Iron Sky

Timo’s Top 10 films of 2009!

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 10:41:18 GMT

SPECIAL MENTION: STAR TREK & DISTRICT 9

Star Trek and District 9 were surprisingly similar films in many ways. At first, they felt like a bite out of a fresh apple, but slowly they started to taste mealier, ditching head first into a pool of cliches and unanswered expectations. Visually, both were outstanding – at first. District 9 ran out of money somewhere around the midpoint, and JJ Abram’s visions of running around on powerplants and blinding the audience with lens flares became too apparent by the end.


And finally, both had quite amazing marketing campaings: Star Trek was sold to me as a teen gay drama in space, and District 9 as a harsh commentary on prejudicament and western immigration politics. Unfortunately, neither of the films eventually responded to things that made me interested. But they were both definitively remarkable films, and deserve to be mentioned.

10. METROPIA

Whine, whine, boo-hoo it was boring, the story was crappy, the world was shitty and nothing happened in it. Wrong. It was a great film, the atmosphere was amazing, the story was maybe the strangest and wildest of the whole year and the cast was excellent. Metropia was not flawless, but a brave, ambitious and exactly what the world of animation needs – completely different from Pixar/Dreamworks dominating the market nowadays. I think we’ll see loads of groundbreaking films from the director Tarik Saleh in the future. So quit whining and respect the film!

Here’s Essi’s review of Metropia.

9. UP!

Pixar never fails. I love everything they’ve done so far, even Cars, and Up! didn’t let me down. The first 20 minutes of the film is easilly the best and most moving 20 minutes in 2009 – hell, maybe in 2000’s. Unfortunately, as the film takes the absurd Pixarian twist, surprisingly enough the story doesn’t live up to the expectations (which is strange, since usually it’s exactly the absurdity that makes their films so excellent). Nevertheless, Up! is a lovely story and Edward Asner delivers one of the best lead performances of the year as the old man Carl Fredricksen. And as a viewer, I feel like somebody respects my time, unlike with most of Dreamwork’s pieces of shit they keep on spitting on the big screen every year.

(BTW. Ever wondered what’s the main difference between Pixar and Dreamworks? Well, here’s quite a good explanation.)

8. CORALINE

Stop-motion 3D animation is here to stay, and Coraline is a living proof that you don’t need a CGI-rendered animation when you have a visionary director working on a story that’s based on a book by one of the greatest modern storytellers. Those being, of course, Neil Gaiman and Henry Selick, in reverse order. Coraline is fun, atmospheric, brave, experimental, beautiful and dark and creepy enough! It’s a humble courtesy for the animaton lovers.

7. AVATAR

The film looks like one of those creepy airbrush-painted dolphin posters that were quite popular in among the most tasteless of us back in early 90’s. The story may not be the most original one – hell, you know exactly what’s going to happen from the very first minutes, and if not, make sure to watch a trailer, it’ll spoil the rest for you. But still, it’s a honest work of love from the grown-up nerd James Cameron, and if you’re able to leave behind the cynicism that’s probably fueling your lost fight against mediocrity, the film is quite damn enjoyable. Most importantly, it’s a film that will last quite long, and spawn heaps of sequels, TV-serieses, cool merchandising – and create a massive fanbase around it. You should enjoy it while you still can – it’s either theaters now, or never on your home telly. The 3D environment is such a big element of the whole film that watching it in 2D is almost like watching bad quality internet porn instead of… Well, the real thing.

Here’s Essi’s review of Avatar.

6. PONYO

The overlord Hayao Miyazaki is back, and takes a dive into the story of the Little Mermaid, giving it a surreal and fantastic twist, and delivering another masterpiece into a long line of masterpieces from the Ghibli Studios. Ponyo felt completely different from any other animation this year – honest and loving in a way only Miyazaki can do. His style is unique, and we sure should hope he stays in good enough shape to make at least few more, because as much as there’s nobody to step in for mr. David Lynch once his time is up, also Miyazaki is unique in this way.

5. MARY AND MAX

“So, you want to make a monochromatic animation about mental illnesses, and you want an all-star cast to it? Yeah, good luck with the funding…” Mary and Max was one of the biggest and most positive surprises – no, out-of-the-blues – this year. It’s a really touching, intelligent and extremely well-written animation about a life-long friendship between a girl in Australia and a man in New York. The story follows the letter exchange between these two, and builds up two perfectly believeable lives with all of the stranger-than-fiction odds and quirks life brings to you.

4. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

To be honest, I was a bit bored with Quentin Tarantino before watching Inglourious Basterds. I mean ever since Jackie Brown, his films haven’t been that impressive, and I started to feel like he had “found his slot” in the industry and descended from this once so promising young director into another retro freak repeating the same joke film after film. But I was wrong. Inglourious Basterds proved that there’s quite a lot of gunpowder still running through his veins, and he’s brave enough to do a film that’s basically long dialogues following each other, seasoned with hefty dozes of sudden violence. And there’s never enough of alternate history movies out there.

Here’s Essi’s review of Inglourious Basterds.

We got so excited about the film that we even did our own version of the trailer – sort of :) Enjoy “Iroun Sky Basterds”!

3. MOON

Semi-hard science fiction with slow pacing, great music, awesome performance and close relations to my next film, Iron Sky, when it comes to Moon as an environment, and Helium-3 as a new target for pure humane greed. Moon is the directioral debute for Duncan Jones who, with this film, catapulted himself among the most interesting directors of the next century. It was recently announced that he will direct the feature film adaptation of Escape from the Deep: The Epic Story of a Legendary Submarine and Her Courageous Crew by Alex Kershaw. Jones also revealed that he will be doing “another science fiction film, called Mute, which takes place in a future Berlin. It’s a Blade Runner-inspired piece, a little love letter to that film.” And he will also direct Summit Entertainment project Source Code, a Science-Fiction thriller from Vendome Pictures, which will be produced by Mark Gordon. Actor Jake Gyllenhaal is in negotiations to play a major role in the film. So there you go, quite interesting films – and Duncan Jones is also a very active Twitterer.

