The Neo Avant-Garde

MMF MMXXIII UPDATE: A CHAT WITH CHRISTIAN WRIGHT

Christian Wright’s alter ego

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The Milan Machinima Festival is psyched to present Body Language, Christian Wright's delirious Body Language, whichdelves deep into the virtual realm of Dark Souls III (2016) to chronicle a captivating interaction between two players. Through this exploration, the artist examines the limitations imposed by the game’s design and the performative customs of the gaming community, specifically how these restrictions affect the players’ ability to express themselves and communicate with one another. With its striking juxtaposition of cinematic grandeur and the often-uneven terrain of gaming, Body Language deftly captures the nuances of limited body language in online gaming.

Body Language will be screened exclusively at the Museum of Interactive Cinema on Saturday March 25 as part of The Neo Avant-Garde program. Buy your ticket here.

Christian Wright was born in 1993 in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. A digital media artist working with video games and animation to blend cinematic and machinima visual languages, Wright looks at how the boundaries of expected play are stretched by the performative actions of players themselves. Whether it be the intimate physical interactions of online multiplayer, the choreographed quest for perfection of speedrunning, or the mimetic act of digital cosplay within character creators, the artist explores community-driven gestures and practices. His poetic machinima Son was featured in VRAL in the Fall of 2022.

Matteo Bittanti discussed the creative process behind Body Language with the artist.

Matteo Bittanti: Can you provide insight into the creative and practical process behind your latest work, Body Language? Can you discuss your approach to balancing the raw footage that you collected and the final work? Also, did you make a detailed storyboard, or was the project more improvisational?

Christian Wright: The process behind making Body Language was quite labour intensive. I had storyboarded a few months before filming began to various degrees of complexity and grandiosity (some fully rendered drawings, while others were just quick sketches), at this stage, not worrying too much about the limitations of what was possible within the game. They were mainly built out of my own ideas for scenes in the script, while others were from wanting to re-create set pieces from separate other games, films, animations or other media. Dark Souls isn’t the most forgiving franchise when it comes to creating machinima, so the real challenge was then scaling down or using a lot of creative problem solving to make the ideas work. There are no in-game camera tools (unless you want to class the binoculars, which aren’t great), so I had to utilize a combination of hacked FROMsoftware developer debug tools, Cheat Engine tables, and a tool called ReShade to create and composite the scenes I had in mind, more than half the shots in the film have some kind of post-production compositing/effects work done to them.

Even then, there were a lot of technical hoops with the game’s online mode that I had to jump through so that I could get two characters interacting together for the scenes. Even getting the tools to work with online without being banned, Dark Souls III’s online servers were taken offline for 8 months half way through filming. This meant I shot a lot of scenes in offline mode, leaving me with only one avatar available to act out a two character scene. I would have to use the tools to lock the camera in place, capturing a clean background slate of each scene, then a shot with Character A in frame so they could perform their action, before running over to where Character B should be standing, changing my armour and weapons to match the right costume, and shooting the reactive action. I would then take this into After Effects to key, rotoscope and composite together to create the final shot. It was exhausting! Luckily I found a work around soon after, but it was tough and very time intensive part of production. I think there’s a good few handfuls of those original shots that made it into the final cut, that I think blend pretty seamlessly with the online play footage, let me know if you…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Christian Wright

Body Language

digital video, color, sound, 21’ 19”, 2022, United Kingdom

Son

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), colour, sound, 14’ 59”, 2016, United Kingdom

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MMF MMXXIII UPDATE: A CHAT WITH IAIN DOUGLAS, MARK COVERDALE

A still from Shank’s 54 by Iain Douglas and Mark Coverdale, courtesy of the Artists

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The Milan Machinima Festival is elated to present Shank's 54, the latest collaboration between game design and artist Iain Douglas and poet Mark Coverdale, whose previous work Facing the wolf was featured in VRAL.

Shank's 54 is an interpretation of the 54 two-line verses written by the poet on repeated walks down a canal in Camden, London. The recreation is set within the world of Grand Theft Auto V,which itself attempts to simulate a dynamic, reactive, “living” urban environment. Shank’s 54explores homelessness and it provides insight into an event through the eyes of a homeless bystander, leading us to wonder about the identity of the narrator.

