Hidden Levels Ep. 4: Machinima

Machinima — a portmanteau of “machine” and “cinema” — refers to movies filmed inside video games. The art form had a renaissance in the 1990s, and many thought it had a future in Hollywood. Among the early pioneers were the New York animation collective the Ill Clan, who puppeteered characters in real-time inside the video game Quake, bypassing traditional animation rendering. This technique exploded into a cultural phenomenon through the 2000s with hits like Red vs. Blue, South Park’s Emmy-winning World of Warcraft episode, and This Spartan Life, a live talk show filmed inside Halo 2's unpredictable virtual world. However, machinima.com http://machinima.com/ faced controversies and eventually shut down, erasing its archive and leaving many original artists sidelined. Today, machinima is experiencing a powerful resurgence in documentary filmmaking. Projects like Grand Theft Hamlet, filmed during the pandemic entirely within Grand Theft Auto 5, proved that sophisticated feature films could be created in active, real-time virtual environments. Award-winning documentaries like The Remarkable Life of Ibelin showcase the medium’s emotional depth and its potential for democratizing creativity. What started as a technical workaround has evolved into a legitimate art form that continues to redefine the meaning of movies, and games. Credits: This episode was produced by Andrew Callaway and edited by Chris Berube. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Original music by Swan Real, Jamilah Sandoto and Paul Vaitkus. Fact-checking by Lara Bullens.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. A recent episode explores how AI is reshaping our schools. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:17Speaker 01

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• 0:33Speaker 02

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• 1:06Speaker 03

  I'm Roman Mars from 99% Invisible.

• 1:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  And I'm Ben Brock Johnson from Endless Thread.

• 1:12Speaker 03

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

• 1:22Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 1:26Speaker 03

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

• 1:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  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:

• 1:52Speaker 03

  Tides of Darkness.

• 1:55Speaker 05

  The once mighty army of Azaroth 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.

• 2:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  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.

• 2:36Speaker 03

  So when I watched 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 in a way. But the key here is that this is all using the language of cinema, not the language of video games.

• 2:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  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.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  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 Callaway.

• 3:44Speaker 06

  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.

• 4:16Speaker 07

  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.

• 4:28Speaker 06

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

• 4:39Speaker 08

  If you're a parent that should send shivers down your spine if you hear these three words.

• 4:44Speaker 09

  Grand Theft Auto.

• 4:47Speaker 06

  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 in 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. So it was tucked away in a hidden area of the map

• 5:32Speaker 06

  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.

• 5:45Speaker 07

  Oh, look at this. It's like a massive kind of arena.

• 5:53Speaker 06

  This is a recording from Sam's gameplay.

• 5:55Speaker 07

  I wonder if you could actually stage something here.

• 6:00Speaker 10

  What, like a put on a play?

• 6:02Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 6:03Speaker 06

  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.

• 6:28Speaker 06

  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.

• 6:45Speaker 07

  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.

• 6:59Speaker 06

  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.

• 7:10Speaker 07

  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.

• 7:23Speaker 06

  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.

• 7:37Speaker 07

  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. This is the police.

• 7:50Speaker 11

  Oh, farewell, honest soldier. Who has relieved you? You can't stop our mother.

• 7:56Speaker 07

  Oh, they got me.

• 7:58Speaker 06

  Me too. 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 practise her craft outside of the house, she decided to make her pandemic project a behind-the-scenes documentary of Sam's pandemic project.

• 8:20Speaker 12

  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?

• 8:30Speaker 07

  Well, you can choose.

• 8:32Speaker 12

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

• 8:35Speaker 06

  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.

• 9:10Speaker 12

  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.

• 9:30Speaker 06

  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 it's a documentary filmed entirely in an active virtual world, full of real people's avatars. It's so uncanny to watch,

• 10:15Speaker 06

  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.

• 10:31Speaker 12

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

• 10:36Speaker 06

  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. 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,

• 11:20Speaker 06

  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.

• 11:33Speaker 13

  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.

• 11:54Speaker 06

  That is a good question, Roger Ebert. 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. One of the pioneers of machinima 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.

• 12:34Speaker 14

  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.

• 12:42Speaker 06

  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.

• 12:55Speaker 15

  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.

• 13:04Speaker 06

  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.

• 13:47Speaker 09

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

• 13:51Speaker 06

  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.

• 14:15Speaker 06

  To make movies in Quake, the Ill 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 Ill 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.

• 14:48Speaker 14

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

• 14:54Speaker 06

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

• 15:04Speaker 14

  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.

• 15:13Speaker 06

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

• 15:19Speaker 16

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

• 15:25Speaker 06

  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.

• 15:42Speaker 06

  They called Apartment Hutton "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 Ilkland designated one player as the camera person, whose point of view captured all the action.

