So I've been obsessed with this YouTube series for a few years now...
And I know that I'm not alone.
Griffin: Welcome to a new video series called Monster Factory
It's a Let's Play series, where Justin and Griffin McElroy try to break video game character creators.
Griffin: No! Borth! Justin: Oh!
Griffin: Borth Sampson, no!
It's a... It's a great vehicle for riffing.
I've gotten friends into it and we have in jokes and we say things like...
"Mustaches, which she collects for her dark needs."
And, "Backpack for his applesauce," and our favorite one...
"How many meat can we make him?"
Griffin: How mu... How many meat can we make it?
Griffin: God! It's like the end of Akira! Justin: Todd!
Griffin: Todd, why would you do this?!
And sometimes I'll show it to people and I get blank stares and puzzled responses...
And questions about why my tastes are the way they are...
Like I do every time I try to share something that love...
But anyway!
There's a brilliance in its silliness.
Like everything made by the brothers McElroy...
It's a heap of absurdist humor distilled through a comforting backdrop of fraternal bonding
Justin: And you look like a normal cool dude?
Justin: And I look like the waste bin of an anime studio...
Justin: That's been upturned and pissed on.
It's essentially a Let's Play series, a popular YouTube genre that I never got into.
But Monster Factory isn't just a Let's Play series. It has crossover appeal.
I've seen it discussed in cinematic circles. Mike Newman wrote about it, and so did Film Crit Hulk.
And now me.
And why not?
There are so many cinematic discussions to be had...
Genre Theory!
Justin: With a single slider, we've taken her from, like, possible protagonists to third-tier fetch-quest NPC.
Critical Race Theory!
Griffin: Um... Justin: [Laughing] What could be less intuitive?!
Griffin: Alright, let's just turn the ethnicity all the way up! He is all ethnicities all at once!
Feminist Theory!
Justin: What does Non-built look like?
Justin and Griffin: [Disappointed muttering]
Marxist Theory!
Justin: Totino's? I love their products.
Griffin: I love Totino's.
Griffin: Totino's, they make Totino's pizza rolls. You know, Totino's pizza rolls.
Griffin: What's even in there? I love it.
And of course, Auteur Theory
Justin: Is this what Todd wanted? Right, because it's so...
Griffin: Can you not see the credits? The credits are rolling on the screen right now.
Griffin: It says produced and fully intended by Todd Howard.
But I want to talk about its aesthetics.
It's a series based on visual gags, that only a computer-generated image...
Can produce.
Griffin: What even in the world do you think you're doing, Fallout?!
Well, it’s an issue with how Fallout 3’s graphics engine handles animation
cause it uses different parameters to define its preset animations
than its procedurally generated ones
so a predefined animation like a walk cycle
seems to define its skeletal rig as relative
to the object as a whole
while the rag doll physics that happen in a death animation
defines individual bones in the rig relative to each other
so if you adjust the scale properties of an object
the mesh will properly scale with the skeleton during predefined animations
but in procedural animations the mesh will be distorted since the scale adjustment will be only be applied...
Anyway...
It's a bug.
It's an entertaining, bug, but it's still a bug.
A bug familiar to anyone who's ever played a Bethesda game.
Griffin: Uh, speaking of bug reports...
[Justin and Griffin laughing]
So, why is this so entertaining?
Well, let's pivot from games to film.
The earliest days of film.
At the turn of the 20th century, films were predominantly shot indoors.
Shooting staged scenes with actors. It was theatrical.
Cinematic pioneer and prolific racist DW Griffith once declared that movies needed more of this:
The wind in the grass.
He wanted to take film outside.
To explore the natural world, rather than the theatrical one...
Jump-starting cinemas longing with capturing that magical five-letter word...
Truth
Director after director in country after country...
Striving to capture something true,
Something natural, something you can't plan.
Film critic Andre Bazin once wrote that cinema was a document of God.
Who put that in there?!
Anyway, Griffith was saying that film needed more of this:
Wait for it...
Accident.
All great movie moments are beautiful little accidents.
The truest performance, the most graceful of movements...
The perfect take, itself, is a kind of accident.
Justin: Because I'd love an ice cold water.
Ice-cold water.
But there's another form of truth: The truth of the medium.
Like an actor on stage, pointing out the proscenium arch
Another great filmmaking tradition emerged devoting to showing you the film stock.
The imperfect take, the truth of the medium.
Not the wind in the grass, but the dirt on the lens,
Also a form of truth. And now we have a new frontier, a new medium, a new truth:
The computer.
But even in CGI, the new frontier seems to be adding photographic detail: The traces of natural accident
Dust, scratches...
...the chaos that requires a lot of memory to calculate.
All that computing power to trick you into thinking this image was photographed and not rendered.
It's why 30 years ago, it was easier to render material without a lot of fine detail.
