Hidden Levels #4: Machinima

Back in the 90s, artists turned video games into movie sets, and their wildest ideas are finally hitting documentaries.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

  Instagram teen accounts have automatic protections on by default. Built-in content settings for the content teens can see, contact limits for who can contact them, and time management tools like daily time limits and sleep mode. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts, and teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of these settings to be less strict. Instagram will continue adding built-in safety features to help create age-appropriate experiences. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. This fall, LL Bean is celebrating the moments people look forward to all year: the first school drop-off, the first sweater-weather day, and the first chilly evening around the fire pit.

• 0:45Roman Mars?

  For over 100 years, LL Bean has been part of these traditions: crunching leaves in Maine-made Bean Boots, cheering from the sidelines in Scotch plaid flannel, and walking the dog in a rugged field coat. So grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean: Be an Outsider. 99% Invisible is presented by Acura. Curating and designing the perfect experience takes meticulous craft, an obsession with detail, and a love for innovation. Just like museum designers, Acura carefully considers every detail to curate the most engaging, exhilarating, and rewarding experience for drivers.

• 1:30Roman Mars?

  That craft isn't always something you can see, but it's something you'll feel: that flutter in your heart, the engine roars. Every Acura is designed with deliberate intention around how people actually use the vehicles. And that is precision-crafted performance.

• 1:51Roman Mars?

  I'm Roman Mars from 99% Invisible.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  And I'm Ben Brock Johnson from Endless Thread.

• 1:57Roman Mars?

  And this is episode four of Hidden Levels, our show about how the world of video games has changed the world beyond video games.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Roman, are you familiar with the concept of a video game trailer?

• 2:11Roman Mars?

  Well, I've never seen one, but I'm guessing it's just like a movie trailer, but for video games.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Ding ding ding. And as advertisements for video games, these things work on me. I spend a lot of time watching them. You know, the first video game trailer I remember, the one that got me to spend way too much time in high school, putting off my homework and instead booting up, I think, Windows 95 to play a video game was for Warcraft II.

• 2:37Roman Mars?

  Tides of Darkness.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  The once mighty army of Azeroth lay among the blackened and charred remains of Stormwind Keep. Those that escaped fled across the Great Sea, bringing tales of the suffering they had faced at the hands of the Orcish hordes.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  The game was awesome, if pretty two dimensional, but the trailer, the trailer was more three dimensional. It actually doesn't look that much like the game. It had these kind of sweeping camera angles in it, the music that was super epic and kind of told its own story, just like a good movie trailer does. That all felt new and different to me in the video game world.

• 3:21Roman Mars?

  So when I watch this, I mean, this really looks like a movie. It doesn't look like a video game, right? It certainly doesn't look like a video game from 1995. Like the camera angles, the presentation, it's really cinematic. It almost seems like they're lying about the game you're about to play here anyway. But the key here is that this is all using the language of cinema, not the language of video games.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  That's right. And one of the big changes in the last few decades of games is that as two dimensional game environments became three dimensional, Roman, graphics got better, game worlds became more open. Video games didn't just get marketed like movies, they became more like movies themselves. Today, lots of Hollywood actors are in games and many games have their own cinematographers.

• 4:09Roman Mars?

  And today on Hidden Levels, we're going to talk about the increasingly blended worlds of games and movies and the boom and bust history of movies inside games. This episode is from 99PI contributor Andrew Calloway.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  In 2020, Sam Crane was feeling lost. He's a professional actor and he had just booked The Gig of a Lifetime on London's West End. But when the pandemic hit, all the theaters shut down and Sam was stuck waiting for the world to reopen. He wasn't much of a video game person until he saw his son watching YouTube videos of people playing games. Then he realized there was a whole other world that hadn't shut down. Sam got ahold of his son's PlayStation and invited some friends to join him online.

• 5:01Speaker 04

  A lot of people found at that time that actually hanging out in those spaces is like really fun, certainly when compared to like doing Zoom calls with friends or family.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  At first, he was just having fun, but artistic inspiration struck when he entered the virtual world of Grand Theft Auto V.

• 5:24Speaker 05

  If you're a parent that should send shivers down your spine if you hear these three words, "Grand Theft Auto."

• 5:31Speaker 03

  Now, if you don't know what Grand Theft Auto is, it's only the most financially successful piece of entertainment ever. GTA is a video game in which you play as a gangster who's trying to build a criminal empire. It's notorious for its extreme cartoonish violence and cheat code hacks for mini-games where your avatar can have sex with a stripper. For a game so crass and content, the level of detail in Grand Theft Auto is breathtaking. From autumn leaves falling to the reflection of the sunset glistening and ocean waves. And the city of San Andreas, where it all takes place, is so enormous, you could spend ages exploring and still not find everything.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  So it was tucked away in a hidden area of the map that Sam made a discovery which charted the course for the next several years of his life. In one fortuitous moment, he found an empty theater.

• 6:28Speaker 04

  Oh, look at this. It's like...