Iain Douglas is an artist working with machinima, game engines, film, and materials like paint and plaster. Iain’s practice explores the themes of loss. He lives and works in The Netherlands. For more information, please visit his website.

Mark Coverdale is a widely published performance poet, writing from the picket line, art gallery, and the terraces. Mark’s poems for these machinima are drawn from his interests in domestic industrial decline and the troubled events of the New European East. He lives and works in London. For more information visit his website. 

Douglas and Coverdale's outstanding work is currently featured in The Neo Avant-Garde program and can be watched online until March 26 2023.

Matteo Bittanti discussed Shank's 54 with Douglas and Coverdale.

Matteo Bittanti: If I’m correct, “shanks” is a slang term for “legs”. What is it like to walk in a video game, considering that the act of deambulation is purely symbolic, that is, performed through finger play on a controller? Was this machinima the outcome of a psychographical kind of dérive in either/both virtual and physical spaces or did you intend to explore the representation of homelessness within Los Santos from the very beginning?

Iain: You are correct about shanks being a slang term for legs, it is also a slang term for a few other things from makeshift knives to periods of time (which for me was a lovely in road to some of the visual elements), however it is legs in the context of Mark’s verse. For my part of this collaboration, the film and installation were very much about homelessness. The homeless as with many other NPCs in Grand Theft Auto are very much bystanders, powerless observers, subject to the whims of players. Having lived in the UK, I have seen too much social injustice and the inequality that has caused so many people to live on the streets. In many cases these are very vulnerable people who, like in GTA, are the powerless observers to events and the victims of more. There was a period in 2013 when my family and I were homeless, that feeling of injustice, powerlessness and vulnerability still stings inside me ten years later. We were very lucky to not end up on the streets.

Mark: Well, how to follow such a fulsome answer. I think that Iain describes this aspect of visual impotency very personally and powerfully. I do, however, believe that as storytellers, it is a duty to give voice to those who can’t always do so. The fact that Iain instinctively picked up on the homeless character obliquely mentioned in the text, was a very necessary and affirming start to this process.

Having lived in London now for 20-odd years, I always liked the phrase 'Shanks’s Pony' and always associated it with Cockney Rhyming slang. It isn’t that, but when I produced the badge and gave it to my Cockney mate, the meaning was certainly confirmed. The connection between our four-legged friends and the industrial highway that was the British waterways adds a neat extra dimension too.

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Iain Douglas, Mark Coverdale

Shank’s 54

digital video/machinima, color, sound, 7’ 40”, England, 2022

Shank's 54: the installation

Iain Douglas and Mark Coverdale's latest machinima (or machinema, as they prefer to say) Shank's 54 was originally shown in 2022 at Enschede (B93), an art gallery located in the Netherlands. We are happy to share some installation shots from the event, courtesy of the Artists.

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MMF MMXXIII UPDATE: A CHAT WITH NICOLAS GEBBE

Nicolas Gebbe

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The Milan Machinima Festival is delighted to present a screening of Nicolas Grebe's unclassifiable work The Sunset Special, offering a voyeuristic glimpse into the meticulously crafted world of social media. This interdisciplinary multimedia project, anchored by an animated short film, invites viewers on an eerie journey to a luxurious realm of unfulfilled desire, endless longing, and the boundless promise of wanderlust. Through the project’s exploration of the pervasive effects of reality-distorting imagery and narrative, The Sunset Special offers a critical analysis of the nexus between nostalgia, desire, and the perpetuation of a customized digital product.

Gebbe's work is featured in the Utopia program and can be watched here until March 26 2023. 

We strongly encourage you to visit the official website to get a better understanding on the scale and scope of this project. 

A Frankfurt-based artist and filmmaker whose work explores the intersection of architecture, everyday spaces, and digital reality, Nicolas Gebbe creates intricate and immersive digital worlds that challenge our perceptions of the spaces and environments that surround us. Gebbe was born in London in 1986, and received his art diploma with a film major from Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach in 2018. Drawing inspiration from existing spaces and our habitual movements within them, his works isolate, alienate, and destabilize.

