Posts with tag strange-company

If you live in Europe, you should be really concerned right about now. A small group of MEPs are trying to sneak in a law that could punish you even if you're innocent. When it goes through, if anyone in your household has been determined to be file-sharing by your Internet Service Provider (ISP) three times, they'll blacklist your IP for life!

There's less than one day to stop this from being passed. It was slipped in right before the legislators broke for the summer, hidden within a huge package of telecom legislation, so most of them won't even get a chance to read it before they vote! Hugh Hancock, Johnnie Ingram, and Matt Kelland decided to do something about it by creating a machinima to warn everyone. If you would like to know more about what's going on, check out the Strange Company website, where they outline what you can do to help.

[Thanks, Hugh and Johnnie!]

If you have any suggestions for WoW Moviewatch, you can mail them to us at machinima AT wowinsider DOT com.

Previously on Moviewatch ...

Just in case you weren't at the Machinima Europe Festival the other weekend, you might like to know: Bloodspell is out. The feature-length machinima film (created with Neverwinter Nights) has been released, in both streaming and downloadable versions. The film was released by machinimakers Strange Company, who have also worked in Azeroth before. And two of them, founder Hugh Hancock and Johnnie Ingram, were nice enough to sit down and chat with us about Bloodspell, the future of Machinima, and their new book, Machinima for Dummies.

Still no word on the Bloodspell DVD, which we were told was going to be released as a downloadable disk with all kinds of commentaries and extras. Strange Company only says that it is still coming, in the next two or three months. And if you can't bear to watch anything that hasn't been created in WoW, there's good news for you, too-- Hugh tells us that he is planning to work on more WoW machinima soon.

I think the title of "Godfather of Machinima" might already be claimed (by either Tristan Pope or Paul Marino, depending on who you ask), but when the history books are all written on the art of making films with 3D engines, I'll be darned if the folks at Strange Company don't at least get listed as uncles and aunts. They've been making films from games since before it was cool to do so, and both Hugh Hancock, Strange Company's founder, and Johnnie Ingram, have been tireless advocates of the form.

They've collaborated both on a book called Machinima for Dummies (part of the Dummies series-- they're blogging heavily about it at machinimafordummies.com), and on BloodSpell, a machinima feature-length film which is being released officially this weekend at Machinima Europe, a festival in which Hugh will be part of the review panel.

WoW Insider got an exclusive chance to speak with these two Uncles of Machinima before their big premiere this coming weekend about how to make machinima (for dummies, of course), machinima's main "competition," how tough it is to make a living doing what Strange Company does, and what's next for the makers of BloodSpell. Read on for the complete interview. Thanks to Hugh Hancock and Johnnie Ingram for speaking with us, and we with them the best of luck at the festival this weekend!