Renga Media

Renga Media (originally Renga Studios) is a British multimedia and animation company located in Brighton. It was established in 1995, and is run by creator Tony Luke alongside producers Simon Moorhead and Doug Bradley. Partners include Alan Grant, Yasushi Nirasawa and Jim Brathwaite, chairman of S.E.E.D.A..

After the success of Dominator in Japan's Kodansha Comic Afternoon, Tony Luke and Alan Grant established Renga Studios to take their characters, such as Dominator and Hellkatt, under controlled copyright as the former was being considered by various parties for movie production, something which the pair strongly felt they should do themselves, with the money and production values of course. While deals were presented, Kodansha advised them to decline these until the opportunity to be in full control of a movie was available. Come 1995, Luke and Grant were able to lock down their property until they had decided what they wanted to do next. The first phase of Renga's Japanese-inspired work was the Urusei Yatsura music video "Phasers On Stun" in 1996 with characters styled on Gatchaman characters. This was also the year that Luke met with Yasushi Nirasawa, the third member to come onboard Renga, and he went on to design the angel characters for 1998's low-budget half-an-hour Archangel Thunderbird, which was stop-motion and live-action. It aired on the UK Sci-Fi Channel and garnered surprisingly-high ratings, reaching almost 0.5 million on one broadcast, unheard of at the time.

Renga Studios then began its next project, an episodic Dominator that was intended to be downloaded from the Renga website; this came about due to the recent price crash in Apple Mac software which was originally suggested to Luke in 1993 by Buichi Terasawa, but at the time wasn't possible for Luke because of how expensive the technology was in the UK. Early stages of production began, the most of what was originally made has not been commercially broadcast anywhere save for a Sci-Fi Channel spot promoting Dominator in 2002 but other than that nothing has been released though a minimal number of original footage was possibly recycled for a future movie. Production was immediately brought to a halt however as Luke was diagnosed with Mesothelioma, a normally-incurable asbestos cancer. He survived his cancer thanks to a radical operation pioneered by St. Barts' Hospital, and has been living with only one lung and a false diaphragm since. By the time he returned to work on this new Dominator series in late 2001 the Sci-Fi Channel, pleased with how Archangel Thunderbird did five years ago, presented him with a deal to turn it into a feature length movie, albeit another low-budget production. Having accepted the deal, Luke and the rest of Renga (now re-christened Renga Media) were pressured by the limited time they had to make the movie. There was very little time for Renga Media to re-build their character models and adjust textures so they would look better on a large screen, and much of the original, more-serious premise was altered in favour of a more comedic tone. Completed in mid-2003, the movie went on to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival and the Festival Of Fantastic Films (where it won the award for Best Original Animated Feature), and was shown at several select cinemas in England during a limited theatrical run.

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