• 6:35Speaker 04

  A massive kind of arena.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  This is a recording from Sam's gameplay.

• 6:40Speaker 04

  I wonder if you could actually stage something here.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  What, like a put on a play? Yeah.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  That first voice is Sam, and the second is Mark Oosterveen, Sam's friend, fellow actor, and his guide through the world of GTA. Sam and Mark decided to stage a play in the Grand Theft Auto Theater. And of course, our British friends obviously defaulted to Shakespeare, perhaps his most violent play, Hamlet.

• 7:12Speaker 03

  Now, GTA V Online is full of other players, real people from around the world that you can interact with. Sam and Mark decided to use this aspect of the game to their advantage, filling the cast of their Hamlet by auditioning strangers from the streets of San Andreas.

• 7:30Speaker 04

  Okay. Oh, look, we've got another audience member here. This is Hamlet, William Shakespeare's Hamlet. I just messaged everyone in the servers. I didn't know who they were. They're just random people in the servers. They say, hey, we're doing this performance. Come. And then a couple of people turned up.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  This was a fun idea, but they also knew it wouldn't be easy because a lot of the other players in GTA are primed for violence.

• 7:54Speaker 04

  If I could just request that you refrain from killing each other. It was like a real kind of electric feeling, that adrenaline you get in performance. And don't kill the actors either.

• 8:07Speaker 03

  Since most interactions in the game involve murder, it's a little bit strange to come across a group of folks standing around peacefully rehearsing a Shakespeare play. So Sam and Mark found that every audition was a risk to their lives.

• 8:22Speaker 04

  And then obviously the fact that when they started shooting each other and then the police turned up, again, that just adds to it. It was just like, oh, my God, this is, this is alive. This is dangerous. This is like theatrical.

• 8:33Speaker 04

  This is the police.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  Oh, farewell, honest soldier. Who has relieved you? Cut, stop, ah, mother.

• 8:40Speaker 04

  Oh, they got me.

• 8:43Speaker 06

  Me too.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  Staging this Grand Theft Auto version of Hamlet became a full-time obsession for Sam, whose wife Penny is a documentary filmmaker. And since she also couldn't practice her craft outside of the house, she decided to make her pandemic project a behind-the-scenes documentary of Sam's pandemic project.

• 9:04Speaker 07

  Sam and I had never worked together, but it kind of felt like, oh, this is territory that I kind of like and know about. What does a filmmaker in GTA look like?

• 9:14Speaker 04

  Well, you can choose.

• 9:16Speaker 07

  I would like to look slightly like Tilda Swinton, to be honest.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  Filming the game is easy. All you have to do is record the screen. But Penny wanted to take what they were doing and make a real film out of it. She wanted it to look cinematic. In GTA, all the players carry guns, but they have the option of switching out their AR-15s for a cellphone, which receives missions and can be used to communicate with other players. This virtual cellphone also has a camera. So Penny decided, instead of carrying a gun, she would switch to the cellphone and film everything with that.

• 9:53Speaker 07

  You were able to go in and do close-ups with it. And it also made it very still, which was avoiding that swinging around footage that's very hectic that you watch on YouTube. And it just meant that I had a sort of cinematic language. I had a variety of different shots. And I just suddenly thought, I do actually think we can do this. Like, it is gonna be a film.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Over the next year, Sam and Mark staged their production of Hamlet inside GTA, and Penny filmed the whole thing, which became a documentary called Grand Theft Hamlet. It's filmed entirely inside the game. You never see Mark or Sam's real-life bodies, only their GTA avatars. Grand Theft Hamlet played at South by Southwest in 2024, where it won Best Documentary Feature. I saw it there, and it blew my mind. It looks like an animated film, but it isn't really. What makes Grand Theft Hamlet special is that

• 10:51Speaker 03

  it's a documentary filmed entirely in an active virtual world, full of real people's avatars. It's so uncanny to watch, because it has all the surreality and beauty of an animated film, but it's also spontaneous and awkward, like a real-life documentary. To me, it felt like an entirely new kind of movie. And to Penny, it felt that way making it.

• 11:15Speaker 07

  Obviously, I'd never made a film inside a computer game, so it was quite a new challenge.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  Part of the uncanny feeling of watching Grand Theft Hamlet was that it felt so inevitable. Like, of course, a movie taking place entirely inside a video game works. Why hasn't anybody done this before? But it turns out Grand Theft Hamlet is not the first movie made inside a game. They had stumbled on a whole tradition going back to the 1990s, and it even has a name: machinima.

• 11:50Speaker 03

  The word machinima is a portmanteau of machine and cinema. Some people prefer to say machinima. I'm using machinima. Both pronunciations are totally fine. What's important is that it refers to movies that were filmed using video games, and it was coined back in 1998. Back then, Roger Ebert, the most famous film critic of all time, asked if video game tech would revolutionize the way we make movies.

