Hugh "Nomad" Hancock sez,
Strange Company have just released the first episode of their Machinima feature film, BloodSpell, under Creative Commons licensing (including a nice little rant on the page about why they're releasing three years' work for free.)
It's described as a "post-goth punk fantasy adventure" about a world where some people are infected with magic in their blood – when the blood is spilled, the magic comes out.
Over 10,000 man-hours of work have gone into BloodSpell, 99% of which were volunteer work. The full film will be about the same scale as the first Star Wars movie in terms of number of sets, characters, and number and complexity of action sequences.
There's some damned fine storytelling and editing/production work here — machinima is still finding its legs, discovering what it's for, and the Strange Company folks are at the forefront of using the medium for feature-length drama, really getting beyond short comedy pieces.
(Thanks, Hugh!)
