Avant Garde

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S4 E149 Special: Season Finale 2024

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes September 27, 2024 1 Comment

In this ep, we reflect on the key trends in #machinima we’ve observed during Season 4 of the Completely Machinima podcast. We’d love to hear your thoughts on the year too, so do add comments below.

During the past year, we have reviewed over 22 hours of content, and presented detailed analysis of over 50 films on this channel. As vets of the original community practices (that’s pre YouTube and the M.com/Inc days), one of the great pleasures we take in this podcast is that we get to look at machinima and virtual production across the breadth of genres and engines, by creators from anywhere in the world, and reflect on where its come from, how its evolved and is developing.

This year, we have seen amazing quality films made in popular games such as Half-Life, World of Warcraft, Elden Ring, Star Citizen, Warhammer 40K and Team Fortress 2; have had the pleasure of exploring work made in entirely new games, like BeamNG and Deep Rock Galactic; and others made using engines in their base form such as Unreal, iClone and Source. We’ve also started to see #genAIs become integrated into processes and works. What a year for creatives and creativity!

Our main observation is that we have noted a resurgence of interest in machinima as a terms for the creative form, and we feel creators are at long last focussing on creative practices rather than their channel return. Of course its great when these things collide but it was never what machinima was about originally: it was the passion for great storytelling, using novel processes to achieve a desired outcome and to share that with a community of equally passionate others. Other observations are why we are not seeing as many traditional short stories as we used to…

We hope you enjoy this ep as much as we have making it.



YouTube Version of This Episode

Show Notes & Links

Key trends observed –

  • The highest quality of machinima we’ve ever seen

  • Unreal, by comparison, doesn’t actually really compare!

  • Experimentation

  • Meme’s

  • Distribution channels

  • Generative AIs

Our reviews, mentioned during discussion in order –

And, check out the bonus episode of our very own RickyAI –

S4 E140 This is one of the craziest videos I have ever made… (GTA5) (Aug 2024)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes July 31, 2024 Leave a reply

Crazy, it is certainly that – and more. If you enjoy slasher horror, we think you’ll love this – and its definitely not for U18s! The film is by Toaster and is a music video for Code Mistake, a deathcore metal spectacular by CORPSE and Bring Me the Horizon. We examine Toaster’s GTA5 machinima, reflect on its anime qualities, and conclude its significantly better than the official music video: Ricky discusses it in the context of Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man, but Phil, Tracy & Damien feel the inspiration is much closer to home.



YouTube Version of This Episode

Show Notes & Links

This is one of the craziest videos I have ever made in my life (gta5 machinima) by Toaster, released 5 July –

Official video directed and animated by Tristan Zammit, and released 8 July 2023 –

Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man –

S4 E101 Avant Garde: 9 by Claus-Dieter Schulz (Nov 2023)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes November 2, 2023 Leave a reply

In this episode, we review one of the first avant garde machinima pieces created by the community. The film is called 9, by German machinimator Claus-Dieter Schulz, has been restored by Phil and is re-presented on his Machiniplex Remastered channel. It is a notable example of modernist cinema which moves towards abstraction and it is clear to see that Claus-Dieter was inspired by the likes of Oskar Fischinger, Hans Richter and Stan Brakhage. There were very few in the early days of machinima that turned in this creative direction, where most creators were instead inspired to devise original stories inspired by popular films, TV series, commercials and products, so our discussion reflects on this point as well as the early reactions to the work we recall.



YouTube Version of this Episode

Show Notes and Links

Film link, released originally in 2009 –

Claus-Dieter’s blog here.

Original sound design with Martin Gurtner –

The only film that Oskar Fishinger ever made is on YT, called an Optical Poem, released originally in 1938. Link here –

Filmstudie by Hans Richter – a 1926 silent short which includes a musical score sampled from Darius Milhaud. Link here –

Clips of Stan Brakhage’s work, Mothlight 1963 –

Projects Update (Jan 2023)

Tracy Harwood Blog January 23, 2023 Leave a reply

This week, we have some more interesting project updates to share with you.

Recognition

We were thrilled to hear that Sam Crane’s GTA Online version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet has been recognized, being shortlisted for an award for innovation at the The Stage Awards 2023 – we love that they spelled Auto incorrectly too (Audio)! Awards are announced on 30 January and hopefully Sam (aka Rustic Mascara) will keep us posted on his Twitter feed during the event. All the best, Sam! You can still find the performance on YouTube, link here –

Unreal

Using Unreal Engine, this short is another example of how beautiful this toolset is. This short by The Blender Bender team (Thomas Thielemann and Alexander Korabelnikov), released 26 Sept 2022, was inspired by David Attenborough’s Our Planet series, and with an even more stark message than the original series –

Also using Unreal Engine, we were interested to see that Sava Zivkovic, who’s film Irradiation we reviewed back in October 2021, is working on a new project, this one called Beckoning. He’s also just been awarded an Epic Megagrant to support development of the project – well deserved for sure. Here’s the link to the trailer for the new project – must say, very much looking forward to seeing the finished work.

Not Unreal but seriously unreal, this is an ‘insane battle’ scene demonstrating the astonishing simulation capability of the Epic Battle Simulator 2 engine. This one, SPECIAL FORCES ARE LANDING ON THE ISLAND OCCUPIED BY SAURON, was released 5 November 2022, by the Battle Simulator Center team –

Virtual Production

A short film, called Goliath by DonBittersil (screencap is our featured image for this post), has showcased virtual production tools using Unreal Engine, having been shot at LA’s Orbital Virtual Studios. For those advancing from purely screen based production techniques, this is an interesting insight into scaled-up processes – check out the film and the ‘making of’ videos here –

You may remember we shared Jackson Wang’s beautifully choreographed music video called Cruel a few weeks back, well this is another one from his Magic Man album, using virtual production techniques. Its also a stunning example of his creative work and the usefulness of the VP process –

Avant Garde?

An interesting article appeared on MUBI’s website about a cutscene collective, called Total Refusal. This team of gamers do what machinima creators have done for 25+ years, that is, use the game for some other creative purpose. Its nice to see that MUBI is keeping up with the times of course, and they would certainly do well to follow our friends at the Milan Machinima Film Festival to keep up to date with this particular ‘Avant Garde’ scene format. In the meantime, this is an example of Total’s Refusal’s creative works, a trailer for Hardly Working (RDR2) –

Tracy Harwood and Ben Grussi’s Machinima Book, On Sale Now!