• 12:17Speaker 08

  And here's a bulletin. The Sony Playstations that will be marketed next year will have about the same computing power as the computers that made Toy Story. Kids will be able to create real-time animation on their own computers. Will that be the beginning of an artistic renaissance? Or maybe will it just make for more point-and-shoot video games? Well, it's a good question.

• 12:39Speaker 03

  That is a good question, Roger Ebert.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  The mainstream is just starting to warm up to these kinds of machinimated movies. But 30 years ago, an artistic renaissance was already underway. Because there are some stories that can only be told in the virtual world.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  One of the pioneers of machine ma is the animator Paul Marino. Well before Grand Theft Hamlet and the pandemic, in 1997, Paul was working in film and television, and he'd even won an Emmy. He wanted to make his own work, but he was getting slowed down by the super-long wait time to export files, which are called renders.

• 13:19Speaker 09

  We would send off animation renders that would take days to produce, 48 hours or so, just to have something, you know, to look at.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  But when Paul Marino was playing the video game Quake, he realized he could control the animation of the characters instantaneously. And he played with some friends who were also in the world of film, like Frank Delario.

• 13:39Speaker 10

  If you're making a live-action TV show, it would be a lot of work to set up a shot, and it would take you maybe all day or half a day. Where in Quake, we're pumping out shots.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  Paul the animator and Frank, the live-action filmmaker, were both feeling the same pain, that making movies just took way too long. But in Quake, everything was easier. You push a button, the character moves right away, and you can just film the animation like a regular live-action movie. Paul and Frank loved playing around with it. And when they realized that people were recording their gameplay to brag about how good they were, they saw the potential. With their combined experience in animation and live-action filmmaking, they started making their own movies inside Quake. And this was the birth of the Ill Clan.

• 14:32Speaker 11

  Rockin' to the beat from New York to Japan, it's the Ill Clan.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  The Ill Clan was made up of seven friends in New York City who played Quake together, and they all came up with ill names. For example, Paul Marino was Ill Robinson, named after Danger Will Robinson from Lost in Space. And Frank Delario was Ill Bixby, named after Bill Bixby, the actor who played the Incredible Hulk in the 70s.

• 14:59Speaker 03

  To make movies in Quake, the Ilk Clan all got together in one room with their computers connected via cables, and each person would puppeteer a character. But instead of moving around to play the game, they would do it to tell a story. This, of course, was all before the screen recording we know today. So to film their movies, the Ilk Clan had to make what's called a demo file, which could be shared online and played back inside another player's copy of Quake. And this wasn't the only technical limitation they were dealing with.

• 15:33Speaker 09

  Whenever you ran out of ammo, they gave you a melee weapon to use, and the melee weapon was an axe.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  Because they were working inside Quake, the Ilk Clan had to figure out a reason for their characters to be carrying around axes. So they turned them into lumberjacks.

• 15:49Speaker 09

  How do we justify them walking around with axes? So you're like, okay, well, we can at least make them look like lumberjacks if we can't take away their axes.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  So their first film, titled Apartment Hunting, was about lumberjacks looking for an apartment.

• 16:03Speaker 12

  Non-lumberjacks to see the apartment. Non-lumberjacks, my eyes, you guys are both carrying axes, all three of you are.

• 16:09Speaker 03

  The 3D graphics of Quake were impressive for the time, but the characters were still pretty blocky, and there wasn't a lot of details in the faces. So like a theater production, they had to rely on loud performances to get their emotions across.

• 16:23Speaker 12

  All right, okay, I got it, I got it, I got it, we're fine, we're fine.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  They called Apartment Hunting a "quartune," like a cartoon but with a Q for Quake. Their work was super inspired by Looney Tunes and the Marx Brothers. It's a lot of silly slapstick comedy. And to film the action, the Ilk Clan designated one player as the camera person, whose point of view captured all the action.

• 16:46Speaker 09

  One of the things about creating a Quake movie was that it also needed to play back in Quake. We didn't have YouTube at the time, so it wasn't like you could just upload a streamed file for people to watch. And as a result of that, in order to do an edit, the camera person effectively would need to teleport.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  Okay, so there are interdimensional gateways in Quake that the player can use to fast-travel between locations. The Ilk Clan repurposed them to imitate the effect of having multiple cameras by teleporting the camera person to a different location in order to get a different angle. For example, in Apartment Haunten, the two main lumberjack characters get separated, and it intercuts between them in different rooms.

• 17:29Speaker 12

  Duke Caucus could not have won that election. Well, the problem was, he understood the political machine, but... Wow, nice, cool.

• 17:36Speaker 09

  This intercut between this very kind of intellectual discussion.

• 17:41Speaker 13

  But Heidegger and Hegel didn't even know each other.

• 17:44Speaker 12

  But they understood existence. They understood how I preceded essence.

