In this episode, we focus our discussion on Facing the Wolf, a series of films by Iain Douglas and Mark Coverdale, submitted to the Milan Machinima Film Festival 2022. The film presents a series of provocative ideas which provoke Ricky, Phil, Tracy and Damien to have a deep discussion on the role of information, ambiguity and audience investment. What are your thoughts on the film series?
YouTube Version of this Episode
Show Notes and Links
Facing the Wolf, by Iain Douglas and Mark Coverdale, released 2021
1:35 Interview with Matteo Bittanti, Milan Machinima Film Festival
5:00 Ricky poses an interesting question: is machinima an animation style or a form of art that ideas can dominate, as opposed to feelings?
27:56 Discussion: for idea films, do you have to have more information than the film provides to appreciate the work? What is the role of ambiguity in filmmaking? How much time should audience invest in understanding a film?
In this episode, Ricky, Tracy, Phil and Damien review some of the best short movies we’ve seen made using machinima and virtual production techniques yet! Not all are hot off the press, but certainly films like The Lord Inquisitor – Prologue allude to why Unreal Engine has become such a key tool for creators today, as beautifully exemplified in extraordinary films we review this week, The Cloud Racer and Prazinburk Ridge. Person2184, made in Unreal Tournament 2004, was an altogether different approach to experiencing real-time content – originally intended to be experienced in-game and is an early example of the promise of what VR may yet become in future.
YouTube Version of this Episode
Show Notes and Links
0:10 Ricky introduces our new episode format – feedback welcome on the plans!
0:59 The Cloud Racer by Impossible Objects (UE5), released 15 August 2022 and Short of the Week, curated review by Jason Sondhi, released 10 August 2022
The Cloud Racer
21:16 The Lord Inquisitor – Prologue, by Warpgazer Animations (released 28 August 2016). See also this promotional video released in 2013, when it had already been in production for 2 years!
The Lord Inquisitor – Prologue
39:15 Person2184 (UT2004 machinima), by Friedrich Kirschner released 4 April 2008 (and the version we’re linking to uploaded by mdvhimself on 17 August 2022) and hear more about The Journey in our Unreal history episode by Ben Grussi, recently released. Addendum: Friedrich has confirmed the work was released in 2005 and premiered at the Machinima Film Festival that year.
person2184
This image is from the Machinima Europe Festival 2007, showing Friedrich Kirschner front left (striped jumper) among other machinima luminaries including Hugh Hancock (mid back), Paul Marino (right front), Alex Chan (next to Friedrich) and Tracy (centre front).
Friedrich Kirschner at Machinima Festival Europe 2007
In this episode, Ricky, Tracy, Phil and Damien review latest machinima and virtual production news items: contest updates, amazing new music videos made using Unreal Engine 5, how to turn MidJourney creations into 3D objects ready for animation, bringing in3D avatars from your phone into Reallusion’s Character Creator 4, Dreamwork’s Moonray becoming open source, Nvidia Omniverse 2022.1 update, Adobe Premiere Pro’s filmmakers guide, Lynchland in Second Life and more!
YouTube Version of this Episode
Show Notes and Links
0:27 Nvidia Omniverse Machinima Contest #madeinmachinima results, entries showreel, announcement of winners at SIGGRAPH and links to winners (via 80.lv) Simon Lavit and runners up Nicklas Lotz and Ted Saguindel
2:54 Tracy’s interview with John MacInnes on his latest Unreal Challenge contest: Mood Scene – the contest begins 1 Sept
9:36 Trailer for an upcoming fan film by Unreal Cinema, made in Unreal Engine 5: Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, Kotor: Episode 1 – The Spire, premiered 5 August 2022
Kotor: Episode 1 – The Spire
11:31 Dreamworks announces that its Moonray platform will become open source
16:22 19-20 September, remember the Nvidia GTC event is always worth following!
In this episode, Ben goes back to the archives and digs out the earliest days of Unreal…. Long before the launch of Unreal Engine, the first machinima productions were made in Unreal 1 as early as 1998. Ben then traces the lack lustre performance of Unreal machinima as a genre until such time as the Make Something Unreal Contest was launched in 2003 – then BANG!!!
YouTube Version of this Episode
Show Notes and Links
Unreal 1 Released – 22 May 1998
The Unreal engine added some interesting shorts to the Machinima community portfolio of things created under the engine. Unfortunately, things really did not go very well, the game’s AI and scripting systems caused some unexpected problems for machinima productions. Chief among them, the game struggled to reproduce a recorded scene since the AI would sometimes react differently and cause the movie to breakdown and crash the game or the movie would not play correctly – none of which was the fault of the film creator.
