A packed news episode, with Tracy’s analysis of the AI art copyright ruling decision and a discussion with Damien about his hit fan series, Heir to the Empire – the Star Wars story that everyone always wanted to see made. Do comment on the discussion (on the YouTube channel or the Blog post).
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RunwayML’s third annual AI Film Festival is now open to submissions until 31st March
Our monthly news update this month covers more genAI matters, game-related items and WoWness in the form of a 2 hour + stunning orchestral performance celebrating 20 years of musical history. Check out the news and our discussion, and do leave comments too!
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A new AI-focussed filmmaking studio has launched, called Asteria. Its argument is that AI can change the way indies make and distribute content, providing new opportunities, and presumably new types of content – its very much the same point we made a few months back about mAIchinima. Link here.
The Silent Hill 2 Remake with a mod that turns it into a VR game, made by Praydog that gives the game more of a first person perspective. Demo video here –
Philip Rosedale has rejoined the team at Linden Labs’ Second Life as the CTO – roundtable discussion with the community in November here –
There’s also a great interview that James Wagner Au has done in two parts on his New World Notes blog here
Remarkable Life of Ibelin trailer here (feature image) –
World of Warcraft 20 years of music orchestral concert, video of performance here –
Steam Launcher update now with recording tools for machinimators. News item here.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard official launch trailer –
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.
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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 –
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!
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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 –
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