• 17:47Speaker 09

  And just this absolute, the most stupid thing we could show on screen.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  People in the Quake community loved Apartment Haunten. Their demo file became a cult favorite. But Paul had a bigger vision for Machinima. He wanted people who didn't play Quake to be able to watch their movies. And so, he started a nonprofit called The Academy for Machinima Arts and Sciences, which claimed that Machinima was going to take over Hollywood by speeding up production 30 to 40%. Machinima became very popular very quickly. A sitcom-style show filmed in the game Halo, called Red vs. Blue, was a massive success. It spawned a company called Rooster Teeth. There was also a website called machinima.com, which was a central hub for viewing Machinima films before YouTube existed.

• 18:41Speaker 03

  In 2001, Time Out New York wrote a feature about Machinima featuring quotes from Roger Ebert, who said, "Machinima proved that affordable, accessible animation is on the way." Soon, Machinima started making appearances on television. The Drew Carey Show filmed inside The Sims.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  The Beastie Boys directed a music video in NBA Street 3 for MTV.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  But perhaps the biggest piece of machinima TV came via Comedy Central.

• 19:18Speaker 14

  This could very well lead to the end of the world of Warcraft.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  In an episode of South Park called "Make Love Not Warcraft", the characters' voices were coming out of their avatars in the World of Warcraft video game. This episode actually won an Emmy. The South Park guys needed to make it as machinima because of the show's super quick production schedule. Here's South Park's Trey Parker talking about that in an audio commentary.

• 19:45Speaker 15

  It's kind of like directing a live action shoot. You're just sitting there going, "Okay, everyone run over here", and they would just all do it within the game and we'd capture that. Having to animate all those individually would have taken forever.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  With all of this happening, machinima.com became an economic powerhouse, becoming one of YouTube's top five channels, reaching over a billion monthly views. They made a deal with game studios so machinimators could monetize their work. For a time, it seemed like a few lucky creators could make a career from machinima.

• 20:21Speaker 03

  While machinima was going mainstream, the original artists, like Paul Marino, were still off on the sidelines, trying to make art with their work and push the medium forward. All these television shows got permission from the people who made the games to broadcast their work. But a lot of independent creators like Paul couldn't make real money off of machinima.

• 20:42Speaker 09

  We were in this kind of punk rock phase where we're like, "Yeah, we'd do all this stuff with this game technology and [bleep] all the legal stuff around it." But at the same time, you know, we want to be looked at as people that are serious about our craft.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  As machinima started to find audiences and commercial success, the Ilkland were setting out to prove that machinima should be taken seriously as an art form. For the sequel to Apartment Hutton, Paul Marino hacked into Quake and imported his own custom 3D models. So they weren't using any of the game's IP, like characters or locations, just the underlying software that makes the game run in real time. The Ilkland were winning a bunch of awards at film festivals around the world. But the Ilkland's next big innovation is what took Machinima to the next level. Everything they had made up until this point was basically an animated film that

• 21:39Speaker 03

  happens to have been made inside a video game. In 2004, they were invited to the Florida Film Festival for their first ever live performance.

• 21:49Speaker 16

  The Ilkland is about to take the process one step further. They're now ready to produce a Machinima film in front of a live audience.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  Frank Delario from Ilkland told me that the Florida Film Festival had heard about how they could render animation in real time.

• 22:06Speaker 10

  What they heard was, oh, they do live animation? So they contacted us, like, hey, you want to come down to Florida Film Festival and do live animation?

• 22:14Speaker 13

  Ciao! Benvenuto and welcome to Common Sense Cooking with Cook Carl, the show where you can learn to cook just like Cook Carl. And today we're...

• 22:24Speaker 03

  Thanks to Paul's custom 3D models, the digital puppeteers could now control not only the mouths of the characters to lip sync to what they were saying, but also subtle facial expressions, like raising an eyebrow. And they could do it live. They made a film in real time called Common Sense Cooking with Carl the Cook.

• 22:43Speaker 06

  I was thinking maybe to make this into Lenny Lumberjack's cooking show. What do you think? I thought that it's a good idea.

• 22:50Speaker 12

  Yeah, they like the idea. Carl, it'll be fine. Human interest. Let's go on the back. Sorry, Carl, you're out.

• 22:55Speaker 10

  Afterwards, people were kind of like, whoa. Like, they were freaking out.

• 23:01Speaker 03

  It's understandable that people were freaking out. Nobody had ever seen anything like live animation. Characters up on a movie screen responding to the audience in real time. It was a huge hit, and they took the show on the road, performing live at Stanford and even the Lincoln Center. The Ilkland were the first people to really take advantage of the real-time aspect of Machinima to do something completely unique, beyond simply making animation faster.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  The very next year, 2005, Halo 2 dropped. It included a voice chat for players to talk with each other, both friends and strangers. This was revolutionary for machinima. No one had ever filmed a movie in a functioning, active, virtual world, full of people from around our terrestrial world. This opened up lots of new possibilities. Like a live talk show.

• 24:00Speaker 17

  Live from New Mambasa, in the unpredictable multiplayer universe, This Spartan Life.

