DaVinci Resolve Archives - Completely Machinima

S6 E225 Machinima News Omnibus (May 2026)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes May 6, 2026 Leave a reply

In this episode of And Now For Something Completely Machinima, Phil Rice, Tracy Harwood, and Damien Valentine dive into the latest news in machinima, virtual production, AI creative tools, game cinematics, and real-time animation.

They discuss the explosive hype around Kane Parsons’ The Backrooms movie, new Starfield expansions and what they could mean for Starfield machinima, the release of Fortnite Star Wars assets for fan-made experiences, and useful production updates including DaVinci Resolve optimisation, Headshot 3, free mocap tools, and local AI voice cloning.

The conversation also takes a deeper turn with a thoughtful debate on AI video generation, Sora, creative AI fatigue, public sentiment toward AI tools, and where AI in filmmaking and digital storytelling may be heading next.

If you’re interested in machinima filmmaking, AI tools for creators, virtual production workflows, Star Wars fan creation, The Backrooms, Starfield, Fortnite UEFN, or digital storytelling, this episode is packed with insights.

Topics covered:

Kane Parsons and The Backrooms trailer reaction

Starfield Free Lanes and Terra Nomada

Fortnite Star Wars creator tools

DaVinci Resolve performance tips

Headshot 3 for Character Creator

Free motion capture and text-to-mocap tools

Local AI voice cloning

Sora shutdown and shifting attitudes toward AI

Project Hail Mary and practical effects vs AI hype

Audio Only Version of this Episode

YouTube Version of this Episode

Show Notes & Links

Backrooms cinema release, and trailer –

Starfield Announcement

Free Lanes and Terran Armada official trailer –

Developer deep dive –

Fortnite / Star Wars – create your galaxy

New tools now available in Fortnite for developers looking to create Star Wars content –

This is HUGE for Star Wars Games! Check out this commentary –

Fortnite / GTA inspired sandbox game

Grand Heist City game launching, check out the story here.

DaVinci Resolve for Machinima

How to optimise the settings, great tutorial video here by Andrew Farmer –

Reallusion’s Character Creator Update

Headshot 3 for CC5 pre-launch offer here –

CC5 & Headshot & Blender – example of a process for creating your own character –

CC and Houdini workflow –

AI Tools

Freemocap – a Github project, does what it says on the box (video to mocap). Check out the link to the files here.

Nvidia announces Kimodo, a text-to-mocap which is free to use –

end result is a BVH file, which can be brought into iClone and convert into an animation file (Phil will provide an interesting video to show how it works)

AI voice, not Eleven Labs, but this is free! Check out Voicebox here. This does voice cloning and text to speech and runs locally.

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 –

Completely Machinima S2 Ep 43 Films (August 2022)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes August 11, 2022 Leave a reply

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.

YouTube Version of this Episode

Show Notes and Links

0:57 The Folklore of Phasmophobia | Modern Mythology, by The Digital Dream Club (released 9 January 2021)

9:51 NVIDIA Omniverse Machinima Path Tracing Test, by JSFilmz (21 June 2022) and a nice little article on the difference between rasterization, ray tracing and path tracing that folks might find interesting, Nvidia says real-time path tracing is on the horizon, but what is it? By Eric Frederiksen, Gamespot.com, 1 May 2022

17:33 Tiny Elden Ring | Tilt Shift, by Flurdeh (11 April 2022) and here’s Flurdeh’s list of filmmaking tools https://github.com/Flurdeh/Youtube-Resources and a post-production tutorial on the tilt shift effect tutorial, How to create Tilt-Shift / Miniature World Time-lapses, by Science Filmmaking Tips (24 Jan 2017)

27:27 What a typical project Zomboid Run looks like, by Pathoze (26 Jan 2022)

31:45 Discussion: using live action with machinima footage in films, what are the challenges?

Examples mentioned –

39:11 Damien’s The Great Bug War on Machinima Expo (8 December 2014)

46:12 Ricky’s reference to a 2D/3D combo – Carson Mell’s TARANTULA A-1 : Nightmares (5 August 2012), shot in Los Angeles

48:30 Phil Tippett’s stop mo film Mad God, including live action with animation (now available on Shudder TV)

51:20 Tutsy Navarathna’s film, A Journey into the Metaverse and an interview we did with him on the podcast in Season 1

Completely Machinima Interview: AlexS189, machinima director

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes January 20, 2022 Leave a reply

Damien discusses the creative process used by AlexS189 and his production team in the recent 2021 Cinematic Captures ‘Animated Film’ competition-winning film, Fallen Angel: A Star Wars Short (Unreal). The film is reviewed in our January 2022 episode.