Matteo Bittanti discussed the creative process behind The Sunset Special with the artist, Nicols Gebbe.

Matteo Bittanti: Your artistic oeuvre demonstrates a preoccupation with facades, both literal and metaphorical. Here's I'm also thinking of a favorite of mine, Urban Dreamscape. In your creative endeavors, photogrammetry is a crucial tool that allows you to reconstruct and distort the surfaces of architectural spaces and urban environments, among other things. Your latest project, The Sunset Special, delves deeper into this fascination with appearances, as you contemplate the manufacture of luxury, exclusivity, and wealth in resort culture, much like that portrayed in The White Lotus, through the lens of social media. Can you elaborate on the origins of this project and the key inspirations that informed it?

Nicholas Gebbe: Key inspirations where video games I played in my childhood, experimental films and pop culture I absorbed through film and other media. The project combines several topics that interested me for a while and brings them together in a virtual hybrid collage. One of the main topics being the absurdities and superficialities of consumerism and advertisement which I enjoy observing in everyday life. Of course, social media amplifies these mechanism by a lot. Spending a lot of time exposed to these digital worlds, I feel the downsides rather vividly myself and care to question their contents. The project started with me experimenting with some found footage and 3D models with all the rough ideas in the back of my head. Through experimenting the simplified narration unfolded itself in a very linear gaming stereotypical fashion and step by step the project pieced itself together.

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Nicolas Gebbe

The Sunset Special

digital video, color, sound, 17’ 30”, Germany, 2022

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MMF MMXXIII UPDATE: A CHAT WITH MARTIN BELL

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Martin Bell

The Milan Machinima Festival is currently featuring Martin Bell's groundbreaking machinima PRAZINBURK RIDGE in the Counter-Narratives program, alongside three other works. Based on a true story, the machinima is set during World War One, and stars former rugby player for Great Britain Douglas Clark. The athlete finds himself on the Belgian battlefields of Ypres and must rely on his old skills to save himself and his fellow soldiers from shot, shell and poison gas.

Martin Bell has been creating computer graphics all his life. Originally from a Yorkshire mining community, Martin moved to London and became a CG artist over 15 years ago. As an animator and film visualization supervisor, he has created huge action sequences for Hollywood productions such as Jurassic World, James Bond, Marvel, Fast & Furious, 1917, Aladdin, the DC Universe and The Wheel of Time. His first short, PRAZINBURK RIDGE premiered at Wigan & Leigh Film Festival 2022, a BIFA-qualifying festival, where it won the award for Best Animation. It was also selected for SPARK Animation Festival in Vancouver, Clones Film Festival, Tbilisi International Animation Festival, and Dispatches of War Festival among others.

We talked to Martin Bell about his practice as a machinimaker and his first solo project, PRAZINBURK RIDGE.

Matteo Bittanti: Can you describe your trajectory from CGI wizard to filmmaker? What led you to explore cinema as a medium and as an artform?

Martin Bell: I always wanted to make films. When I was eleven, I tried to make an Aliens sequel using DeluxePaint IV on my Amiga: that was probably my first unfinished project, many more would follow. 

Jurassic Park was what sealed it for me though, when dinosaurs suddenly came alive in front of me. I knew I wanted to be a part of that. In my CGI/VFX career I have always tried to steer myself towards the most creative roles possible – I wanted to be an animator to create my own stories, not necessarily other people’s stories. So eventually I ended up in film previsualisation for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and found that to be a role I could be creative in, while contributing to a film franchise I loved. Later, the opportunity to supervise previs came along, and put me in an even more creative position. But meanwhile the desire to create my own films had been growing, and I’d been writing scripts. I’d been introduced briefly to Unreal Engine and knew it could potentially be something I could utilise but I hadn’t had chance to learn it yet, and then Covid-19 hit.