Machinima unfortunately didn’t make a big mark on this game, even with the release of the Unreal Movie Studio suite from UnFramed Productions. However, it was partly responsible for the creation of Unframed Productions after co-founder James ‘eVOLVE’ Hammer-Morton (years later, a professional voice actor) worked on Unreal films under the banner of Team Evolve. James teamed up with co-founder Hugh McDonald (Solo) to create UnFramed Productions which tried to salvage the Unreal machinima movement with Arcadia. The project was shelved, however, due to lack of staff.
Unreal Tournament 1 – 23 May 1999
Unreal Tournament was developed as a multiplayer heavy focused game, as was Quake 3 Arena. The game was very popular due to its highly fresh and fun gameplay but machinima development really didn’t happen with any great speed. In fact not many films were produced until a free movie-making tool developed by Internet Team Reactor4 came along, dubbed Real-Time Movie Studio or RTMS for short. RTMS enabled players to have better control in producing movies that were mostly geared to the action genre (why not, its action game isn’t it 😉 ). Unfortunately, there are no notable movies attached to this engine but there is one movie still under development which could change that.
Unreal Tournament 2003/2004
Date: 22 September 2003
Date: 16 March 2004
Unreal Tournament 2003 comes prepared for machinima enthusiasts, being prepacked with a new cut-scene producer and editor dubbed Matinee. Not much was produced with this new tool. Eric ‘Starfury’ Baktius was the first machinima film maker (outside of Epic Games) with his test film called Sucker. In a effort to stimulate the creation of new content using these tools, Unreal Tournament’s developer Epic Games launched a huge contest – the Make Something Unreal Contest aka MSUC -which was intended to promote development of user made content ranging from new models and levels to new gameplay genres. Epic also included a category for machinima productions under the title of Non-interactive Movie in the later years. The contest was originally launched for the 2003 edition of the game, since later years required mods/movies to be made in UT2004.
Friedrich Kirshner’s aka Feizi’s The Tournament, a runner-up in the contest, was also featured at the 2nd Annual Machinima Film Festival. UnFramed Productions created Lucky Man was also a runner-up. Other films that won were from previously unheard of creators such as EG_Intro from Hongman Leung and The Showdown by Accelerated Pictures.
screencap: The Journey
Key dates and Events
5 March 2000
Unreal Movie Studio also known as UMS is released by UnFramed Productions
20 July 2001
It is discovered that Steven Spielberg has used Unreal Tournament (Epic Games) for the set design of his movie AI (Artificial Intelligence)
20 July 2001
Epic releases details about its new Machinima tool for the upcoming Unreal Engine games called Matinee
7 October 2002
Starfury makes the First Unreal Tournament 2003 movie with Matinee called Sucker
3 February 2003
Unreal II: The Awakening released
4 March 2003
Ken ‘3dfilmmaker’ Thain reports that Epic is planning a contest that will include slots for machinima productions made in Unreal Tournament 2003
7 July 2003
Epic and NVIDA formally announce the $1,000,000 Make it Unreal Competition. One of the categories is Best Non-Interactive Movie with $50,000 prize for the winner. The Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences also co-coordinated the machinima portion of the contest
Make Something Unreal Contest 2004
16 October 2003
Epic Games releases a FREE version of it’s Unreal Engine for use with education ional and/or non-commercial projects – a massive opportunity for machinima creators and others
Winners of the Phase 2 – Real Time Movie- Category of the ‘Make Something Unreal Contest’ were announced
1st Place – Infection
2nd Place – EG_Intro Movie
3rd Place – The Showdown
4th Place – Unreal Films: Eternal Combat
Runners Up
WrongGame Matinee
Hollow Moon
The Tournament [Version 2]
LuckyMan
FlaTClaN_TheMovie
4 July 2004
The GameOn Video project is seeking Unreal 2004 Level Editors for a Machinima project to be nationally distributed by Volvo (The Automaker) https://archive.org/details/Game_On_Short_Film
14 September 2004
Atari and Epic Games’s Make Something Unreal Contest Phase 4 Submission window closes – it received the biggest Machinima submission to date with 14 entries!
14 October 2004
Epic Games released the $1,000,000 Make Something Unreal Contest
A short tidbit from HomeLAN Fed’s interview with the Unreal developers on the Make Something Unreal contest: “HomeLAN: on another subject, why was Journey picked as the Best Movie award winner? Steve Polge: Journey was unique and well done. It had a thoughtful story line, and unique art. It certainly didn’t look like it was running on the Unreal Engine.”
In this episode, Damien, Ricky and Tracy discuss four very different films. Damien reviews an interesting explainer on witches in The Folklore of Phasmophobia game, Ricky presents us with another of Jae Solina’s tutorials, this time on path tracing in Omniverse, Tracy selects Tiny Elden Ring – yep, its tiny! And Phil, absent due to sickness, ironically picked a satirical Zombie fest, which mixed Walking Dead ‘live action’ with machinima! The team then discuss that approach to creating films, highlighting some of the key challenges with some more fab examples of films that have used the techniques well.
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