Strange Company: making Machinima films since 1997

We're very pleased to announce that we've been working on a new piece for charity - in this case, Christian Aid and Stop Climate Chaos.

Much like the Fair Game project for Fair Trade, we didn't actually write this one - instead, it was written by the kids of Dalkeith High School Movie Club, aiming to talk to other kids their age about climate change.

Note: we recommend watching in HD quality if you can. This project is released under the Creative Commons Scotland BY-SA-NC license. You can download it in Quicktime format from http://www.archive.org/details/DrainedOfLife

Many thanks to Handup Media for involving us and managing the entire project!
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Just a quick note - When We Two Parted has been selected for screening at moves09 in Manchester, as part of the My Life As An Avatar screening, in April! Yay!
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It's been quiet over here on the Strangeco website, but that's because we've been madly busy with our projects!

Overall, 2008 was a great year for Strange Company; one of our most productive years ever. We:

• Launched 2 DVDs, including the mammoth, feature-packed BloodSpell double-DVD set
• Launched our first non-Machinima series, the "geek cooking" show Kamikaze Cookery, the first series of which has been pretty darn popular, with showcases on Slashfood, in the Guardian, on Boingboing, and more.
• Got involved in politics with our "Everyone Hates Stealth" campaign against Three Strikes laws in the EU (which went really, really well)
• Hugh keynoted his first conference, speaking at the DMFest conference in Singapore on the future of guerilla showrunning and TV-on-the-Internet
• Were featured on the front page of YouTube with our adaption of "When We Two Parted" by Lord Byron
• Ran Machinima workshops and talked about Machinima all over place.
• Finally finished the multi-year, award-winning, hit, as-featured-in, etc, etc BloodSpell feature film project.
• And kept commentating on and discussing Machinima over at the Machinima for Dummies blog.

And there's probably more I've forgotten.

Next year? Well, we're figuring out where to take Kamikaze Cookery next, we're investigating new technology - there's all sorts of stuff in the pot, but right now I'm trying to figure out what our next move is out of the many, many options. Whatever it is, I hope it's as productive as this year has been!
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If you'd like to see what I talked about at DMFest in Singapore, you can get the video of the entire session over on the DMFest Site. There are no slides, but you should be able to follow most of the talk - I'm talking about webisodes and guerilla TV on the Internet rather than Machinima specifically.

I'd also heartily recommend watching both Iolo Jones' talk (everything you ever wanted to know about IPTV distribution on the Internet, including some very, very interesting discussion of funding), and Timo Vuorensola's talk, where he talked about how the Star Wreck team managed to make a full, live-action feature film using crowdsourcing - just astonishing, and really inspirational.
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There's a full-page article on Hugh and Machinima in Singapore's Business Time - sadly it's print-only, but if you're in SG, it's worth a read, as we cover Asian Machinima, why computer games companies should open up to Machinima possibilities, and more.
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Yep, Strange Company has a new series out, and it's not Machinima!

We're calling Kamikaze Cookery "Top Gear meets Mythbusters, meets a cooking show". We're investigating the science of food, testing cooking myths, and generally rampaging around the cookery world like the proverbial bull in the proverbial shop of expensive fragile things.

You can watch the trailer, or watch the first episode, in which we cook the perfect steak with a vacuum cleaner, a blowtorch and a ziploc bag...
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Just a quick reminder of Hugh's conference schedule this autumn - catch him if you can!

• He's speaking on the Synthetic Cinema panel at the Machinima strand of the Cambridge Film Festival, on September 21st, and is also running a workshop with Johnnie Ingram, entitled Make A Movie In Your Lunchbreak, on the 22nd and 23rd.
• He's then going to Oxford for the GikIII digital law conference on the 24th and 25th of September
• Next, he's delivering a keynote speech at DMFest in Singapore on the 30th and 31st of October.
• Finally, he'll be speaking at the Narrative/Non-Narrative/Anti-Narrative conference in Bristol on the 23rd of November.

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I'm no longer a member of the board of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences, which runs the Machinima Film Festival.

This isn't directly related to recent decisions around the Festival, although that did act as a catalyst. I've been considering this move for a long while, since before the last Festival.

Two things really prompted the decision.

First, that as a non-US member of the Academy, the major work of which is to organise the US-based Machinima Film Festival, I've barely been involved with the Academy at all over the last few years. That's not anyone's fault but mine - I've simply been too busy, and other things have taken priority. It's not fair for me to continue taking the credit for other people's hard work, nor is it reasonable for me to represent myself as a spokesperson for an organisation with which I'm not really involved.

Secondly, I feel very strongly that the Machinima world is in need of more high-profile people who aren't tied to any of the nascent Machinima festival or tool organisations, and as such can report on them. There's just no-one in a position to independently report on the Machinima film festivals that are happening this year, as 95% of the people who might do so are either running one, financially tied to one, or very close to the people who are running one! I'm intending to get back to one of the things I do best, and that's reporting, as independently as I can, on a world I deeply care about.

I originally suggested that I resign from the Academy a few months ago, but that, for various reasons, was put off. Now, I feel it's important to leave so that I can comment from the outside.

I wish the rest of the Academy - Paul Marino, Frank Dellario and Friedrich Kirscher, plus the various staff of the Festival - the best of luck.
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We've temporarily disabled comments. That's nothing to do with today's news, but everything to do with a nasty attack of spam. If you've got any comments, feel free to email us at info at strangecompany dot org.
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Seems like Strange Company's films are popular right now!

When We Two Parted is screening at the Leipzig Games Conference and DragonCon, both in August, and BloodSpell is screening at DragonCon too, in its entirety.

In other news, Hugh is curating a program of short Machinima pieces to be shown before the documentaries "Second Skin" and "Tilt", at the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival this weekend.
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