Cosmos Factory was founded on October 1, 1993 and is run by two Austrian science journalists who have been working for print media, radio and television since 1979, including 9 years in ORF televison’s science news department. Main topics: nature, science, contemporary history.
Our office is located in the city center of Vienna. A core team develops projects and organizes processes and administration. The company has two video editing stations.
The members of the camera crews are hired as service providers on the open market, as are almost all employees in the post-production process and associated studio services such as sound editing, color grading and mastering. The accounting is largely outsourced.
CEO: Dr. Harald Pokieser, Manfred Christ
Head Technician: Hermann Winklhofer
Office Manager: Mariella Bleimuth
In addition to prime-time documentaries in collaboration with partners from all over the world, over the decades we have also produced social reports, docu-soaps, magazines, journals, films about artists and their works and daily news programs, as well as designing and producing countless short films and clips for companies and public institutions.
A second field of activity, since the company’s beginnings, has been the creation of proposals, treatments and commentary texts for the films of other production companies, including nine opulent nature and culture documentaries by the Austrian filmmaker Georg Riha.
As the workload in the film and television industry demands, since 1993 we have researched and developed around fifty detailed proposals for documentaries and innovative broadcast concepts, which, despite the best prospects, often could not be realized or financed at the last minute.
However, the generation of ideas, research, development, design and production of globally compatible documentation has always been our most important business area.
Their locations are in Europe, East and Southeast Asia, South America, North America and, since 2008, predominantly in Africa and the greater Indian Ocean region.
Since 1997, they have received almost 70 international awards at festivals for quality, design, writing and directing, camera work, innovation and popularity with audiences.
Highlights of the company’s history include:
- 38 films for the acclaimed ORF series “Universum” (1996 – 2024)
- 13 films for the internationally producing Terra Mater Studios (2011-2023)
- the 100-minute docudrama “Prague Spring – the last coup of the Soviet empire” (2008)
- “The Wild and the West” – a tongue-in-cheek exploration into the realities of the Wild West as winner of the Parthenon Entertainment Award for Innovation at the British Wildscreen Festival (2006)
- Mobile TV for Hutchison 3G Austria – daily news, sports broadcasts, entertainment (2003-2006)
- 4 seasons of the docu-soap “The Wildlife Orphanage” set in Namibia for SWR/ARD (2011-2014)
- the daily ORF youth magazine “25” (2004)