Half Life Archives - Completely Machinima

S5 E165 What is it about those HL NPCs? Ridiculous Ties (Jan 2025)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes January 16, 2025 Leave a reply

This week’s #machinima short is ridiculous, yep Ridiculous Ties – a meme response to Eltorro64Rus’ review of favorite and least favorite words used by the Scientist in Half Life, created by Finzlow. And did we say its ridiculous?! We love the well-crafted humor in this, in-jokes with some of the best timing and inspired editing we’ve seen for quite some time. Although its strictly not machinima, it is definitely from a machinima stable, so it counts for us at least. Our review –

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Show Notes & Links

Ridiculous Ties by Finzlow, released 5 March 2024

Eltorro64Rus’ short about the Scientist’s favorite and least favorite words –

Lazzi (plural of lazzo) are comedic routines or gags used in Commedia dell’Arte. They are pre-rehearsed bits of physical or verbal humor that can be inserted into performances, often improvised, to entertain the audience or punctuate the action. Here’s a link to a teacher’s pack you mind find useful.

S5 E150 Dead on Cue: Fake Science

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes October 4, 2024 Leave a reply

This week, we take a deep dive into a film from one of the original machinima creator studios, Dead on Cue. This comprised the duo Mike Holochwost and Brian Mayberry. The film, Fake Science, had a couple more iterations, including one that allowed it to be played in the game itself, which was Half Life. It was released some 3 years before YouTube, and is another great example of how games could be used to produce artworks. Its wide recognition led to careers in games dev and production for both Mike and Brian, the former working on RoosterTeeth’s RWBY series and the latter on cinematics for games like the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic and Defiance. Brian is still active in the games dev industry and is working on his first game, called Gone Camping. Check out the discussion and memories we share.

YouTube Version of This Episode

Show Notes & Links

Dead on Cue, made in Half Life, was released on 13 Sept 2002 – the original versions can be found on the Internet Archive here.

BuddyDoQ (Brian Mayberry) has posted a YouTube version of the film here –

S4 E133 Machinima News Omnibus (Jun 2024)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes June 12, 2024 Leave a reply

This week we celebrate Nvidia’s investment in machinima, discuss latest AIs and give you the heads up on some great projects we want to highlight – there are just too many for us to fully review everything we’re seeing that we want to share with you these days! Do check them out, we’d love to hear your thoughts too – links and notes below.

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Show Notes & Links

Homage to Nvidia’s Omniverse Machinima app by Pekka Varis, released 14 April 2024 –

Here’s a link to Omniverse USD Composer

Projects Worth Catching Up On

Endgame by Peaches Chrenko and Dark Machine Audio, sound track –

JP Ferre’s DCS: Spitfires – Cinematic, a real tribute to those brave souls in WWII –

TheDavedood (Scratby Films) animation for Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon 50 years celebration – this one is for the single, Time –

Anomidae’s latest episode of the Half Life supernatural series Interloper –

Fallout inspired videos: JT Music’s Fallout rap, All in With the Fallout –

and Fallout – Dream on (tribute) by Couch Patrol –

Fables of the Foolish by Dreeko –

AI is Genie-us Init?

ElevenLabs has released a dubbing toolset tutorial, making different languages for videos even more accessible – link here

Google DeepMind has announced a new video generation model called Veo, which produces 1080p res videos for over a minute length in a whole range of different cinematic styles – link here

Stability AI has launched Stable Artisan to a wider user group on Discord – ats a tool for media generation and editing – link here

Showrunner by The Simulation, text to episode generator – link here

Winner of the 2nd AI Film Festival at Runway is by Daniel Antebi, called Get Me Out –

Luc Shurgers’ Skibidi Sam, video only on LinkedIn, created using Replikant – link here

Sony backs out of AI training with its catalogue – article here

Cor Blimey!

The real Backrooms discovered – check it out here

Another movies game, yes really! This one is called Movies Tycoon, link here

We are living in the Matrix, Black Mirror style – check out the episode Joan is Awful –

S4 E120 Machinima News Omnibus (Mar 2024)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes March 14, 2024 Leave a reply

This week’s podcast episode is our curated news omnibus for this month. We cover lots, and enjoy reflecting on the significance of the stories we highlight for the world of machinima and virtual production.

btw, the international internet pipes failed and microwaves fried our apps during this recording session, video corrupted and monsters ran loose among us, so enjoy the voice data we’ve managed to resurrect and video clips we’ve added – we’ll be back next week in full glory!

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Show Notes & Links

Fan communities under pressure?

Valve’s Steam policy and recent take downs for Team Fortress 2 and Portal fan projects – article on Games Radar here

Half Life 3 aka Entropy Zero (and 2) projects – Fandom.com overview here and video –

New Moviemaking Toolsets

Blockbuster Inc, Prologue version now on Steam here

Demo by Orbital Potato here –

Replikant now in free beta on the Unreal Marketplace.

Replikant has a Youtube channel with plenty of tutorials on it already, and there’s a great demo of it which gives you a sense of the animation quality it produces –

And for those wanting a quick and dirty tutorial on UE5, check this out –

Steamboatin’ Along!

Minecraft Steamboat Willie which is a fun take on it, made by Red and Blue –

Fewture Studios’ trailer for The Return of Steamboat Willie, made in Unreal Engine –

Screams

The origins and impact of the Wilhelm Scream – BBC shorts here

More about Sheb Wooley here

And another video about it here –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNvZYzg7o68

AI Genies Rising

Community action against deepfakes of Taylor Swift – link to story on BBC site here

Jae Solina has done a nice overview of OpenAI’s SORA here –

and this is a link to RunwayML’s video controller toolset (and our feature image for this post) –

The Suno model, released by ElevenLabs, for music composition – here is a fun example on X –

The new Suno model is a 10x leap forward for AI music.

Prompt: "Rap battle between GPT-4 and Gemini"

Stop whatever you're doing and listen.

AI music is coming. pic.twitter.com/mnZsaNkZvt
— Matt Shumer (@mattshumer_) March 1, 2024

S4 E103 Longest Walkable Distances (in a game) | UE: The Alchemist’s Confession (Nov 2023

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes November 16, 2023 Leave a reply

This week we present a critique of two very contrasting machinima productions – one took literally months to make and the other just a few days. In our first pick, the creator has asked: just how big are the maps in games these days? Well, vast actually – and quite frankly it blows our minds to think that so much effort has gone into answering the question. The film is called Longest Walkable Distances in a Video Game, by How Big is the Map. Our second film is a review of a creative experiment in Unreal Engine, called The Alchemist’s Confession by Cory Williams – it was inspired by a found marketplace asset and is experimental in a number of ways, not least in the five days it took to make it. Ricky highlights the weakness in the writing albeit the film is technically masterfully produced and acted, using mocap and LinkedIn (yep, you heard that correctly!). We also start this episode with some links we hope you enjoy and a discussion about the voice characterisation of G Man in the Half Life series.

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