Like this character, made of liquid metal.
It would take adding layers of grime and rust and subtle textures onto the model before we could render character made of solid metal.
And as long as we're talking about adding natural elements to a computer, look at Andy Serkis' entire career.
Motion capture brings the talents of human actors into a digital space.
Again, the natural world, rendered.
And of course video games have been following films lead... To varied effect.
"Whatever hole he's got Adrian stashed in, he's gotta go back there sometime."
[Sneeze]
But even outside of motion capture, look at how many titles add motion blur, film grain, chromatic aberration.
All features of a photographed image, not the rendered one. But it's still just a simulation of wind in the grass.
A render of a different truth.
So...
What's the truth of the computer-generated image?
What's the wind in the grass?
Griffin: I've just made a realization. Justin: What's that?
Kyle: You can turn the grass off.
Justin: Good...
Griffin: The grass is all gone.
Wait, I just googled the quote.
Griffith actually said "the wind in the TREES," not grass.
Goddammit, Griffith you dead racist asshole, I had the perfect segue and you ruined it!
Griffin: [Groans] Justin: [Laughing] Oh, no!
Watching the McElroy clan play games is like watching a live documentary of the workings of a graphical world.
A wildlife program, where the wildlife is digital.
Griffin: (as monster) My world is pain!
Exploring how a program works by breaking it.
By finding its boundaries, overloading its functions,
And figuring out just how many meat we can make him.
Griffin: Gristle!!
Jean-Luc Godard famously said that every film is a documentary of its actors.
So is a Let's Play a documentary of a program?
Justin: Uh, this is bad. Griffin: This is bad.
Justin: This is bad! I don't-
Griffin: I'm noticing some gaps in "trijuice".
Yes, I just cut from a Godard film to a Fallout 4 clip.
Hello! Welcome to my channel!
Of course, this idea didn't start with the McElroy's.
Glitch art has similar goals.
Trying to understand the soul of a machine by finding the cracks in the system.
Digital artists have experimented with different physics programs to find a new way of showing the human form.
Just look at the renders of Martin Olson.
Or the installation art of Ian Cheng, who wrote a procedurally generated program, which acted out a strange mythology.
In Cheng's piece, Emissaries, he let the program itself create its bizarre story.
And of course, games have tried this too.
And, yes, it has some backlash.
I know there are plenty of gamers out there who roll their eyes at procedurally generated environments.
But it's still something, which is, in a way...
Discovered but not planned.
Its own accident.
Its own wind in the... trees.
Not that Justin and Griffin ever really get into the nitty-gritty of the programs they break.
Which is great.
The Boy Mayor of Second Life's reelection campaign wouldn't be any funnier if I knew why he looked different after going to a sex club.
Griffin: [Laughing] Who is- Move your giant pizza ass!
Griffin: Who is this?!
That's the beauty of the graphics glitch.
Enough calculations, enough encryptions from binary numbers to visual data...
And you have no idea what might get lost in translation.
Justin: No! Griffin: [Groaning]
Griffin: If HP Lovecraft saw this right now, he would shit his pants to death!
What the McElroys have done is aestheticized these accidents.
Highlighting them and reveling in their absurdity.
Leading to some of the strangest, most compelling discovered narratives I've ever experienced.
Chalk it up to Griffin's skills as a dungeon master.
So I'm only just now getting into The Adventure Zone. I'm just starting The Eleventh Hour. It's great so far.
No spoilers!
Put a hundred artists from Pixar in front of a computer, and I doubt they could ever stage a moment as surreally funny as this one.
[Justin and Griffin laughing] Griffin: We're back!
Justin: Nobody saw that.
Kyle: Or this one.
[Justin laughing] Griffin: You gotta scale the pizza box down.
Kyle: or this one.
Justin: Look. Look at the top left corner of your screen right now, please.
[Griffin laughing]
For a long time, I've been wondering about the potential for using CGI beyond the goal of photorealism.
What the image might look like if we saw the pixels as pixels.
And I wonder...
Is this it?
This?!
This format which somehow got me to care about an immortal, pockmarked, axe-wielding demigod,
Who broke the world to live with her trash husband,
Metal husband,
Roach husband,
Ghost son,
And her thousand coffee-can sons in the ocean below he world?!
THIS?!
Griffin: One, two, three!
Griffin: [Wordless terror/arousal?]
At very least,
Monster Factory made me realize that the cinematic world is decades behind when it comes to talking about CGI.
We can't keep treating the computer like a magic box that just throws out images.
When it comes to talking about CGI, the gaming world has us beat.
So if we're going to move forwards towards a computer-driven filmmaking process, if computers are going to be generating our images,
We might as well see how many meat we can make them.
Griffin: Oh, Game, no! Justin: Not like this!
Griffin: Game, just let me do the thing!