• 16:02Speaker 14

  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.

• 16:19Speaker 06

  Okay, so there are interdimensional gateways in Quake that the player can use to fast-travel between locations. The Ilkland 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 Hutton, the two main lumberjack characters get separated, and it intercuts between them in different rooms.

• 16:44Speaker 16

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

• 16:51Speaker 14

  This intercut between this very kind of intellectual discussion...

• 16:56Speaker 17

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

• 16:59Speaker 16

  But they understood existence, they understood how it preceded essence.

• 17:03Speaker 14

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

• 17:11Speaker 06

  People in the Quake community loved Apartment Hum. 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.

• 17:56Speaker 06

  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. The Beastie Boys directed a music video in NBA Street 3 for MTV. But perhaps the biggest piece of machinimated TV came via Comedy Central.

• 18:34Speaker 18

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

• 18:39Speaker 06

  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.

• 19:01Speaker 19

  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.

• 19:10Speaker 06

  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.

• 19:36Speaker 06

  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.

• 19:58Speaker 14

  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.

• 20:12Speaker 06

  As Machinima started to find audiences and commercial success, the Ilk Clan were setting out to prove that Machinima should be taken seriously as an art form. For the sequel to Apartment Hunter, 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 Ilk Clan were winning a bunch of awards at film festivals around the world. But the Ilk Clan'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 happens to have been made inside a video game.

• 20:57Speaker 06

  In 2004, they were invited to the Florida Film Festival for their first ever live performance.

• 21:06Speaker 20

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

• 21:15Speaker 06

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

• 21:22Speaker 15

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

• 21:30Speaker 17

  Ciao! Benvenuto and welcome to Common Sense Cooking with Carl, the show where you can learn to cook just like Carl.

• 21:38Speaker 06

  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.

• 21:59Speaker 09

  I was thinking maybe to make this into Lenny Lumberjack's cooking show. What do you think? I don't think it's a good idea. Yeah, they like the idea. Carl, it'll be fine. Human interest. Let's go in the back. Sorry, Carl, you're out.

• 22:11Speaker 15

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

• 22:16Speaker 06

  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 Ill Clan 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. 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.

• 23:01Speaker 06

  No one had ever filmed a movie and 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.

• 23:15Speaker 21

  Live from New Mambasa, in the unpredictable multiplayer universe, this Spartan life.

• 23:25Speaker 06

  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.

• 23:41Speaker 09

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

• 23:44Speaker 06

  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.

• 23:55Speaker 09

  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 words. We're recording an interview.

• 24:07Speaker 06

  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.

• 24:25Speaker 22

  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.

• 24:58Speaker 06

  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.

• 25:31Speaker 09

  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.

• 25:41Speaker 06

  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.

• 26:21Speaker 06

  And independent machinimators felt they weren't being taken seriously as artists either. 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.

• 26:38Speaker 14

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

• 26:45Speaker 06

  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.

• 27:13Speaker 10

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

• 27:19Speaker 06

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

• 27:25Speaker 09

  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 okay with reality.

• 27:37Speaker 06

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

• 27:46Speaker 15

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

• 27:55Speaker 06

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

• 27:58Speaker 15

  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, 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?

• 28:40Speaker 06

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

• 29:24Speaker 06

  And machinima proper is coming back too. And it's not just Grand Theft Hamlet. There's a whole new wave of documentary machinima. 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,

• 30:03Speaker 06

  a teenager with muscular dystrophy who lived a vivid life online in the world of Warcraft.

• 30:10Speaker 23

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

• 30:16Speaker 24

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

• 30:22Speaker 23

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

• 30:27Speaker 06

  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.

• 30:44Speaker 12

  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.

• 30:54Speaker 06

  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, it's 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.

• 31:23Speaker 11

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

• 31:29Speaker 06

  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.

• 31:39Speaker 12

  There was actually some super really interesting things, which I wish I'd put more in 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.

• 31:54Speaker 11

  Yes.

• 31:54Speaker 12

  Inside buildings.

• 31:55Speaker 11

  You cannot, 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 the Playboy Mansion. Yeah, yeah. So it was tricky.

• 32:14Speaker 06

  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 Players 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.

• 32:54Speaker 12

  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.

• 33:30Speaker 06

  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. We have more with Andrew Callaway after this.

• 33:53Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI?

• 34:05Speaker 25

  Instead of observing the final artifact, instead of observing the final essay or the final program, observe the entire process of creation.

• 34:15Speaker 00

  Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on rethinking academic and job assessment when AI can do the work.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  Get this. When you're with Xfinity, you're already a member. No sign up, no cost. Score epic experiences from our family at NBC Universal. Plus movie tickets, discounts on streaming, mobile, and more. Check the Xfinity app every Thursday for exclusive perks and experiences. Only with Xfinity. Now that's the way to start a weekend. Let the magic begin. Restrictions apply. Visit Xfinity.com/membership to learn more.

