This week’s film picks are of epic battle scenes: one made in Warhammer and the other Unreal Engine. There are similarities and contrasts between these two works, respectively created by a gamer, Game Thumb, and a CG production team, Glow Productions – and that also includes the opinions of the CM crew reviewing the works! What’s your view, please do add you comments on our YT review or ep blog post. The ep begins with an update on Ricky’s take on the SAG AFTRA deal for his Army of Darkness characterisations.
YouTube Version of This Episode
Show Notes & Links
Northern Wars – Total War Warhammer 2 Cinematic Battle Machinima, by Gamethumb, and was released on 10 August 2019
video set to music by Danheim
Oryctes by Glow Productions, released 25 October 2023
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
Show Notes and Links
Film, by Puttefnask, released 23 February 2023 –
Made using Cyberpunk 2077 Photo Mode mod v 1.0.20 by Otis_Inf, link here
Original music video, Haelos – Pray, released 26 Oct 2015 –
Not machinima but some great projects to share with you this week.
This has to be SFX rather than cinematic… right? From what I can ascertain, this new game release trailer/taster, called Off the Grid by none other than the infamous Neil Blomkamp (District 9 director), was captured with Technoprops and edited with Dynamixyz Performer –
The short is called SWITCHER, and was released on 3 May. The game will apparently be launched later in 2023 so we can check out the stunning cinematics in more detail then, and hopefully see more shorts from this world in due course.
Our next film this week is a stop-mo Samurai spectacular. Its called Hidari, being based on the work of wooden sculpture Jingoro Hidari. It is presented in the style of a ‘Japanimation’ and is promoted as a pilot for a long-form feature film although its unclear whether or when the release will happen. Its creators are attempting to devise new visual effects that make use of the wooden materials to show texture and joints and, for example, to use sawdust gushing out instead of blood when the characters are being attacked. Here’s the short, released on 8 March –
From one horror to another, this creator has re-imagined Alien as a Pixar movie using Midjourney, ElevenLabs and ChatGPT tools – yep, you read that correctly! The short is by Yellow Medusa and was released on 27 March. Its not animation, but is an interesting visualization nonetheless – maybe all horror movies should be transformed in this way, for those with a more sensitive pallet? Here’s the link –
Finally this week, Tenacious D’s hilarious music vid about video games, is a must watch and which has apparently been so already by more than 18M viewers. Its called Tenacious D – Video Games (our feature image for this post) and was a collaboration with Oney Play, released on 11 May. Enjoy –
To kick start 2023 with a virtual BANG, we are highlighting some projects we’ve seen that are great examples of machinima and virtual production, demonstrating a breadth of techniques, a range of technologies, and comprise good ole’ short-form storytelling. We also really enjoyed Steve Cutts tale of man… let’s hope for a peaceful and happy year. Enjoy!
Force of Unreal
We were massively impressed throughout last year with the scope of creative work being produced in Unreal Engine. So, we have a few more to tell you about!
RIFT by HaZimation is a Sci-Fi Anime style film with characters created in Reallusion’s Character Creator. The film debuted at the Spark Computer Graphics Society’s Spark Animation Festival last October. We love the stylized effects that have been used here, which Haz Dulull, director/producer, describes as a combination of 2D and 3D in this article (scroll to below half way). We are also impressed that those same 3D assets and environment used in the film making process have also been integrated into a FPS game. The game is currently available free on Steam in early access here. This is another great example of creators using virtual assets in multiple ways – and builds very much on the model that Epic envisaged when they first released the City sample last year, hot on the heals of the release of The Matrix Resurrections film and The Matrix Awakens: UE5 Expeirence for which the city was created. We also love HaZimation’s strategy of co-creation for the new RIFT game experience with players – “We at HaZimation believe that a great game is only possible with direct feedback from the audience as early as possible” (Steam). We fully expect to see more creative works using the RIFT content in future too. Congrats to everyone involved.
As any of you that have been following the podcast will have gathered, we love a good alien film too, and we have found another made in UE5 that we really enjoyed. This one is called The Lab, by Haylox (released 14 Sept 2022). The director/producer builds the suspense well in this although, of course, its the same Alien trope we’ve seen many times over. Nonetheless, this has nice effects and well balanced soundscape.