• 24:10Speaker 03

  Six months after Halo 2 dropped, a musician named Chris Burke came out with the first episode of This Spartan Life, a late-night talk show with monologues, sketches, and a host trying to hold it all together while strangers killed the people he was interviewing.

• 24:25Speaker 06

  Hey, guys, no burning the guest alive, please.

• 24:29Speaker 03

  What made This Spartan Life so special is that it's not just an animated talk show. The host and the guest are surrounded by real people who are playing the game.

• 24:39Speaker 06

  There's so many outtakes I have of me just yelling at the people in the game, like, "Don't kill the guest!" We're shooting a bad choice of work. We're recording an interview.

• 24:51Speaker 03

  The show is largely an investigation into what it means to exist as a human in one of these virtual worlds. And no guest spoke better to the magic of being an artist in the online game space than Malcolm McLaren, legendary fashion designer and manager of the Sex Pistols.

• 25:10Speaker 18

  The virtual world becomes a more comfortable world, a world where that outlaw spirit can exist, and a world where you can absolutely continue to have magnificent failures. A world where you can, in truth, become an artist again. This is the real, true story of rock and roll. It was not about anything other than how to live your life as a gangster in sartorial splendor and turning the world into a place where normality would never return again.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  This new direction for Machinima led to many imitators that got a lot of media attention and traveled to film festivals around the world. The French democracy, Molotov Alva and his search for the creator, the list goes on. But the golden age of Machinima only lasted a few years. First, machinima.com took a turn for the worse. According to Chris Burke, a lot of young machinima creators signed bad contracts with them.

• 26:15Speaker 06

  Within a few years, they got a little bit older and realized what had happened, and they started being very vocal about it on the internet, and machinima.com got a really bad name.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  Eventually, machinima.com realized that they didn't even need machinimators. You could get even more views on a video of someone just playing a game and talking. No edits, no scripts, no fancy filmmaking. And popular shows like Red vs. Blue also stopped making machinima and switched to traditional animation. Machinima.com and Rooster Teeth both ended up getting bought out and shut down by AT&T, and their entire archives were erased. Today, if you go to machinima.com, you're forwarded to Warner Brothers Discovery's website. And independent machinimators felt they weren't being taken seriously as artists either.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  Paul Marino of the Ill Clan was invited to an animation festival in Canada that had an award category specifically for machinima. But they decided not to give an award to any of the nominees.

• 27:23Speaker 09

  Right at that point, I stood up and walked out, and all the other machinima filmmakers followed me.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  A lot of other machinima creators followed Paul, out of the machinima game and into the video game game. Paul went to work on video games, making what are called cinematics, or cutscenes, the parts of the game that just play like a movie to move the story along. Frank Delario of The Ill Clan held on for a long time. He made an episode of CSI New York where Gary Sinise finds a killer through Second Life.

• 27:57Speaker 19

  Second Life? It's a metaverse, an online social network inside a virtual world.

• 28:04Speaker 03

  And a Super Bowl commercial for the sitcom Two and a Half Men, using The Sims.

• 28:09Speaker 06

  Charlie, the virtual world is amazing. I can be anything or go anywhere I want. Charlie, why aren't you changing? Alan, I'm single, rich, and I live at the beach. I'm OK with reality.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  But eventually, the novelty wore off, and paying work, making machinima, disappeared completely.

• 28:31Speaker 10

  We stopped in 2010 officially. And then we went into just traditional video from that point. Yeah.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  And did you miss, you know, making movies on the video games?

• 28:43Speaker 10

  Um, at the time, I don't think I did. But at one point, I'm working at an ad agency here, and it was in San Francisco. I was a project manager. And we're doing, you know, mobile websites and things like that, you know, for AT&T, for big clients and stuff like that. And at one point, I show one of the videos that we did. And it was a VP, and she goes, "Oh, my God, well, what are you doing here?" I was like, "Oh, my God." You know, you felt terrible because, I mean, we were in New York Times Magazine. We performed live at Lincoln Center and all that. But, and I imagine, like a band, you have your period of time, and then after, you're not the belle of the ball anymore. And then what?

• 29:25Speaker 03

  All of this machinima history went away and was forgotten. And for a full decade, the 2010s, not much happened.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  But now, finally, I feel like the dream of machinima taking over the cinemas is coming true. A lot of Hollywood movies use virtual production, a technique in which realtime video game engines like Unreal are used to put actors in virtual environments. This is what they use on a little movie series called Avatar and the Star Wars TV show The Mandalorian? Virtual production isn't exactly machinima, but it wouldn't exist without machinima. And machinima proper is coming back too. And it's not just Grand Theft Hamlet. There's a whole new wave of documentary machinima.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  Nits Island, another documentary filmed inside an online video game, has won lots of awards at film festivals. It was even nominated for Best Feature at the same film festival that Paul Marino walked out of. And a film called The Remarkable Life of Evelyn won Best Documentary at Sundance and was shortlisted for the Best Documentary Oscar. It uses machinima to recreate the virtual life of Mott Steen, a teenager with muscular dystrophy who lived a vivid life online in the world of Warcraft.

