Following on from Tracy’s visit to the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, which took place between 26 April and 1 May, Ricky leads a discussion with Tracy on the thoughts about film selection at the event, different distribution strategies, topics discussed at the panel, and the future of avant-garde machinima films and filmmaking for festivals generally.
YouTube Version of this Episode
Show Notes and Links
Tracy’s CM blog post on her visit to the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival
Hypatia Pickens aka Sarah Higley CM episode, poetry in machinima!
Tracy’s paper on a manifesto for machinima, published in Journal of Visual Culture (2011) – a preprint free download on ResearchGate can be found here
You can also follow this episode with Tracy’s interview with Vladimir Nadein and Dmitry Frolov, curators of the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, on our channel here –
You can also follow this episode with Tracy’s interview with Vladimir Nadein and Dmitry Frolov, curators of the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, on our channel here
This week’s film selection comprises 2 shorts, both untitled but actually worlds apart in their development. Its not often we get to comment on a first ever machinima project as the framing for a creative idea but our first film is just that, by Sydney Walker and made in an environment we have never seen used for machinima before, Final Fantasy 14. Our second film is a psychological thriller, drawing us in from a the whole world of familiar cinematic language in a way that we struggled with in the Astartes Project. BUT, the title needs work because “iClone shorts” just doesn’t cut it for us… over to Just Art Animation Studios!
YouTube Version of this Episode
Show Notes & Links
MachinimaFinal by Sydney Walker, released 10 Feb 2023 –
iClone Short by Just Art Animation, released 25 Feb 2023 –
and BennyDee/Benjamin Dazhi YouTube channel here –
After we first talked about this project last April 2022, we were thrilled to see what a stunning job @MartinKlekner has made in the 21 Jan 2023 release of the first episode of Heroes of Bronze. We were not disappointed: the film and work stands up to AAA Assassin’s Creed Odyssey studio work, but with amazing detail of historical artefacts and storytelling, which is even evident in the way clothes move on characters. Damien couldn’t put our views better when he says this work inspires him to want to do better with iClone. We’re definitely looking forward to the next release – bring it on!
YouTube Version of this Episode
Show Notes and Links
Heroes of Bronze: The Memory by Martin Klekner, released 21 January 2023 –
This month, we have two weeks of projects to share with you. This week, we focus on the Unreal film projects we found. The breadth of work folks are creating with this toolset is astounding – all these films highlight a range of talent, development of workflows and the accessibility of the tools being used. The films also demonstrate what great creative storytelling talent there is among the indie creator communities across the world. Exciting times!
NOPE by Red Render
Alessio Marciello’s (aka Red Render) film NOPE uses UE5, Blender and iClone 8 to create a Jordan Peel inspired film, released on 11 December 2022. The pace and soundscape are impressive, the lucid dream of a bored schoolboy is an interesting creative choice, and we love the hint of Enterprise at the end! Check it out here –
The Perilous Wager by Ethan Nester
Ethan Nester’s The Perilous Wager, released 28 November 2022, uses UE’s Metahumans in our next short project pick. This is reminiscent of film noir and crime drama, mixed with a twist of lime. Its a well managed story with some hidden depths, only really evidenced in the buzzing of flies. It ends a little abruptly but, as its creator says, its about ideas for larger projects. It demonstrates great voice acting and we also love that Ethan voiced all the characters himself, he said using Altered.AI to create vocal deepfakes. He highlights how going through the voice acting process helped him improve his acting skills too – impressive work! We look forward to seeing how these ideas develop in due course. Here’s the link –
Gloom by Bloom
Another dark and moody project (its also our feature image for this post), Gloom was created for the Australia and New Zealand short film challenge 2022, supported by Screen NSW and Epic. The film is by Bloom, released 17 December 2022, and was created in eight weeks. The sci-fi concept is great, voice acting impressive and the story is well told with some fab jumpscares in it too. The sound design is worth taking note of but we recommend you wear a headset to get the full sense of the expansive soundscape the team have devised. Overall, a great project and we look forward to seeing more work from Bloom too –
Adarnia by Adarnia Studio
Our next project is one that turns UE characters into ancient ones – a slightly longer format project, this has elements of Star Wars, Blade Runner and just a touch of Jason and the Argonauts mixed together with an expansive cityscape to boot. Adarnia is a sci-fi fantasy created by Clemhyn Escosora and released 19 March 2021. There’s an impressive vehicle chase which perhaps goes on just a little too long, but there’s an interesting use of assets that are replicated in different ways across the various scenes that is brought together nicely towards the end of the film. The birdsong is a little distracting in places, one of those ‘nuisance scores’ we highlighted in last week’s blog post (Tech Update 2). There’s clearly a lot of work that’s gone into this, and pehaps there’s scope for a game to be made with the expansiveness demonstrated in the project, but the film’s story needs to be just a little tighter. We guess the creators agree because their YouTube channel is full of excerpts focussing on key components of this work. Check out the film here –
Superman Awakens by Antonis Fylladitis
Our final project for this week is a Superman tale, created by VFX company called Floating House. The film, released on 13 February 2023, is inspired by Kingdom Come Superman and Alex Ross and is a very interesting mix of comic styling and narrative film, with great voice acting from Daniel Zbel. Its another great illustration of the quality of the UE assets for talented storytellers –
Next week, we take a look at films made with other engines.
