Hi everyone,

The Monad is a paranoid vision of our future in the face of The Network.

Any comments/critiques welcome!


UPDATE:

Some people have been unable to view the downloadable avi: VLC should play it. Or download and install the Divx codec. Its not xvid, as I'd previously stated.

Alternatively, there are a few places people have uploaded the film for streaming. Some of them are:

Gametrailers
MODDB
DailyMotion



The Monad
format: divx AVI
runtime:12 minutes
platform: HL2

Email: lorka.pcgf@gmail.com

Site: Polygon Fiction

EPICNESS IN ALL DEGREES. YOU ROCK MATE.

Haha, cheers man. Appreciated :)

Too epic for words, make more!

Hey dude if your up to it, I'd like to make a film with you. Hope you don't mind. Add me on steam if you feel like it. (steam ID is the same as Facepunch nick). You've got the kind of mind I like. ;)

Actually Mags, the plan for next year is to get a team together and make a feature length. I'm not on Steam much, but my email's above if you're interested.

Next yeah. Damn, that's a little while from here. But Hey, you don't get Quality out of nothing. Sure but, don't you have like X-fire or Messenger? Anything like that? Anyways I'll right you an E-mail to blab about this crap.

Best Gmod Machinima ever

EVER


PERIOD, OVER AND DONE

I'm...I'm a bit unsure of what to say now. In the obvious sense of the word, I'm amazingly impressed. Maybe I should take this from the top...

As some people know, I recently started creating tutorials for using Face Poser and posted them on Facepunch. That was because I love drama; I love emotions, and until now the entire machinima world has been devoid of it. As hi-res and pixel-pushing as our games have been, we've never even scratched the surface of art. But the tool has been there for about 3 years, and no one's truly used it. Sure, we saw Tom "Barney" Cruise demand the truth, and we heard the fabulous singing voice of the G-man. But that was still, as amazing as it was, toying around; simple experiments.

I wanted people to take machinima to what it could be; a real art form, something that I assure you no one has come close to. Many people may remember situations where they asked me "How to get Face Poser scenes into gmod"...to which I always gave my answer only after preaching to them how important it is to make their own level, and learn every trick of the trade. I wanted to show people this because silly Garry's Mod videos weren't what I wanted when I made those tutorials. What I wanted...

...was exactly what I have just watched.

This is exactly what I've been looking for. If I were ever to show someone how powerful tools like Face Poser are, this would be it. It's not only succeeded in getting the emotions right and adding appropriate gestures, but settling for no less than perfection in terms of writing and voice acting. Everything comes together just the way I would have wanted it, and I felt that even I could identify strongly with the main character.

Anyone who's known me on the forums for any length of time knows that as much praise as I give, I'll always criticize the video, and offer pointers for improvement. I've had heavy criticisms for every big Source movie that I've ever seen; Slapdash, Zompocalypse, and even the one that I helped with, War of the Servers. Honestly, for this video...I can't. You've excelled at everything I could think of, and this film is far better than I honestly think that I could ever do. Congratulations.

Now, if only I could overcome my sloth and aspire to make something as great as this...

brilliant goddamn work.

Amazing, simply amazing. But what happens to him?! Does he kill himself? Or does she kill him? Because she at first said "arranged" but re-worded the sentence. I wanted to see his big powerful dramatic message. :(

That was really good. I enjoyed watching it, best Half life 2 machinema by far.

Amazing work.

Now let's go nuke the Blizzard offices before it's too late.

Brilliant. It reminded me of something you'd see on the BBC, or those videos you would watch at school that shows problems in some things that young people do. Up until now I hadn't had the chance to see what Face Poser was fully capable of (other than what we see in Valve's games) but you've done everything brilliantly in this and it's made me want to get into Face Poser myself.

for today. I throw in my hat ...

just for today though. hot damn.

Yeah that was awesome.

Somehow it touches the reality in such way, that it cannot be compared or explained. Its dark, chaotic and sinister world reflects the current status of internet and its massgaming so perfectly... That... It's just beautiful.

Fantastic.

Cheers everyone! I can't believe the film's getting such a good reception.

The_Maker, yes, he does kill himself. There's a brief shot near the start where you see his corpse on the grassy roof he takes her to on their date, but that bit's kinda dark and it's not really portrayed that elegently.

You're right, it's wierd that she'd say 'arranged', although I'm afraid there's absolutely nothing to that line. To be honest I was unsure how she'd word it, I guess that came through.

Does anyone have any criticisms?

I'll start us off with some.

Firstly the encoding is shit, it's way overbright compared to the 30GB pure but I'm a noob with codecs and I'm still trying to find a way to keep the contrast at 100mb.

I didn't really believe in their relationship. I wanted there to be some intimacy between Callie and Stephan 'cause I thought that'd be a first for a machinima, (am I wrong here?) but it wasn't really there. They suffer a bit from being talking signposts, just getting across the themes in unrealistic monologues. That's something I need to work on.

And scene 3, where they're on the bench? It's one long boring shot. Should really have fixed that...

Ah, been reading up on our Leibniz, have we?

(For those who don't know, Gottfried Leibniz was a natural philosopher and contemporary of Isaac Newton, who independantly discovered the Calculus. His book "Monadology" discusses the principle of Monads, which his theory states make up everything in the universe.)

(I have far too much time on my hands.)

Dude, your work is so amazingly good for Facepunch standards. Expect a lot of praise and little criticism!

And please oh please, MAKE MORE!

Can anyone put this on Youtube?

Anyone got a mirror? only getting around 100 KB/s

(I'll upload to rapidshare as soon as I'm done downloading.)

wow this is epic.
just epic
just wow

also could someone please convert this to ipod format that way i can take the epicness with me

no, download it.

That was brilliant! I don't know any other words to describe it.
One thing I must ask is how you made your music--was it with a real guitar, or was it on a computer?
Make more!

This seems epic, mind if I put it on youtube?

Thank you for resume support.

Dammit, rapidshare went offline as I was uploading... :(

Put it on Stag.. ..too bad Stage6 is gone.

What did you use to record, like what tool / stools?

This was so worth the Garry's Mod front page article. I am so surprised this has not received a ton of reviews yet.

This was excellent, and it gave such a strong message. And the tone, a dark city night with streetlights glowing, made it even more perfect. My hat goes off to you.

How long did this take you to produce?

Man that was awesome, it actually made me reflect upon how much time I personally spend on these forums. It really is like an addiction.

I love this video, you must tell us how you did it, all of it. Your skills are what we need to revive the Gmod community.

Offtop: MAN Alyx is much sexier with a British accent.

Ontopic: 10/10 from me man, keep up the excellent work. I'd say this has topped all of the Litfuse films, and War of the Servers. Pure perfection.

Well done. Very, very well done. <3

Hello! I've downloaded this and it says it's an xvid file..and it wont play on windows media player. I've downloaded the xvid codec but I don't know how to convert the video into xvid form since it downloads into windows media player form and plays only the audio! Help!

*Face*

Download the DivX Media Player. www.divx.com

The only improvement I could ask for is subtitles. Little hard to understand them, but that was very well done.

It definitely does speak the truth that a lot of us try to ignore.

Amazing story that is true to many of us.

That was truly fantastic.
It felt like a real film short
The subject of the story was also very adequate to the medium used for this.
Camera work is great
You really have a good eye for photography and timing.
I applaud you.

as many above have said, absolutely fantastic. crazy visuals and that's an unbelievable feat you did with taking photos you took and implementing them so well for the movie.

now what I'd love to see you do with these stunning visuals is something action-based! just my 2 cents.