S3 E75 Film Review: Patient Zero - A Half Life 2 Short (Apr 2023)

[@TheParryGod]

It was really interesting and humbling listening to this. Thank you kindly for all the praises and criticism that came up! Some things I'd like to comment on / clarify. Patient zero is a medical term referring to the first identified carrier of a disease. In HL, the Combine terminoligy is riddled with medical terms and in the context of this film it refers to the yellow eyed soldier being the first of its kind in the "spikewall" series of transhuman soldiers. The film was created with Source 2 Filmmaker which runs on the Source 2 engine introduced with Half-Life: Alyx. So most of the base assets and tools (map editor, particle editor etc) used in this were directly accessed with the workshop tools released alongside Half-Life: Alyx. I wholehearteadly agree that my naming convention can come across rather silly, but I intentionally wanted to strip names away from my characters. I set up the whole scenario as a sort of "this is just one of many" and so names become unimportant. They are people struggling to fight back against an eldritch alien empire and that's all I wanted the viewer to know about them. Similarly, CP (Civil Protection) and Spikewall are simply unit designations not individual callsigns. At first I didn't want to include any identifiers in text, but I feared it might become very confusing to some folks who's speaking in some cases so I went with this option. And yes, some amount of previous knowledge on Half-Life is I'd say definitely a requirement to get the full picture here. Even though an adaptation should stand on its own I really didn't want to force in any expository dialogue. Regardless, I was glad to hear that it was enjoyable even with a surface level knowledge of the universe.

[@completelymachinima]

Thanks for the comments and clarifications - its a great film, and we really enjoyed it.

[@determination2294]

I really enjoy watching people commenting on animations like this one, just a few things I found worth mentioning about it: 1. We do see the rebel that kills the soldier calling out for "John" to see if he is still alive near the end. 2. Apparently the vocoders are not only used to make them seem like endless waves faceless soldiers, but also to make it difficult for enemies to hear their communication, in combat. 3. The Combine units use a lot of codes, specially the SPIKEFALL, even with subtitles I think some people could have trouble understanding their terminology. 4. The main unit we follow through the story is the only Combine soldier, the ones following him are Civil Protection officers, you can think of them as barely trained cops. Anyway, I think that's all, thank you for giving us this analysis of the animation, I always find this type of content very interesting to watch.

[@3dchick]

Ok, will have to watch this, and, as you say, study it. 😊