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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 –

S3 E76 Film Review: After War (May 2023)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes May 4, 2023 Leave a reply

This week, Ricky, Phil and Damien begin with an brief discussion of the roles AI is being used for to restore old machinimas, and in particular the very exciting upcoming release Phil will be doing of old Machiniplex films – more on that in due course!

The film discussion centres on After War by RG Studios and their approach to telling a story without moving a camera in the Half Life 2 world.



YouTube Version of this Episode

Show Notes & Links

Hitpaw video enhancer AI, subscription information here

Machiniplex, no longer exists as a platform/website, but the link on the archive is here for the moment!

This week’s film by RG Studios, released on 3 March 2023 –

S3 E61 Film Review: INTERLOPER: Half Life 2’s Greatest Unsolved Mystery (Jan 2023)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes January 19, 2023 1 Comment

This week, Phil has selected a couple of films by @Anomidae, INTERLOPER: Half Life 2’s Greatest Unsolved Mystery (released 25 Oct 2022) and Interloper 2 The Source Engine’s Deepening Mystery (released 20 Nov 2022). These are astonishingly well done conspiracy documentaries, examining the strange phenomenon of the periodic appearance of alien-like grafitti in a little explored area of Half Life 2. The documentaries are so well done that even after we discussed them at length, Phil remains unconvinced its a hoax! What do you think?



YouTube Version of This Episode

Show Notes and Links

INTERLOPER: Half Life 2’s Greatest Unsolved Mystery by Anomidae, released 25 October 2022

Interloper 2 The Source Engine’s Deepening Mystery, released 20 Nov 2022

Kardavshev’s theory, article in Science Focus

War of the Worlds radio play, ready by Orson Wells, reviewed in Smithsonian Magazine online here and recording link below to the complete broadcast –

S3 E59 Film Review: The Voice in the Hollow by Half M.T Studios (Jan 2023)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes January 5, 2023 Leave a reply

Welcome to a brand new year, 2023! We start the year off with Tracy’s pick of the month, a sublime short by Half M.T Studios, called The Voice in the Hollow, made using Unreal Engine. We were blown away by quality of the virtual production in this short, although Ricky highlights a couple of pointers from a storytelling perspective. It is a very dark little tale, a la Cain and Abel, but there’s an even deeper back story to this one which Tracy explains.

The film provokes a discussion about the differences and similarities between virtual production and machinima – asking just how much fun is there now with making these productions? Spoiler alert: lots of course!

We’d love your feedback on this too, so do get in touch – contact info on our website, or drop in your thoughts below on the chat.



YouTube Version of this Episode

Show Notes and Links

Film –

Miguel Ortega on ArtStation

Tran Ma on ArtStation

Making of the film on Gnomon’s website here (90 hours of content)

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