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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 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).

S4 E124 Machinima News Omnibus (Apr 2024)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes April 10, 2024 Leave a reply

A packed review this month, with some sad 🙁 better 😐 and happy news 🙂



YouTube Version of this Episode

Show Notes and Links

Endings

The long-anticipated demise of Rooster Teeth and has been announced – as has the much anticipated final season of Red Vs Blue in this trailer –

If you are a die hard RTer, here’s a link to the Rooster Teeth team response to Warner’s announcement, its ‘Not a Final Goodbye’ –

Tracy and Ben’s Pioneers in Machinima book chapter is here too, Chapter 4: Rooster Teeth Bites.

Here’s the link to the 2007 Special Ep, Going Global, released at the First European Machinima Festival in 2007 (in Leicester, UK) –

Articles, Variety, Deadline and IGN.

Another ending, Draxtor Dupres’ Second Life series supported by Linden Labs, Drax Files: World Makers. Here’s his final report and here’s a link to a livestream he did to celebrate the achievements of the show –

Accolades

Sam Crane’s Hamlet in GTA5 won a Jury prize for best documentary at SXSW 2024, link to news coverage here, and the distribution deal awarded here.

Electro League and Weta’s War is Over has become the first UE5 film to win an Oscar, Best Animated Short –

Aye AI AI…

YouTube has updated its T&Cs, a nice article here

ConvAI has announced a partnership with Unity for NPCs, and also teamed up with Second Life. Here’s a link to Wagner James Au’s New World Notes blog – and here’s a couple of useful links –

Stability AI has introduced a 3D video generator, information here

RunwayML has partnered with Musixmatch to generate video to lyrics, link to information here

and it has also announced a new lipsync feature for generative audio, currently on early access to its creators programme members

Hume has a demo of a voice-to-voice generator, described as an Empathic Voice Interface – link to sign-up for early access here

and if you need a little overview of how all things generative AI are developing, here’s a nice video summary by Henrik Kniberg –

Inspiration

To celebrate the phenomenal success of Gozilla Minus One at the 2024 Oscars, Nelson Escobar, the VFX creator of the Godzilla model, has released it as a free download for Blender. Link here –

Blockbuster Inc has announced its release date: 6 June 2024. Here’s the official gameplay trailer –

and here’s the link to Prologue on Steam

Finally, here’s the link to the interview with Denis Villeneuve, discussing his approach to making the latest Dune films –

Post Script

We are super excited to see our Podcast make the Top 3 listing of indie filmmaking podcasts on Goodpods in March 2024 – how cool is that?!

S4 E123 Fluxus: The Dog Days (Apr 2024)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes April 3, 2024 Leave a reply

The Dog Days is an unusual machinima that combines the glitchiness of AI generated content composited with a Second Life avatar. Whilst not realtime, the performative aspect of this work is evident and we reflect on the fit of the current state of generative AI with the Fluxus art movement. We discuss what The Dog Days means, metaphorically and literally, and how we interpret this film concluding it is not a happy outcome for the focal character. The Dog Days evokes memories of a long-ago childhood spent with a much loved pet but the non-sense words and images are of something far more sinister, contextualized by the current general media coverage of wars in Eastern Europe, Middle East and elsewhere. We also discuss our interpretations of the fragility represented in the avatar, including the role of generative AI in becoming cyborg.



YouTube Version of this Episode

Show Notes and Links

The Dog Days by Fau Ferdinand and Elle Thorkveld, released 17 Feb 2024

Fau Ferdinand’s channel is here – https://vimeo.com/fauferdinand

Second Front arts movement here

Fau Ferdinand on Roles 4 Women here

About the Fluxus art movement here

S4 E121 Cosmic: Flowers of Evil (Mar 2024)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes March 21, 2024 Leave a reply

This week, we take a look at a spectacular particle show in a machinima that has been documented and edited by Tutsy NaVaRaThNA in Second Life. The show is called Flowers of Evil and was created by Lalie Sorbet and Chrix as an interactive installation inspired by the most scandalous literary works of Charles Baudelaire, with the support of a Second Life Endowment for the Arts. Tutsy’s documentary is accompanied by an hypnotic composition by French club DJ and musician Sahale (from his Bouddha Bar XXI album), music that takes its inspiration also from the Flowers of Evil (or Fleurs du Mal). All round, this is a mesmerizing rendition that we could well imagine being enhanced with VR as a live experience… and that’s not something you hear us state all that often.



YouTube Version of This Episode

Show Notes and Links

Flowers of Evil by Tutsy NaVaRaThNA, released on 29 Jan 2024 –

Full recording of the show by Lalie Sorbet and Chrix here –

Fleurs du Mal Second Life map reference – https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/SLEA6/90/143/1001

Project Gutenburg ebook, open access https://www.gutenberg.org/files/36098/36098-h/36098-h.htm, originally released on 13 May 2011

A website dedicated to Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal https://fleursdumal.org/ which includes links to the various editions, the first of which do not include the censored works – those you can find the 1866 Les Epaves (the scraps)

More about ‘happenings’ here

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