• 30:54Speaker 20

  In there, my chains are broken and I can be whoever I want to be.

• 31:01Speaker 21

  We had the whole, "Let's go on a date together," and he would give the flowers.

• 31:05Speaker 20

  It was just a virtual kiss, but boy, I could almost feel it.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  To me, this doesn't feel like a flash in the pan. Machinima is taking the documentary film world by storm. Remarkable Life of Evelyn has been a huge hit on Netflix, and Grand Theft Hamlet became the first machinima ever to be released in movie theaters earlier this year.

• 31:28Speaker 07

  I'm kind of surprised that we are weirdly like the first machinima film to be distributed in a cinema, you know? I think there'll be more stuff like this.

• 31:39Speaker 03

  Penny and the rest of the Grand Theft Hamlet team loved working inside a video game and the things that it unlocked for them as no-budget indie filmmakers making a movie in their bedroom. For example, they got to film on a blimp for free, which is nice. Also, Hamlet is a ghost story, but they didn't have to design any crazy special effects. They could just turn the character into a ghost using passive mode.

• 32:08Speaker 22

  In passive mode in the game, you're transparent, you're kind of see-through, and people can literally walk through you.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  Penny was also intrigued by the limitations of filming in GTA V, because when you're making a movie inside a game, you have to follow some rules.

• 32:24Speaker 07

  There was actually some super really interesting things, which I wish I'd put more into the film about, like, weird workarounds that he had to do, like, the closet scene. Obviously, Polonius has to get murdered by Hamlet accidentally, but you can't kill people inside.

• 32:38Speaker 22

  Yes.

• 32:39Speaker 07

  Inside buildings.

• 32:40Speaker 22

  You cannot be killed in an indoor space in GTA V. So we had to find somewhere where there was something that could conceivably be a closet, but it had to be outside. So we used the grotto in...

• 32:53Speaker 07

  The Playboy Mansion.

• 32:54Speaker 22

  Yeah, yeah. So it was tricky.

• 32:58Speaker 03

  Despite the challenges, Penny sees a lot of benefits to working in Machinima as a documentarian, even now that the pandemic's over. In fact, she's now working on an expanded, immersive version of their Grand Theft Hamlet performance called Be the Player's Ready. So much of making a documentary is about access. And for Penny, one of the most amazing things about filming inside an online video game is that you can meet and talk with people all around the world without leaving your apartment. The magic of Machinima is in how it can connect people who would have never, ever been in the same place otherwise.

• 33:39Speaker 07

  I think that it just gives you access and opportunity to find all these amazing characters. I think that's something that is pretty unique. I mean, I don't know of another environment that offers that. There's something inherently exciting about that game space. And like, I think the filmmakers, worth their salt, are always attracted to making films that reflect the world we live in, right? And increasingly, people are living in game spaces for many hours a day. And it would be very odd if we didn't start turning our attention to those narratives and to those relationships and to those communities. And so it was kind of inevitable in a way.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  Penny's not done making art with video games. She learned while making Grand Theft Hamlet. There are things you can only film inside a game.

• 34:29Roman Mars?

  We have more with Andrew Callaway after this.

• 34:35Roman Mars?

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• 35:18Roman Mars?

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• 35:59Roman Mars?

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• 36:41Roman Mars?

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• 37:26Roman Mars?

  Ben Brock Johnson.

• 37:27Speaker 03

  Roman Mars.

• 37:28Roman Mars?

  We are back with Andrew Callaway. Hey, Andrew.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  Hey, Roman. Hey, Ben.

• 37:32Roman Mars?

  So I know there are a lot of recent developments in the world of Machinima that we couldn't get to in your story, and you want to talk about some of them.

• 37:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. So you know, there's this big renaissance in Machinima right now. You remember in the story I talked about Rooster Teeth? They were the company that made Red versus Blue?

• 37:48Roman Mars?

  Yes. Red versus Blue was my first introduction to all of this. It was a big deal when it came out, when I was aware of it.

• 37:54Speaker 03

  Well, so Rooster Teeth, the company that made Red vs. Blue, were bought out in 2014, and AT&T shut down their archives last year. But now, one of the original creators just bought back the company name and has revived the domain and the archives, and presumably they're planning on bringing back Red vs. Blue, one of the most popular machinima series of all time. But also, there's a lot of new people getting into the world of machinima. Like, do you know the filmmaker Harmony Corin?

• 38:24Roman Mars?

  Yes, yeah. I saw Kids when it came out, and yeah, I will never forget seeing Kids.

• 38:29Speaker 03

  And Spring Breakers as well, has done a lot of crazy stuff. But now, he's interested in video game technology. And he's set up a studio called Edge Lord, but you know, it's missing some vowels in there.

• 38:41Roman Mars?

