Valve Archives - Completely Machinima

S4 E144 Assault on 2Fort (Aug 2024)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes August 28, 2024 Leave a reply

This week we take a look at another stunning Team Fortress 2 short called Assault on 2Fort by JP Stevens aka Lolripk, a recommendation made to us by Dominzki (whose own TF2 short we reviewed in E135). What a great choice this is: we loved this film, a classic RED vs BLU tale but with a layer of emotion that is as beautifully portrayed as it is unexpected in SFM. These characters have real depth to them and we note how that’s been achieved, even though the focal character doesn’t even speak. Did we mention the fight choreography too? We reflect on the game lore, the significance of the community in the creative process, and how this story is told from an unusal perspective. We also reflect on why machinima series almost never complete… but we certainly hope Lolripk doesn’t follow the pattern!

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Show Notes & Links

Assault on 2Fort by Lolripk, released 9 July 2022 –

Trailer for part 2 –

About the TF2 game lore, wiki link here

S4 E142 Half Life: OVERWORLD (Aug 2024)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes August 14, 2024 Leave a reply

This week’s selection is a stunning cinematic imaginary by Unknown Dino, focussing on the next version of Half Life (soon to be released… er, well, possibly in the next 10 years or so?). There is a lot of craft in this film, called HL: Overworld and made in Blender, which has taken its inspiration both from the HL Reddit community and the HL2 Artbook ‘Raising The Bar’. We also talk about the positioning of the new world portrayed as being the next obvious logical step in the story arc for Half Life – HL1 being a portal through which aliens jump to Earth, HL2 being a kind of survival against the odds, Alyx being the prequel, and HL3 being the fight back taken to those hateful Combine… yeah, we wish!

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Show Notes & Links

E142 Half Life: OVERWORLD by Unknown Dino, released 27 May 2024 –

Half-Life 2 Raising The Bar, link to pdf of artbook (feature image)

S4 E120 Machinima News Omnibus (Mar 2024)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes March 14, 2024 Leave a reply

This week’s podcast episode is our curated news omnibus for this month. We cover lots, and enjoy reflecting on the significance of the stories we highlight for the world of machinima and virtual production.

btw, the international internet pipes failed and microwaves fried our apps during this recording session, video corrupted and monsters ran loose among us, so enjoy the voice data we’ve managed to resurrect and video clips we’ve added – we’ll be back next week in full glory!

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Show Notes & Links

Fan communities under pressure?

Valve’s Steam policy and recent take downs for Team Fortress 2 and Portal fan projects – article on Games Radar here

Half Life 3 aka Entropy Zero (and 2) projects – Fandom.com overview here and video –

New Moviemaking Toolsets

Blockbuster Inc, Prologue version now on Steam here

Demo by Orbital Potato here –

Replikant now in free beta on the Unreal Marketplace.

Replikant has a Youtube channel with plenty of tutorials on it already, and there’s a great demo of it which gives you a sense of the animation quality it produces –

And for those wanting a quick and dirty tutorial on UE5, check this out –

Steamboatin’ Along!

Minecraft Steamboat Willie which is a fun take on it, made by Red and Blue –

Fewture Studios’ trailer for The Return of Steamboat Willie, made in Unreal Engine –

Screams

The origins and impact of the Wilhelm Scream – BBC shorts here

More about Sheb Wooley here

And another video about it here –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNvZYzg7o68

AI Genies Rising

Community action against deepfakes of Taylor Swift – link to story on BBC site here

Jae Solina has done a nice overview of OpenAI’s SORA here –

and this is a link to RunwayML’s video controller toolset (and our feature image for this post) –

The Suno model, released by ElevenLabs, for music composition – here is a fun example on X –

The new Suno model is a 10x leap forward for AI music.

Prompt: "Rap battle between GPT-4 and Gemini"

Stop whatever you're doing and listen.

AI music is coming. pic.twitter.com/mnZsaNkZvt
— Matt Shumer (@mattshumer_) March 1, 2024

S4 E119 Feature Length: Emesis Blue (Mar 2024)

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes March 7, 2024 Leave a reply

In all our years of involvement with machinima (over 75 years between us!), feature length has been something we’ve rarely found watchable… but with this week’s pick, we were proven wrong, mostly! Emesis Blue, made in Source Filmmaker using the Team Fortress 2 characterisations by Fortress Films, is an incredibly well-made if very complex story that was crafted over many years.

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Show Notes and Links

Film, by Fortress Films, released 21 Feb 2023 –

Another review here, by Durham College Chronicle.

Ricky discusses pulp fiction, not the Tarantino film, but the style – here’s a useful source to find out more

Phil compares the film to Nolan’s style of filmmaking – more on that here

S4 E103 Longest Walkable Distances (in a game) | UE: The Alchemist’s Confession (Nov 2023

Tracy Harwood Podcast Episodes November 16, 2023 Leave a reply

This week we present a critique of two very contrasting machinima productions – one took literally months to make and the other just a few days. In our first pick, the creator has asked: just how big are the maps in games these days? Well, vast actually – and quite frankly it blows our minds to think that so much effort has gone into answering the question. The film is called Longest Walkable Distances in a Video Game, by How Big is the Map. Our second film is a review of a creative experiment in Unreal Engine, called The Alchemist’s Confession by Cory Williams – it was inspired by a found marketplace asset and is experimental in a number of ways, not least in the five days it took to make it. Ricky highlights the weakness in the writing albeit the film is technically masterfully produced and acted, using mocap and LinkedIn (yep, you heard that correctly!). We also start this episode with some links we hope you enjoy and a discussion about the voice characterisation of G Man in the Half Life series.

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