Half Life 2

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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 E142 Half Life: OVERWORLD (Aug 2024)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes August 14, 2024 Leave a reply

This week’s selection is a stunning cinematic imaginary by Unknown Dino, focussing on the next version of Half Life (soon to be released… er, well, possibly in the next 10 years or so?). There is a lot of craft in this film, called HL: Overworld and made in Blender, which has taken its inspiration both from the HL Reddit community and the HL2 Artbook ‘Raising The Bar’. We also talk about the positioning of the new world portrayed as being the next obvious logical step in the story arc for Half Life – HL1 being a portal through which aliens jump to Earth, HL2 being a kind of survival against the odds, Alyx being the prequel, and HL3 being the fight back taken to those hateful Combine… yeah, we wish!



YouTube Version of this Episode

Show Notes & Links

E142 Half Life: OVERWORLD by Unknown Dino, released 27 May 2024 –

Half-Life 2 Raising The Bar, link to pdf of artbook (feature image)

S4 E109 Teaching an AI: Backflip (Dec 2023)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes December 28, 2023 Leave a reply

Backflip is a docu-style film, made over a period of three years where Nikita Diakur presents his progress using AI to teach a character to backflip. The character is the 3D scanned artist and the learning process applied is based on a technique he read in an academic paper. To say its chaos is an understatatement, and something anyone in research could probably have told him when attempting to replicate a finding in a publication (which of course is why LLMs using text alone will never be ‘intelligent’). It is also everything one would expect from a character rig with the physics of a double-jointed arachnid… but it sure is hugely entertaining to watch, and brilliantly edited together. Backflip is a must watch for anyone using AIs for animation, not least because it serves as a reminder of just how tough this all was pre-mid 2023!

We also begin the episode with some news updates: Half Life 2 @ 25 years, GTA6 trailer, Elden Ring DLCs and Baad Viibes (John MacInnes).



YouTube Version of This Episode

https://youtu.be/-iE2YKKQX9s

Show Notes & Links

Half Life 25th anniversay documentary and update –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbZ3HzvFEto&t

The GTA6 official advert –

John MacInnes talking about Baad Viibes at the Unreal Fest, October 2023 –

Backflip – film by Nikita Diakur, released 27 September 2023 –

S3 E94 Half Life 2: Shelf Life (September 2023)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes September 13, 2023 Leave a reply

This week we discuss one of the best HL2 films from the 2009 era – Shelf Life by Pixel Eyes Productions. The film, which is in two episodes, won a heap of creator awards back in the day and has definitely stood the test of time for us. There are some fun sci-fi and weird tropes integrated into the story, which we discuss, as well as the very well done sound design and original music. We’d love to see these guys pick this project back up, although of course, none of the issues they faced back then will be a problem now – just a whole set of new ones to overcome!



YouTube Version of This Episode

Show Notes and Links

Films

Chapter 1 Shelf Life: You Are What You Remember, by Pixel Eyes Productions, released 6 July 2009 –

and Chapter 2 Shelf Life: After the Scan –

Music video by Pixel Eyes to E V Kain’s Yes No Maybe, made in iClone –

S3 E89 Half Life 2: Daydream (August 2023)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes August 9, 2023 Leave a reply

A performance by a camera ham, shutterbug or just a plain histrionic narcissist? This week’s review discusses an older machinima that has highly contemporary themes in it: carry-on-regardless, daydreaming, whatever, so long as the virtual camera is rolling. The film is called Daydream (2009) set to the titular song by Lovin’ Spoonful, created by Mystfit and made Valve’s Half Life 2. Needless to say, we loved the humor but what makes this machinima interesting is that it was a scripted production created by running a path sequencer inside the game, harking back to the early days of how machinimas were made but so is reminiscent of how contemporary tools such as iClone and Unreal now work.

This week we also begin with Ricky talking about ultra-wide monitors, using it to play Elden Ring (a mod required) and the #SAGAFTRA strike; and, Phil gives an overview of his remastering project of the Machiniplex collection and his homage to the great Hugh Hancock, founder the #machinima movement, the upcoming showcase of Bloodspell and also his own response to some of the hoopla that Hugh created at the time of its release in 2006!



YouTube Version of this Episode

Show Notes & Links

Film, Daydream by Mystfit, released 6 January 2009

Gigabyte ultra-wide screen and Elden Ring mod, by Nexus Mods

Machiniplex Collection, remastered by Phil Rice – https://bitly/Machiniplex

Bloodspell trailer for Phil’s showcase channel –

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