This week’s #MondayMotivation post has some more great examples of machinima and virtual production projects. We have a selection of shorts made using Unreal Engine and another entirely made in Blender, plus a couple of ‘making ofs…’ and a ‘role of…’ also worth checking out.
Projects
An artist we’ve talked about before who has created extensive work over many years in Second Life is Bryn Oh, and now she has created a nostalgic experience called Lobby Cam which is available on Steam, made using UE5. The experience is a walking tour of an extensive environment and a story told through the pages of a ripped up diary. The project has been reviewed by James Wagner Au on his blog, New World Notes here. It is described as part of a larger narrative, and here’s a video sampler of the tour produced as part of that too… an interesting approach to virtual storytelling –
Off planet, another project which contains amazing detail of other worlds is by Melody Sheep, called The Sights of Space: A Voyage to Spectacular Alien Worlds (released 29 Nov 2022). This a 30 minutes-long film of speculative depictions of space scenes based on ‘current scientific understanding’ of the Milky Way, albeit with extensive creative license. If you ever wanted to get into a new type of documentary, this is probably the one to have on your watchlist –
We were also thrilled to see what promises to be a very interesting new series launching later this year by Melody Sheep, called The Human Future, check out the trailer on the channel here.
In our next project pick, called JOYCE by GTshortStories (released 14 Dec 2022), UE5 and every available tool with it has been used to create an interesting space story. This mixes live action with some well done animation, and the integration is done really well, so its a great example to check out. Joyce is a backchatting robot exploring a facility along with Sargeant Terry Brown – there are many references to popular sci-fi tropes, so do check this one out! GTshortStories is also putting out other creative content, so check out the channel too.
Our final space project for this week is Countdown, by Andrew Klimov on the CGChannel. This is a fast paced story of a crash landing onto an alien planet, all about the crash itself, and it certainly makes you feel it. The crash is the beginning of a new series and you can find out more about that on his website here. There’s also an interesting breakdown of the filmmaking process on his Vimeo channel here.
Our next project pick goes back to the 11th Century, inspired by an Umbrian folk tale in the novel ‘E poi si fece buio’ by Matteo Bebi. It is about a dream by Imiltrude who lived in a hidden village and was sentenced to death for having caused a fire that destroyed a city. The film HIMIL is by Tiziano Fioriti and Andrea Brunetti, made using UE5 and is a fascinating first person perspective with a very well done soundscape –
Our next project pick is a Blender-made movie and another example of great storytelling, this time in a cyberpunk environment with a really nice twist in the tale. Not sure it would be Ricky’s cup of tea, to his point about emotional representation, but I certainly loved it! The story has been created by the Blender HQ team, so its by no means an indie endeavour with a team of folks behind the processes employed but definitely worth watching – check out the pace of the action and sound design in particular. The film is called Charge – Blender Open Movie (released 15 Dec 2022) and you can access the production files and making of videos for the film here.
Making of…
We always love a good homage to Star Wars, and this week we have a feature from the Reallusion Magazine, which describes how iClone and the Vicon mocap system have been used to recreate that iconic ‘I am your father’ scene from the Empire Strikes Back episode. The short has been made by Luis Cepeda from Quitasueño Studios, based in the Dominican Republic, and he provides a great step-by-step guide to how the short was made with a video overview here –
Ever wondered how to use a midi controller with UE5 that lets you use the controller for all sorts of effects in real-time just with the keyboard? Well, here’s a fantastic video tutorial for you by Taiyaki Studios featuring Cory Williams –
Role of…
And finally this week, we share Loralee Sundra’s video on the Internet Archive about the value of public domain films from her perspective as a Frontline Fellow at the Documentary Film Legal Clinic at UCLA School of Law. Her talk was part of the Internet Archive’s Public Domain Day 2023 celebration, held on 25 Jan 2023.
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