To think this film’s creator knew nothing about animation prior to making this short is absolutely astonishing. Of course, as we discuss, many crossed this path as a consequence of the pandemic, but there are few gems we’ve found like this. The film, Rally, draws heavily on Santiago Menghini’s experience as a live action director and producer. What’s fascinating, in our analysis, is our evaluation of ambiguity and how its clever use makes up for the animation and limitations. Watch the movie, check out our comments and add your own.
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).
YouTube Version of This Episode
Show Notes & Links
RunwayML’s third annual AI Film Festival is now open to submissions until 31st March
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 –
This month, we have another packed episode, iClone 8 update, Balder’s Gate 3 modding tools, Starfield expansion, projects, projects, projects, Sketchfab, Backrooms, YouTube AI disclosure and more. Check out the ep and be sure to comment too.
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 –
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