We also love a good music video. The next project is a dance video made by Guru Pradeep using the music ‘Urvashi’ – Kaadhalan (A R Rahman), released 2 Aug 2022. Its a little rough around the edges, having seemingly been cobbled together with Megascans, Sketchfab and items grabbed the UE Marketplace, but the mocap is done particularly well, although we don’t know what was used, as is the editing. We look forward to seeing more from this creator in future.
Aspiring Assets
We want to highlight the amazing content that’s being developed for use in UE with Reality Capture. In this video, which is not a film but a ‘show and tell’ more than a tut, William Faucher reveals how he created a Lofoten-inspired cabin environment from the 1800s. Its impressive stuff if you have an eye of photogrammetry as well as some of the challenges for asset creation and there are lots of tips and hints in here with more detailed tutorials on his channel.
We have also been impressed with the range of fabulous assets that are being created and used in the Kitbash 3D Mission to Minerva challenge (closed 2 Dec 2022) the outcome of which will be a new galaxy of the combined concept artworks and in-motion content being submitted. There are some really nice videos which you can find using #kb3dchallenge on YouTube that are definitely worth a looksee. We liked this one, which has a nice touch of a disaster about it, by Mike Seto.
With an impressive field of judges that included talent acquisition representatives from NASA Concept Labs, Netflix, Riot Games and ILM, winners were announced on 20 Dec.
And Finally?
Let’s hope for a more progressive year in 2023 than the hate-filled traps that befell so many across a whole plethora of virtual platforms and IRL… and maybe reflect on the message contained within this great fun short, created in Clip Studio Paint with Cinema 4D and After Effects. The film is by Steve Cutts, called A Brief Disagreement, released 30 Sept 2022. Steve is not a nOOb in the world of machinima (and the earlier days of Reallusion’s CrazyTalk) – his classic comedy about the fate of Roger and Jessica Rabbit, as well as every other iconic cartoon character you can think of, even 8 years after its release is still a good laugh for those of a certain age (and its the featured image for this article in case you were wondering)!
Everything with AI has grown exponentially this year, and this week we show you AI for animation using different techniques as well as AR, VR and voice cloning. It is astonishing that some of these tools are already a part of our creative toolset, as illustrated in our highlighted projects by GUNSHIP and Fabien Stelzer. Of course, any new toolset comes with its discontents, and so we cover some of those we’ve picked up on this past month too. It is certainly fair to say there are many challenges with this emergent creative practice but it appears these are being thought through alongside the developing applications by those using it… although, of course, legislation is far from here.
Animation
Text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion raised $100M in October this year and is about to release its animation API. On 15 November it released DreamStudio, the first API on its web platform of future AI-based apps, and on 24 November it released Stable Diffusion 2.0. The animation API, DreamStudio Pro, will be a node-based animation suite enabling anyone to create videos, including with music, quickly and easily. It includes storyboarding and is compatible with a whole range of creative toolsets such as Blender, potentially making it a new part of the filmmaking workflow bringing imagination closer to reality without the pain, or so it claims. We’ll see about that shortly no doubt. And btw, 2.0 has higher resolution upscaling options, more filters on adult content, increased depth information that can be more easily transformed into 3D and text-guided in-painting which helps to switch out parts of an image more quickly. You can catch up with the announcements on Robert Scoble’s Youtube channel here –
As if that isn’t amazing enough, Google is creating another method for animating using photographs, think image-to-video, called Google AI FLY. Its approach will make use of pre-existing methods of in-painting, out-painting and super resolution of images to animate a single photo, creating a similar effect to nerf (photogrammetry) but without the requirement for many images. Check out this ‘how its done’ review by Károly Zsolnai-Fehér on the Two Minute Papers channel –
For more information, this article on Petapixel.com‘s site is worth a read too.
And finally this week, Ebsynth by Secret Weapon is an interesting approach that uses a video and a painted keyframe to create a new video resembling the aesthetic style used in the painted frame. It is a type of generative style transfer with an animated output that could only really be achieved in post production but this is soooo much simpler to do and it looks pretty impressive. There is a review of the technique on 80.lv’s website here and an overview by its creators on their Youtube channel here –
We’d love to see anyone’s examples of outputs with these different animation tools, so get in touch if you’d like to share them!