  Of course, of course, it's called Edge Lord. Of course, it's called Edge Lord.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  And, you know, his latest film, Baby Invasion, played the Venice Film Festival, and he's using machinima technology to be able to kind of remix it live as a kind of DJVJ set, which is cool. But for me, the best shot of machinima entering mass culture is a thing called Skibidi Toilet. Have you all, you've all heard of this, I assume?

• 39:08Roman Mars?

  I of course know what Skibidi Toilet is in passing, certainly, although I'm not Generation Alpha.

• 39:14Speaker 03

  Well, it's a YouTube series, and yes, it went super viral. It was so popular at its height, it was getting over 3 billion monthly views, which is like more successful than any TV show ever. But what most people don't know about it is that it's machinima.

• 39:30Roman Mars?

  Huh, huh, that's so cool. So could you explain to us a little bit what Skibidi Toilet is all about?

• 39:36Speaker 03

  Sure, but I actually talked to a YouTuber named Matt Pat, who created the very popular channel Game Theory, and I think he can explain it a little bit better than me.

• 39:47Speaker 23

  It is an epic Transformers-like battle between a faction of camera-headed people versus a faction of toilets with heads coming out of them.

• 39:56Roman Mars?

  Okay, yep, of course, of course. Okay, so let me, let me repeat this back so that I make sure I got it right. There are toilets with human heads.

• 40:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 40:05Roman Mars?

  And then there are other creatures with human bodies but camera heads, and they are fighting in a, in a battle.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  A Transformers-like battle, Roman, Transformers.

• 40:14Roman Mars?

  Transformers-like battle, that's, that's right. So how do camera heads and toilet head people, how do they fight?

• 40:21Speaker 03

  So it really starts with the camera headed people just flushing the human heads down the toilet. And then, you know, the toilets fight back with lasers out of their eyes that they shoot at people. And next thing you know, entire cities are getting decimated. The scale gets bigger and bigger and bigger because eventually the skeebity toilets and the camera head people have to join forces to fight a new enemy called Astro toilets, which are enormous. And they fly around and they have lots of heavy machinery attached to them and like spinning claws and are very intense. And I know that this all sounds pretty ridiculous, but to me, I think.

• 41:02Roman Mars?

  It sounds perfectly normal. But go on.

• 41:06Speaker 03

  A lot of people would call it brain rot or something like that. Like, it's just a random collection of stupid scatological humor. But I think the filmmaking is actually pretty sophisticated. For the first like 50 episodes, each scene is like a unbroken one-er. So there's very sophisticated blocking happening in all of these fight scenes that must have been very, very hard to make and design. But it can also be viewed as a piece of media criticism. And Matt Pat says that it can be viewed as an allegory for our media landscape.

• 41:44Speaker 23

  If you look at how the toilets and the cameras are depicted throughout these 77 episodes, you can tell a meta narrative about YouTube versus traditional media or digital creators versus traditional creators, right? The toilets, you know, they are these creatures of memedum. You know, they're made out of machinima. And then contrast that with the camera people who are high caliber production equipment, movie cameras, high end audio equipment. They attack using the THX sound effect that like to test out movie theater sound systems, right? They're attacking with the the medium of traditional old school entertainment, like higher end, classier stuff.

• 42:28Speaker 23

  Both sides are represented from a different form of music. On one side, you have the toilets that are represented by this kind of mishmash of songs fused together to create this earworm.

• 42:44Speaker 23

  Contrast that with the Alliance, the camera-headed people who use "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" by Tears for Fears. Classic like 1980s nostalgia, right? So again, you have this battle between new media, new music versus old school stuff.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  I get it. I get it. What about you, Roman?

• 43:05Roman Mars?

  I'm catching on to it. This is, this is, sounds pretty good and, and more sophisticated than I was maybe first thought in the very beginning. But I guess it doesn't explain to me what the Astro toilets are all about. What is their theme song or what is their agenda?

• 43:19Speaker 03

  Great question. I asked Matt Pat about this and I thought his theory was pretty interesting.

• 43:26Speaker 23

  Oh, man, I don't have a whole lot of evidence to support it. It's still early in the Astro Toilet lore. When I look at just broad strokes of what the story has become, you have YouTube, the digital content, has had to join forces with traditional media through the camera heads. And what's the new existential threat for both of these worlds? It's AI. It's the computer-generated stuff. So they need to work together to take down this big existential threat, Astro Toilet AI.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. And you know, one of the things that I love personally thinking about Machinima is that the creator of Skibidi Toilet is a 25-year-old guy from the country of Georgia. And now he has created one of the most successful pieces of IP introduced in the past decade. And so it feels like Machinima has had this democratizing effect that people have been talking about, you know, back in the 90s.

• 44:16Roman Mars?

  You know, when you put it that way, I mean, I know it was sort of dismissive of Skibidi Toilet in the beginning. I mean, like, you know, I'm only human. I'm old. But, but when you, when you talk about this 25-year-old guy from Georgia making this like hugely popular, speaks to so many people with, you know, tools that you can purchase online and do it. That is kind of amazing. I mean, I was amazed by zines and punk rock. It's the same principle to me. I kind of love it. And if new generations of people are not making art that offends and confounds older people, then they're not trying art enough. That's what art should be about, being confusing to me. So I actually love it.

