Strange Company
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Strange Company is a group of machinima creators and distributors based in Edinburgh, Scotland. They are known in the medium for running the Machinima.com website, which distributes such films on the Internet since 2000, and as the longest-standing Machinima production company, having produced 16 Machinima films since 1997.
It was founded by Hugh Hancock in 1997, at the time a student at Edinburgh University and a part-time journalist with an interest in the computer game Quake, and Gordon McDonald, a commercial film-maker and soundscape artist. Together they created the Machinima.com website, a hub for machinima producers on the Internet.
The company focuses on the creation of machinima productions, having worked on commercial animation production since 1999, and has since produced animation for companies and organisations such as Electronic Arts, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, Scottish Television and the BBC. The group has also created highly-acclaimed independent releases, including Eschaton: Darkening Twilight and an adaptation of the sonnet "Ozymandias".
They also spent a number of years working on the 'Lithtech Film Producer' project, the first attempt to create a stand-alone Machinima production environment, which was cancelled in 2001.
Strange Company participated in the formation of the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, and is now working on the first feature-length machinima film, BloodSpell, an independent production that is purportedly the largest independent machinima production to date. After two years of pre-production, BloodSpell is now being released in an episodic form.
[edit] External links
- Machinima.com, a central site for Machinima with hundreds of films and articles.
- Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences (AMAS), an advocacy group for machinima.
- Bloodspell, Strange Company's current project.
