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S5 E164 Machinima News Omnibus (Jan 2025)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes January 9, 2025 Leave a reply

Whilst January’s news begins with more of the same ole genAIs doing their thang, because they can, there’s now evidence of more concerted effort to control the efforts of creators… because the corporates and policymakers can at least try to do that, right? Well, maybe, but all this has achieved in the past is even more creative energy invested in jumping through the hoops, clambering over the walls and crashing through the hedges – so Happy New Year, we’re looking forward to seeing what the amazing machinima creative communities of all engine persuasions around the World can achieve in 2025! Plus, we discuss iClone’s new update, a couple of interesting creative projects celebrating content creators in their own ways, as well as interesting milestones.



YouTube Version of This Episode

Show Notes & Links

SORA‘s launch trailer (although the AI is still not available in EU apparently) –

Runway’s Act One is as good as SORA, here’s the promo –

Face Depth Frame Mancer is similar to Act One – a $20 plug-in for UE5 – here’s the trailer and here’s the link to the download –

Riot Games issuing penalties for ‘off platform’ conduct violations – here’s the notice

Epic’s Fortnite hits a new milestone of 14M concurrent players participating in Snoop Dogg/Eminem’s concert (er, well, its slightly less than the last milestone but apparently more if you add in some other metrics too…) –

RDR2‘s how to involving its horses and mocap – what could be more fun than this?!

JT Music‘s tribute to Halo, includes a nice mention of RVB, as anything that celebrates the achievements of Halo should –

Bullet Time Agent – a new VRchat combat/puzzler game by Lakuza has released. Here’s the trailer –

Reallusion‘s iClone update, overview here –

Whatever happened to Syama Pedersen, the creator of that stunning Warhammer 40K film, Astartes? Find out in this episode! And here’s the Secret Level trailer for a quick overview –

Our review episode all about the Astartes film –

S5 E163 20 years on HL2: I’m Still Seeing Breen (Jan 2025)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes January 2, 2025 Leave a reply

Kicking off 2025 with a review of a classic and iconic #machinima by one of the pioneers of the movement, Paul Marino aka ILLRobinson – and its 20 years almost to the day this was released! I’m Still Seeing Breen, made in HL2, holds a special place in our memories from those early years – not only was it a perfect ‘protest piece’ as the feature machinima demonstrating its potential for a 2005 Sundance Film Festival panel discussion (alongside RoosterTeeth’s RVB) but was further developed for MTV2’s Season 2 premiere of its Video Mods TV show later that same year. In this episode, we go over the back story, discuss how this was made and its impact on machinima in general.



YouTube Version of This Episode

Show Notes & Links

I’m Still Seeing Breen, released 5 March 2005 by Paul Marino

480p broadcast version for MTV2 –

Steam link for HL2 upgrade including Source Filmmaker here

Background information also from the Pioneers in Machinima book, written by Tracy Harwood and Ben Grussi

Paul Marino’s book, published in 2004, available as a free download on the Internet Archive (log-in/account required) here

S4 E128 Machinima News Omnibus (May 2024)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes May 8, 2024 Leave a reply

Our May update on machinima and virtual production related news highlights some of the latest generative AI tools, warts and all, and brings to attention several of the latest machinima potential games, including Jaws, Jurassic World Evolution, 1943: Rise of the Hydra and Harold Halibut. We discuss the challenges filmmakers face when developing games from their IP, why Kickstarter isn’t a good strategy for raising funding for smaller studios, the [almost] final instalment of the RoosterTeeth saga and Second Life’s latest film festival, Fantasy Faire. All with our usual discursive aplomb (despite Ricky being mia, reportedly on a skinny dipping retreat) and a few non machinima related asides!



YouTube Version of this Episode

Show Notes & Links

AI Genies

Art of the Problem about the history of development of generative AI – it’s a documentary including interviews with some of the scientists attributed with developing the building blocks for the techs. Link here.

Google Deepmind has created a new AI model Genie that can create playable worlds in the style of 2D platforms, using an image as a prompt, or a sketch or text description.  A twitter thread link here.

Stability AI has introduced its Stable Audio 2.0 model, that enables high quality, full tracks with musical structure up to 3 minutes long from a single text prompt –

According to some, however, its not quite as good as Suno –

Musk has announced that Grok 1.5 Vision which aims to connect the digital and physical worlds with a multi-modal model will be released imminently – here’s link to the website about it https://x.ai/blog/grok-1.5v

Here’s the original style transfer post using Joker –

and here’s a tutorial on how to replace anyone in a video stream –

And here’s a link to the Arnie style example. 

New games

A new JAWS experience on Roblox called JAWS: Infested Waters.  More about it here –

JT Music’s rap about Palworld –

GTA6 trailer is a nice teaser –

1943: Rise of Hydra storyworld –

Interestingly, this is the one that Kim Libreri showcased at the Game Dev Conference event a few weeks ago –

Harold Halibut, a stop-mo animation game, trailer –

Steam link https://store.steampowered.com/app/924750/Harold_Halibut/

Projects

Blackmilk Studio A 1000 Suns series is definitely worth a watch! Channel link here.

Star Wars 1950s super Panavision 70 style short made with generative AI tools, including the script.  Its been put together by Abandoned Films –

Vikings and Aliens, using Kickstarter (feature image for this post)!  Here’s a link to the teaser –

And here’s a link to the Kickstarter if you’d like to support it.

Final fantasy!

RoosterTeeth going quietly, nah –

Fantasy Faire, Second Life Film Festival hosted by Chantal Harvey and Safia Widdeshins (to follow).

Completely Machinima S2 Ep 30 News & Discussion (February 2022)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes February 3, 2022 Leave a reply

In this episode, Tracy, Ricky, Phil and Damien cover the relevance of Nvidia’s special address at CES for machinima creators, Adobe’s Project Shasta, Kerbal Space Programme, the uptake in VR kit over the Christmas period, growth in machinima, NFTs, Philip Rosedale’s return to the Second Life fold, the nail in RoosterTeeth’s RVB saga, Minecraft’s and Rockstar’s astonishing achievements, Ben Grussi’s history episodes and discuss two great questions posed by our followers: what’s the difference between machinima and animation and what’s the advice for adapting prose to visual media formats.



YouTube version of podcast

Show Links

1:10 Nvidia’s special address at CES, points relevant for machinima creators eg., Omniverse, AI

12:55 RDR2 images in the news!

13:40 Austin Film Festival

14:24 Adobe Project Shasta for audio recording

14:56 Kerbal Space Programme 2 impending launch

Kerbal Space Programme 2 screencap

16:25 Machinima growth observations

17:28 VR growth observations

19:46 NFTs observations – Peter Molyneux and John Gaeta

23:57 Philip Rosedale and the future of Second Life for creators

40:30 Halo Xbox 360 multiplayer servers close – the end of the story for Rooster Teeth’s RVB series?

42:50 Ben Grussi’s history of machinima episodes of the Completely Machinima podcast

44:34 Matthew Loris/Zeke: what are the differences between machinima and animation discussion; Completely Machinima interview with Mr Anymation, Tom Jantol

1:00:48 Rockstar’s lawsuit against a modding group

1:02:21 Minecraft’s astonishing video reach

1:03:43 Pandora’s 3d Films: adapting prose to visual media formats preliminary comments

Tracy Harwood and Ben Grussi’s Machinima Book, On Sale Now!