Case Studies/Strange Company
The major benefit we’ve seen [from CC-licensing] is simply that people know they’re free to watch and give away BloodSpell, and that’s made us very popular - to the extent that we’re currently the second most watched Scottish feature film this year, on a budget that’s more than 100 times lower than the next most watched film! — Hugh Hancock, Artistic Director and Co-Founder of Strange Company
Overview
Strange Company is the world’s oldest professional Machinima production company. They have been in operation since 1997, when Artistic Director and Co-Founder Hugh Hancock quit pursuing a computer science degree to go play with “Quake Movies”. They have in turn been making films for 10 years and have been praised by Pulitzer winner Roger Ebert, worked for some very respected companies (like the BBC and BAFTA), and have produced numerous films.
License Usage
Strange Company licensed their most major and latest release, Bloodspell, under a CC BY-NC-SA license.
Motivations
From Hugh Hanckock, Artistic Director and Co-Founder of Strange Company:
- Essentially, we chose CC for brutally commercial reasons - we weren’t going to make money with BloodSpell (it’s basically the world’s largest market research project), we knew that basically every first feature film doesn’t make its creator money, no matter how it’s licensed, and we wanted to make sure that as many people as possible got to see it. From that standpoint, CC was a no-brainer. Likewise, there was no reason to limit the uses people make of our work - I’d love to see BloodSpell fan-fiction, for all that I probably can’t read it myself for legal reasons.