Matteo Bittanti: Very apropos... There’s a new generation of innovative filmmakers that was born during the Covid-19 lockdown. Forced indoors and unclear about the future, hundreds of creative types around the world began experimenting with different kinds of tools and storytelling techniques. Does this story sound familiar to you?

Martin Bell: Oh, very much so! Covid-19 and the associated lockdowns were awful, but I was conscious that it provided an opportunity to reset things, to take stock and think about what might be next. Without any work to focus on and no creative outlet, I knew I needed to make something, and with the time available I could learn Unreal Engine finally. So I decided I’d make a little three-minute short or something, in Unreal, just as a learning exercise. And PRAZINBURK RIDGE was born.

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Martin Bell

PRAZINBURK RIDGE

digital video/machinima, color, sound, 10’, 2022, England

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MMF MMXXIII UPDATE: A CHAT WITH BRENTON ALEXANDER SMITH

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The Milan Machinima Festival is delighted to introduce Brenton Alexander Smith's The Impossibility of Things Disappearing. Featured in The Neo Avant-garde program, Smith's work will be available between March 19-26 2023 exclusively on the MMF website.

His previous machinima Things Are Different Now, was featured in 2020 as part of VRAL. Read an interview by Luca Miranda here. 

Brenton Alexander Smith is an Australian artist whose work delves into the intricate interplay between humanity and technology. He creates pieces that evoke a range of emotions, from discomfort to nostalgia, and draws on a variety of media, both digital and tangible, to craft immersive installations that feature both sculptural and video components. One of Smith’s primary concerns is addressing the cultural anxieties that arise from our dependence on technology. His work reflects this by imbuing machine detritus with human-like qualities and expressions. The result is a thought-provoking commentary on our relationship with technology and the role it plays in shaping our lives. Smith earned a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of NSW in Australia in 2020, and his work has been exhibited internationally, as well as in his hometown of Sydney. His solo exhibitions include I Feel Like a Nervous Wreck (2019) at the virtual gallery of Closed on Monday Gallery and Together with Machines (2015) at the Akureyri Art Museum in Iceland. He has also participated in The Wrong Biennale (2019) in Valencia, Spain, and received the Friedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship in 2014.

In the following interview, Brenton Alexander Smith discusses the main inspirations behind his new artwork:

Matteo Bittanti: The impossibility of things disappearing is a captivating exploration of the intersection between life and death, and the notion of agency beyond the living. Can you speak to the inspiration behind this work, and how you approached creating a sense of liveliness and movement in a desiccated fish?

Brenton Alexander Smith: This work started as a technical challenge that I set for myself. I’ve worked with BeamNg.drivebefore to make similar kinds of videos but it was always within the constraints of the car theme of the game. I would use mods that other people have created to open up new ways of making, but the subject matter always began with a car. I wanted to see if I could put something else into the simulation to see how it would behave. I set about learning how to make my own mod for the game.

The idea was to replace the car with something different, perhaps something organic. I decided to go with the desiccated fish because it was part of an old video artwork I made during a residency in Iceland that I had been meaning to expand on. It was a video of a factory machine that packaged fish to be sent to Nigeria to be used as soup stock. I took a screenshot from the video and selected one of the dried fish from the image to be turned into a 3D object.

I think about the work in terms of resurrection. The original fish has surely been turned into soup by now, but here we see its specter rotating on screen. This is partly what I’m getting at with the title of the work. Matter doesn’t disappear, it can only become something new. In the same way images (like the fish) can be reused, reinterpreted and resurrected.

Matteo Bittanti: BeamNG.drive was designed to simulate the experience of driving with “realistic” physics. By using it to create an artwork, you subverted its intended purpose, well beyond your previous works. Can you address the role of BeamNG.drive in the creation of this piece, and how the simulation’s realistic physics affected the final product? Also, can you describe the process of creating the mod and how it enabled you to use the game’s physics simulation as an “animation” technique? Is this the first installment of a new series, à la The Soft Crash (2020)?

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Brenton Alexander Smith

The Impossibility of Things Disappearing

digital video/machinima, color, sound, 6’ 10”, 2022, Australia

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