much bigger things to come, relating to metaverse propositions, but its an interesting development for now. Here’s a walk through of the tools from their livestream about it –
Omniverse USD
Nvidia’s Omniverse Create and Omniverse View are rebranding, announced on 3 March. These will now be called, respectively, Omniverse USD Composer and Omniverse USD Presenter. The omnipresence of USD (Universal Scene Description) has become a driving force for 3D creative development in a very short space of time – just last August, Nvidia summarized its vision with embedding USD as the foundation of the metaverse for creatives (and also industrial teams, smart services providers and such), where content could be pushed across a vast array of different platforms. Less than a year later, workflows everywhere have evolved with it and USD is now a ubiquitous technology, much like the internet is the driving force for the web. What’s a little intriguing is why draw attention to it at this juncture, and what’s the point of editing archival videos to include the new names, like this one – recognition, reinforcement, repositioning or something new coming down the pipeline?
Blended
Beyond the hype, and clearly the practices as we’ve highlighted above, the metaverse is taking shape in interesting ways. An interesting article, published in VentureBeat on 4 March, highlights the lengths that media and entertainment companies such as Sony are going to in creating virtual worlds that transcend film, game and experiences, including in VR and theme parks. These are more than alignments of creative talent teams, but allude to the potential of vast new ecosystems for collaborators and partners. What’s interesting of course is that the inflection into such ecosystems can be from any creative medium (game, film or artwork presumably), with outputs that are going to be more visceral and consequently more immersive. Since toolsets such as USD facilitate the creation of these ecosystems, it will be interesting to see how indies get in on this action too – we’re already seeing a number of start-up enterprises pushing the boundaries, but there’s also scope for small studios to join in. Question is, where are they now?
Cinematics (the Old Way)
No Man’s Sky has been a machinina creators’ go-to for some time, and this short gives a great overview of how to create cinematics in the environment, by EvilDr.Porkchop (also our blog post feature image) –
Eve Online is another such environment, and now of course a [very] old one, but here’s a nice ‘how to’ for making epic looking machinimas, by WINGSPAN TT –
March was another astonishing month in the world of AI genies with the release of exponentially powerful updates (GPT4 released 14 March; Baidu released Ernie Bot on 16 March), new services and APIs. It is not surprising that by the end of the month, Musk-oil is being poured over the ‘troubling waters’ – will it work now the genie is out of the bottle? Its anyone’s guess and certainly it seems a bit of trickery is the only way to get it back into the bottle at this stage.
Rights
More importantly, and with immediate effect, the US Copyright Office issued a statement on 16 March in relation to the IP issues that have been hot on many lips for several months now: registrations pertaining to copyright are about the processes of human creativity, where the role of generative AI is simply seen as a toolset under current legal copyright registration guidance. Thus, for example, in the case of Zarya of the Dawn (refer our comments in the Feb 2023 Tech Update), whilst the graphic novel contains original concepts that are attributable to the author, the use of images generated by AI (in the case of Zarya, MidJourney) are not copyrightable. The statement also makes it clear that each copyright registration case will be viewed on its own merit which is surely going to make for a growing backlog of cases in the coming months. It requires detailed clarification of how generative AI is used by human creators in each copyright case to help with the evaluation processes.
The statement also highlights that an inquiry into copyright and generative AIs will be undertaken across agencies later in 2023, where it will seek general public and legal input to evaluate how the law should apply to the use of copyrighted works in “AI training and the resulting treatment of outputs”. Read the full statement here. So, for now at least, the main legal framework in the US remains one of human copyright, where it will be important to keep detailed notes about how creators generated (engineered) content from AIs, as well as adapted and used the outputs, irrespective of the tools used. This will no doubt be a very interesting debate to follow, quite possibly leading to new ways of classifying content generated by AIs… and through which some suggest AIs as autonomous entities with rights could become recognized. It is clear in the statement, for example, that the US Copyright Office recognizes that machines can create (and hallucinate).
The complex issues of the dataset creation and AI training processes will underpin much of the legal stances taken and a paper released at the beginning of Feb 2023 could become one of the defining pieces of research that undermines it all. The research extracted near exact copyrighted images of identified people from a diffusion model, suggesting that it can lead to privacy violations. See a review here and for the full paper go here.
