machinima podcast Archives - Page 20 of 42

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!

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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 –

S3 E88 Minecraft: Wither Storm War (July 2023)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes August 2, 2023 Leave a reply

This week’s film review focusses on a story made with building blocks and without voice acting… and yet, what a spectacular story! The game world is Minecraft of course, and the story is based on Telltale Games’ episodic release called Story Mode. Made by @SquaredMediaAnimations , we discuss the production values emcompassed within the film, why we think adding voice acting would have enhanced the film and a number of other things we nit-picked but conclude that its really no wonder Squared Media are one of the top machinima producers in Minecraft.

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Links and Notes

Film, by Squared Media Animations, released 6 May 2023 –

Bloopers reel for the film –

Projects Update 2 (July 2023)

Tracy Harwood Blog July 31, 2023 Leave a reply

Our final post this month takes a look at more projects made in Unreal Engine. Once again, we are blown away by the incredible diversity of creative work made with this engine and the power it unleases among its ever growing community of users. It is not always cheap to do, but it can sometimes be free! Check these out.

Scaled Up

Planet Earth as an 80K digital recreation, designed for ‘orbital scenes and cinematic scenes of Earth, this model is available as a download in the Unreal Marketplace. It took creator Tuomas Hakala (aka MegaMammoth) two years to create and boy does it show. Its not a cheap asset to buy at £550+, but if this is something you want to include in high fidelity work, its surely worth it –

Leo Torres has re-created and upscaled vision of his beloved Skyrim Whiterun world. He has made some assumptions about what the world might scale to, stating that although its hard to tell just how big the population of the game might be, he is pretty sure it will exceed what was seen in the game! He’s used experience and fan facts to produce something that is ‘lore-scale’ – wonderful, even if its not playable –

Highlighted

Another Unreal short is DISTANCE by Machina Infinitum, a 3D fractal short made using a plugin the creator has built for UE5 called Essence. Their intention for using the tool is create realtime renders, typically for VR. Its on the Marketplace here at a very reasonable $40, and check out the video, released 17 Oct 2022, here –

Freedom!

We’ve been talking about no/low cost movie making since machinima.dot.one (1996 actually) so its great to see that mantra being picked up by others. In this case, Taiyaki Studios have made a short demo, called Airship DJ, in UE5 and another on how they made it. Check out the films here –

Film, released 21 July 2022 –

Explainer featuring Cory Williams, released 21 July 2022, here –

S3 Special: Machiniplex Intro

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes July 28, 2023 Leave a reply

In this episode, Phil introduces the Machiniplex [Remastered] Collection, a curated selection of machinimas from the early years. Machiniplex was a site created to host classic machinimas at the point that Machinima [dot] com began to assert its energies over the community as a corporate entity. The site was a community endeavour, with both Ricky and Phil playing a pivitol role in managing the project to preserve the original content the community had contributed to the early original Machinima website… until such time as it ran its course. In this ep, Phil and Ricky reminisce about the origins of Machiniplex and its contributors.

To celebrate the release of the curated collection, we have each selected a film we recall with particular fondness and discuss its significance. Phil has remastered each of the films using AI, not always a perfect process, so we also discuss his approach and techniques in bringing the original works up to 4K standard.

We encourage machinima fans everywhere to check out these films, not only were they brilliant in their day but in terms of storytelling, remain some of our favourite creative works against which we often draw comparisons when reviewing latest films.

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Show Notes & Links

Blahbalicious by Wendigo and Avatar, 1997 –

BOT by Digital Yoke, 2005? –

Edge of Remorse by Riot Films, 2006 –

The Snow Witch by Britannica Dreams, 2006 –

Phil’s trailer for the Machiniplex [Remastered] Channel –

Go to the Machiniplex [Remastered] Collection on Phil’s Vimeo channel here – website https://bit.ly/machiniplex or access the playlist here –

S3 E87 Cyberpunk 2077: Don’t Fall Down, Cinematic Machinima Music Video (July 2023)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes July 26, 2023 Leave a reply

A love letter to Cyberpunk 2077? In this week’s episode, the CM crew discuss a cinematic music video that perfectly captures a uniquely human feeling of people watching… and reflects on the phenomenal creativity of procedurally generated character content in the Cyberpunk world. The film is called Don’t Fall Down by Puttefnask and the song it accompanies is Pray by Haelos – it is perhaps a more fitting video than the original.

YouTube Version of this Episode