The wombat is a proud and noble animal, sturdy and dignified, the famous Australian "bulldozer of the bush".
We don't have any.
We'd like to, they seem cuddly enough and everything, but we're in Portland, not Perth, and besides, we're not zoned for marsupials, so we've had to make a few adjustments. We do have a somewhat scrufty mascot, a cat named Mitchell, and he does dig in the dirt, but he's not especially noble or dignified.
Mitchell (not a wombat)
Lacking opposable thumbs, he's not especially helpful either, but if necessary, he will supervise for hours at a time.
The Wombats in our name dates back to one of our first projects, a film shooting in Australia. We spent many, many days chasing technical problems with our brains baking in the southern sun, and many, many evenings trying not to attract the attention of the giant fruit bats - theoretically harmless as they circled lazily overhead, but still troubling, seeing as they were only slightly smaller than Cessnas.
Soon enough, everything became a running joke about indigenous wildlife...
"That wombat is staring at me!" "The bats carried off my cables!"
It was actually really funny at the time, probably because the Aussies always had beer. Eventually, the jokes merged into a composite creature with strange new powers...
"The flying wombats have nabbed my camera assistant!"
Roughly about this time, with our brains in this slaphappy condition, we had to file DBA paperwork to start a company. So, on the spur of the moment and in honor of the adventure, we named the business Flying Wombat Industries (we would note that this was, in fact, years before the term "flying wombat" would be applied to a questionable technique sometimes used to end Australian bar-fights).
Frankly, we didn't think it would last 15 years. In retrospect, it probably would have been a better idea to pick a more respectable name, as we have since found that once you name a company, it's an appalling ordeal to go back and change it.
Truly, we should count our blessings that we weren't naming a child back then.
Anyway, the name is staying, though now we call it FWI. The studio accountants seem to like that better.
How'd we come up with the logo? Well, we thought and thought, and well... we have no idea how it came to us.