• 44:56Speaker 03

  You know, and you can watch five or six episodes in about a minute or two, because most of them are under 10 seconds.

• 45:02Speaker 23

  10 seconds?

• 45:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, real quick.

• 45:06Roman Mars?

  Oh, yeah. Well, that earns the name Brain Rod. If the narrative goes 10 seconds long. Oh, my goodness.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  You know, pair of baby shoes never worn. You can do it, Roman. I believe it.

• 45:17Roman Mars?

  Oh, that's true. Thank you, Andrew.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Thanks a lot, Andrew.

• 45:21Roman Mars?

  Thanks, guys.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Now, Roman, before we end this episode, I have a question for you.

• 45:32Roman Mars?

  Shoot.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  You're our hero. You're on a big, big quest. And as you're traveling along the open road, the dangerous open road, your journey is interrupted by a fellow traveler who needs your help. If you help them, you're veering off from your main quest. Your interruption might lead you to a place where there be dragons, but also maybe where there be treasure, which could help you in your larger quest. Roman Mars, the hero of our story, would you take this side quest?

• 45:59Roman Mars?

  I always take a side quest.

• 46:02Roman Mars?

  I always take a side quest because the big game is like hard to complete. And the side quest is so satisfying. It's just like, it's like a thing on your to do list that you could knock off first thing in the day, like brush your teeth or something.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Your always be side questing t-shirt is in the mail. So look out for that. And Roman Mars, fellow traveler and adventurer and side quester, I have good news for you. We have put together a couple of special side quest episodes for Hidden Levels listeners. And your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find these episodes on the Endless Thread feed and listen to them. The first one is out today. It comes to us from producer Franny Monahan. Hey, Franny.

• 46:41Speaker 24

  Hello.

• 46:43Roman Mars?

  So Franny, what journey are you taking us on with this side quest?

• 46:46Speaker 24

  Well, you could say that my side quest is pretty character driven, as in it's about characters.

• 46:54Roman Mars?

  Like any good movie or piece of fiction, they're all character based in the end, aren't they?

• 46:59Speaker 24

  Yeah, and specifically, this story is about the characters you get to design yourself in games. So their body, their clothes, their skills. And it's about how creating a character and playing as that character can be a really powerful way to explore your own character, IRL, your identity.

• 47:21Speaker 25

  My mom and my brother specifically were asking, like, why do you spend so much time with this game? Why is it so important that you play this character? And I said, Because I get to be beautiful. It wasn't about a peak physical beauty that I wanted. I just wanted to feel good about myself. I wanted to feel at home in my body.

• 47:40Roman Mars?

  Oh, that sounds so cool. I cannot wait to listen.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you can listen to that story right now on the Endless Thread feed.

• 47:47Roman Mars?

  And coming up Tuesday on Hidden Levels, our fifth episode, how video games shape our natural world.

• 47:53Speaker 26

  I can build my house on a beach. I can, I can build my house in a rainforest, you know? I can't do that in real life.

• 47:59Roman Mars?

  This episode was produced by Andrew Coway, edited by Chris Berube, mixed by Martine Gonzalez, fact checking by Laura Boland. Original music by Swan Real, Jamila Sandoto, and Paul Vitkus. The super cool music by Swan and Paul for Hidden Levels is being released as an album. You can listen everywhere you stream music. Special thanks to Anna Hanks, Dr. Henry Lowood, and Matteo Batanti. The managing producer for Hidden Levels is Chris Berube.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Hidden Levels was created by me, Ben Brock Johnson, while fleeing a Lionel on the way to Level Nine Death Mountain in Zelda, with power ups and cheat codes, thanks to Team 99% Invisible and Team Endless Thread. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR. The rest of our team tackling unsolved mysteries, untold histories, and other wild stories from the internet includes my illustrious co-host, Amory Severson, managing producer, Selma Tajoshi, editor Meg Kramer, producers Dean Russell, Grace Tatter, and Franny Monahan, and sound designer Emily Jankowski. 99% Invisible's executive producer is Kathy Tu. Kirk Colstead is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Jason DeLeón,

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Laishma Dawn, Jacob Adina Gleason, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. The art for this series was created by Aaron Nester. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. We'll see you for a new episode of Hidden Levels on Tuesday.

• 49:41Speaker 27

  Hey, this is Will Arnett, host of Smartless. Smartless is a podcast with myself and Sean Hayes and Jason Bateman, where each week one of us reveals a mystery guest of the other two. We dive deep with guests that you love, like Bill Hader, Selena Gomez, Jennifer Aniston, David Beckham, Kristen Stewart, and tons more. So join us for a genuinely improvised and authentic conversation filled with laughter and newfound knowledge to feed the smartless mind. Listen to Smartless now on the SiriusXM app. Download it today.

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