AR & VR
For those of you into AR, AI enthusiast Bjorn Karmann also demonstrated how Stable Diffusion’s in-painting feature can be used to create new experiences – check this out on his Twitter feed here –
Made a quick AR inpainting experiment called We See!
For those of you into 360 and VR, Stephen Coorlas has used MidJourney to create some neat spherical images. Here is his tutorial on the approach –
Also Ran?
Almost late to the AI generator party (mmm….), China has released ERNIE-ViLG 2.0 by Baidu, a Chinese text-to-image AI which Alan Thompson claims is even better than DALL-E and Stable Diffusion albeit using much a smaller model. Check out his review which certainly looks impressive –
Voice
NVidia has done it again – their amazing Riva AI clones a voice using just 30 minutes of voice samples. The application of this is anticipated to be conversational virtual assistants, including multi-lingual assistants and its already been touted as frontrunner with Alexa, Meta and Google – but in terms of virtual production and creative content, it is also possible it could be used to replace actors when, say, they are double booked or poorly. So, make sure you get that covered in your voice-acting contract in future too.
Projects
We found a couple of beautiful projects that push the boundaries this month. Firstly GUNSHIP’s music video is a great example of how this technology can be applied to enhance their creative work. Their video focusses on the aesthetics of cybernetics (and is our headline image for this article). Nice!
Secondly, an audience participation film by Fabien Stelzer which is being released on Twitter. The project uses AI generators for image and voice and also for scriptwriting. After each episode is released, viewers vote on what should happen next which the creator then integrates into the subsequent episode of the story. The series is called Salt and its aesthetic style is intended to be 1970s sci-fi. You can read about his approach on the CNN Business website and be a part of the project here –
Last month we considered the disruption that AI generators are causing in the art world and this month its the film industry’s turn. Just maybe we are seeing an end to Hollywood’s fetish with Marvellizing everything or perhaps AI generators will result in extended stories with the same old visual aesthetic, out-painted and stylized… which is highly likely since AI has to be trained on pre-existing images, text and audio. In this article, Pinar Seyhan Demirdag gives us some thoughts about what might happen but our experience with the emergence of machinima and its transmogriphication into virtual production (and vice versa) teaches us that anything which cuts a few corners will ultimately become part of the process. In this case, AI can be used to supplement everything from concept development, to storyboarding, to animation and visual effects. If that results in new ideas, then all well and good.
When those new ideas get integrated into the workflow using AI generators, however, there is clearly potential for some to be less happy. This is illustrated by Greg Rutkowski, a Polish digital artist whose aesthetic style of ethereal fantasy landscapes is a popular inclusion in text-to-image generators. According to this article in MIT Technology Review, Rutkowski’s name has appeared on more than 10M images and used as a prompt more than 93,000 times in Stable Diffusion alone – and it appears that this is becasue data on which the AI has been trained includes ArtStation, one of the main platforms used by concept artists to share their portfolios. Needless to say, the work is being scaped without attribution – as we have previously discussed.
What’s interesting here is the emerging groundswell of people and companies calling for legislative action. An industry initiative has formed and is evolving rapidly, spearheaded by Adobe in partnership with Twitter and the New York Times called Content Authentication Initiative. CAI aims to authenticate content and is a publishing platform – check out their blog here and note you can become a member for free. To date, it doesn’t appear that the popular AI generators we have reviewed are part of the initiative but it is highly likely they will at some point, so watch this space. In the meantime, Stability AI, creator of Stable Diffusion, is putting effort into listening to its community to address at least some of these issues.
Of course, much game-based machinima will immediately fall foul of such initiatives, especially if content is commercialized in some way – and that’s a whole other dimension to explore as we track the emerging issues… What of the roles of platforms owned by Amazon, Meta and Google, when so much of their content is fan-generated work? And what of those games devs and publishers who have made much hay from the distribution of creative endeavour by their fans? We’ll have to wait and see but so far there’s been no real kick-back from the game publishers that we’ve seen. The anime community in South Korea and Japan has, however, collectively taken action against a former French game developer, 5you. The company used a favored artist’s work, Jung Gi, to create an homage to his practice and aesthetic style after he had died but the community didn’t agree with the use of an AI generator to do that. You can read the article on Rest of World’s website here. Community action is of course very powerful and voting with feet is something that invokes fear in the hearts of all industries.
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