In the meantime, more creative platforms used to showcase creative work are introducing tagging systems to help identify AI generated content – #NoAI, #CreatedWithAI. Sketchfab joined the list at the end of Feb with its update here, with updates relating to its own re-use of such content through its licensing system coming into effect on 23 March.
NVisionary
Nvidia’s progressive march with AI genies needs an AI to keep up with it! Here’s my attempt to review the last month of releases relevant to the world of machinima and virtual production.
In February, we highlighted ControlNet as a means to focus on specific aspects of image generation and this month, on 8 March, Nvidia released the opposite which takes the outline of an image and infills it, called Prismer. You can find the description and code on its NVlabs GitHub page here.
Alongside the portfolio of generative AI tools Nvidia has launched in recent months, with the advent of OpenAI’s GPT4 in March, Nvidia is expanding its tools for creating 3D content –
It is also providing an advanced means to search its already massive database of unclassified 3D objects, integrating with its previously launched Omniverse DeepSearch AI librarian –
It released its cloud-based Picasso generative AI service at GTC23 on 23 March, which is a means to create copyright cleared images, videos and 3D applications. A cloud service is of course a really great idea because who can afford to keep up with the graphics cards prices? The focus for this is enterprise level, however, which no doubt means its not targeting indies at this stage but then again, does it need to when indies are already using DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, MidJourney, etc. Here’s a link to the launch video and here is a link to the wait list –
Pro-seed-ural
A procedural content generator for creating alleyways has been released by Difffuse Studios in the Blender Marketplace, link here and see the video demo here –
We spotted a useful social thread that highlights how to create consistent characters in Midjourney, by Nick St Pierre, using seeds –
🌱 –seeds in Midjourney
What they are, why they're useful, where to find them, & when/how to use them 👇
and you can see the result of the approach in his example of an aging girl here –
Animation
JSFilmz created an interesting character animation using MidJourney5 (which released on 17 March) with advanced character detail features. This really shows its potential alongside animation toolsets such as Character Creator and Metahumans –
Runway’s Gen-2 text-to-video platform launched on 20 March, with higher fidelity and consistency in the outputs than its previous version (which was actually video-to-video output). Here’s a link to the sign-up and website, which includes an outline of the workflow. Here’s the demo –
Gen-2 is also our feature image for this blog post, illustrating the stylization process stage which looks great.
Wonder Dynamics launched on 9 March as a new tool for automating CG animations from characters that you can upload to its cloud service, giving creators the ability to tell stories without all the technical paraphenalia (mmm?). The toolset is being heralded as a means to democratize VFX and it is impressive to see that Aaron Sims Creative are providing some free assets to use with this and even more so to see none other than Steven Spielberg on the Advisory Board. Here’s the demo reel, although so far we’ve not found anyone that’s given it a full trial (its in closed beta at the moment) and shared their overview –
Finally for this month, we close this post with Disney’s Aaron Blaise and his video response to Corridor Crew’s use of generative AI to create a ‘new’ anime workflow, which we commented on last month here. We love his open-minded response to their approach. Check out the video here –
The second of our March projects updates, this week we have a selection of work made using AI and live action.
Do The Evolution by Ricardo Villavicencio
We kick this week’s projects off with one of the first to be released by Runway Studios, whom we discussed in our Tech Update 1 on AI generators earlier this month. Released on 2 March 2023, this film is described as a posthumanist concept and whilst it starts with what seems like an homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey, it certainly ends with a slightly different narrative, vaguely reminiscent of Planet of the Apes. Its surreal for sure, and what’s interesting is that its been created with AI – although its not exactly clear whether that actually extends to the story’s plot too. Check it out here, and note it is the second of a trilogy from this creator although they are not all on the channel –
The film is also our featured image for this week’s blog post.
HALO – A Hero’s Journey by Raw Mind Pictures
We loved this! Its not actually a machinima production at all but a live action, shot in a quarry and supported by a community of cosplayers. The film was released 19 December 2021 and the channel includes a great ‘making of’ film too – lots of fun for Halo lovers everywhere –
Three days and 50 people, an impressive endeavour, and here’s the making of –
Nitro Warriors: A Stop Motion Animated Film by Vanguard Pictures
Not machinima and not even recent, but we just loved this awesome stop-mo which not surprisingly took 6 months to film, released 26 Aug 2012, such great timing to the soundscape –
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