Strange Company: making Machinima films since 1997

Susi O'Neill, producer on the Education for Life project that Hugh recently consulted on, has written up the Ephemeral Media workshop last week at which Hugh was keynoting. Lots of interesting stuff!

Yep, Hugh's speaking at the Ephemeral Media conference in Nottingham next week. His keynote speech is on the 23rd - looking forward to meeting people there!

Very cool - Chris Jones, writer of "The Guerilla Filmmaker's Handbook" and the creator of http://www.gonefishingseminar.com (and the guy who got to the final 10 selections for the Oscar last year) has written up a short piece on BloodSpell over at the Living Spirit blog - very cool.

In other news, what are Strange Company up to? Well, we're preparing for our first Kamikaze Cookery Live event, but mostly, I'm working on a bunch of new experimental shorter projects, designed to extend our skills, work with new people, and incorporate new technology. It's all rather exciting. See you in the trees!

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!

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!

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!

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.

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.

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...

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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