• 35:02Speaker 26

  Welcome to the 50th Hunger Games.

• 35:04Speaker 27

  Witness the beginning of the revolution.

• 35:07Speaker 26

  Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from Star.

• 35:10Speaker 27

  Filmed for IMAX.

• 35:11Speaker 26

  Make them remember you.

• 35:14Speaker 27

  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, November 20th, rated PG-13.

• 35:21Speaker 03

  Ben Brock Johnson.

• 35:22Speaker 06

  Roman Mars.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  We are back with Andrew Callaway. Hey, Andrew.

• 35:25Speaker 06

  Hey, Roman. Hey, Ben.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  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?

• 35:34Speaker 06

  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 vs. Blue?

• 35:44Speaker 03

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

• 35:49Speaker 06

  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?

• 36:19Speaker 03

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

• 36:25Speaker 06

  And Spring Breakers as well. He's 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.

• 36:36Speaker 03

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

• 36:40Speaker 06

  And, uh, 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 DJ VJ set, which is cool. But, uh, 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?

• 37:03Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 37:10Speaker 06

  Well, it's a YouTube series, and yes, it went super viral. It was so popular at its height, it was getting over three billion monthly views, which is like more successful than any TV show ever.

• 37:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  Wow.

• 37:22Speaker 06

  But what most people don't know about it is that it's machinima.

• 37:25Speaker 03

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

• 37:31Speaker 06

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

• 37:42Speaker 28

  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.

• 37:51Speaker 03

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

• 38:00Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 38:00Speaker 03

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

• 38:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  A Transformers-like battle, Roman, Transformers.

• 38:09Speaker 03

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

• 38:16Speaker 06

  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. Um, the scale gets bigger and bigger and bigger, because eventually, the Skibidi 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-

• 38:57Speaker 03

  It sounds perfectly normal.

• 39:00Speaker 06

  But go on. 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.

• 39:40Speaker 28

  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. They're 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.

• 40:23Speaker 28

  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.

• 40:39Speaker 28

  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.

• 40:58Speaker 06

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

• 41:00Speaker 03

  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?

• 41:14Speaker 06

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

• 41:21Speaker 28

  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.

• 41:48Speaker 06

  Yeah. And you know, one of the things that I love personally thinking about machinima is that the creator of city 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.

• 42:11Speaker 03

  You know, when you put it that way, I mean, I know it was sort of dismissive of skipity toilet in the beginning. I mean, like, you know, I'm only human.

• 42:19Speaker 03

  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 is I, 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.

• 42:51Speaker 06

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

• 42:58Speaker 03

  10 seconds?

• 43:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, real quick.

• 43:01Speaker 03

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

• 43:09Speaker 06

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

• 43:13Speaker 03

  That's true. Thank you, Andrew.

• 43:15Speaker 06

  Thanks a lot, Andrew.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  Thanks, guys.

• 43:22Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 43:27Speaker 03

  Shoot.

• 43:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  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?

• 43:54Speaker 03

  I always take a side quest. 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.

• 44:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  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.

• 44:36Speaker 29

  Hello.

• 44:38Speaker 03

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

• 44:41Speaker 29

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

• 44:49Speaker 03

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

• 44:55Speaker 29

  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.

• 45:16Speaker 30

  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.

• 45:35Speaker 03

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

• 45:37Ben Brock Johnson?

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

• 45:42Speaker 03

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

• 45:48Speaker 31

  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.

• 45:55Speaker 03

  This episode was produced by Andrew Callaway, edited by Chris Berube, mixed by Martin Gonzalez, fact checking by Laura Boland's, original music by Swan Real, Jamilah Sandoto, and Paul Vaitkus. 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.

• 46:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  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, Anne-Marie Sivertson, managing producer Selma Tajoshi, editor Meg Kramer, producers Dean Russell, Grace Tatter, and Franny Monahan, and sound designer Emily Jankowski.

• 46:57Speaker 03

  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, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Ashma 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 Nestor. 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.

• 47:37Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, Executive Director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education.

• 48:00Speaker 32

  I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context.

• 48:04Speaker 13

  And just to explain why you're excited about it.

• 48:07Speaker 32

  Oh my gosh, individualized support, right? Personalization and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities, for example, speakers of different languages, there are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  Get this. When you're with Xfinity, you're already a member. No sign up, no cost. Score epic experiences from our family at NBC Universal. Plus movie tickets, discounts on streaming, mobile, and more. Check the Xfinity app every Thursday for exclusive perks and experiences only with Xfinity. Now that's the way to start a weekend. Let the magic begin. Restrictions apply. Visit Xfinity.com/membership to learn more.