2. A SERIOUS MAN

The Coen Brothers are able to “tilt my camera”, so to speak, so that suddenly everything around me feels a bit stranger and makes a little bit less sense, making life a little bit more exciting experience. A Serious Man was definitively one of those films – but it’s also a film you can do with two conditions: you need to be Jewish, and you need to have an Oscar to prove you know what you’re doing. Otherwise, you’d end up lynched.

1. DEAD SNOW

We’ve been raving about Dead Snow enough for one one year already, and to be honest, I’m not even sure if the film’s actual official release year is 2009 (that’s what IMDB claims, though, but I saw it in 2008 already) but who the hell cares? I just can’t get enough of the Norwegian Nazi Zombies, and Tommy Wirkola’s excellent timing in both comedy and horror genres is stellar. He’s among the few directors I’m following very closely, and I’m very interested to see how his next film, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, turns out!

Here’s my review of Dead Snow.

Everyone – have a merry christmas time and remember not to go outside after dark – who knows what’s lurking there!

Ps! I challenge other Energidiots to do their own lists, too!

(Via ZombieRoom)

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

Merry Christmas and some good news!

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 11:04:09 GMT

It’s a Christmas morning, and I’m sitting in a small red cottage in the middle of vast fields of snow in eastern Finland, close to the city of Kotka. I’ve just slept almost 10 hours, which is exactly 5 hours more that I’ve slept on a nightly basis for the last two months – so I feel strangely rested, peaceful and clear-headed.

I thought about writing briefly about few new things going on right now – and then eat myself unconscious!

First and foremost, we’ve just updated the Iron Sky website. Jarmo Puskala, scriptwriter/webmaster, did a great job fighting against loads of vile and vicious viruses on all of our sites (the problem’s now fixed, thanks J!), and smashing together the new layout for the website. At first look, it might not seem that different from what it used to be, but the functionalities are much better and the site works better to what we believe web sites are used today. Our philosophy in the web design is to feed stuff from many sources to the front page, and activate our users to join our community in whatever way they feel the best.

Because of this, on the frontpage we’re feeding our Flickr feed, YouTube feed, Wreckamovie feed and our blog in the form of News from the Front and Blog. From the Press page you’ll find latest Iron Sky -related articles and can read all of the earlier articles through our Delicious feed
From the Community page you’ll find the main community sites we’re active with, and best ways you can jump in and become one with the Iron Sky.

The Support page encourages you to blog and tweet about Iron Sky to help us spread the word around the word – remember, we have basically a marketing budget of zero, so we need *all* the help we can get from the community!

Most interestingly, a new feature we’ve been testing for some time now, and activated to full burn after the site re-design is the Demand Iron Sky. The idea here is pretty simple: you tell us which city you live in, and let us know you’d like to see the film on theaters in your city. The more people we have from your city signing up, the easier it’s for us to get a theatrical distribution there. So be active, and get your friends to Demand Iron Sky, too!

In other news, we’re happy to announce that we’ve secured more funding from Europe: both The Nordisk Film & TV Fond and Eurimages have granted us production support for Iron Sky, a sum totaling up to about 800000€! So merry christmas to us! :)

Oh, if you want to give us a christmas present, here’s our wishlist:

1. Demand Iron Sky. If you’ve already demanded, get someone you know demand for it. Muchos gracias!

2. Watch Iron Sky teaser on YouTube. I know you’ve already seen it, but we’d like to get above 1 million views before the end of the year, so re-watch it and share it on Facebook and Twitter!

Oh, and if you feel extremely generous, buy War Bond, and help us make the film look as good as it should – every dollar counts, trust me!

Thanks, everyone!

Alright, I think that’s about it. The rice porridge is being carried on the table as we speak, and the sauna is heating up. So it’s time for me – on behalf of the whole Iron Sky team in Finland, Germany and Canada – to wish you all a Merry Christmas.

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

The good old days – as seen by Jarmo’s phone.

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 13:00:31 GMT

Last week we posted some new pictures from Timo’s phone. This friday we’ll be going to bizarro world and post some old pictures from my phone.

Our first Christmas party at our old office. In this pic we can see a very young looking Antti and certain Mr. Lyden who we share the Tampere office with these days.

Timo carved “Slayer” on a swiss roll. Why? I have no idea.

Prototyping the Raumsturmfuhrer cap.

Juhan af Grann and Star Wreck. Met him at a ufo conference where we were asked to give a talk. Me and Antti spent the day there where rest of the team was in Helsinki shooting the Iron Sky teaser. Back then we hadn’t yet publicly admitted we were making a film about space nazis, wich was a shame since Juhan af Grann mentioned the idea of ufos being built by nazis being such a stupid idea he’s not even going to go there.

We of course took the idea quite seriously and were reading quite a bit about Nazi Germany between the script meetings – if you’re going to make a comedy about something it’s better to know the subject inside out…

After the Iron Sky teaser was shot and we got the props and clothes back to the office of course I had to try out the Nazi biker costume. Und mein bad german akzent.

We had cool things to play with, like this inner cap from a fighter helmet Timo is modeling…

…and I stuck my head in the actual helmet. It’s easier said and done, since it’s meant to form an airtight seal with the pressure suit.

The helmet is an original Mig-25 fighter pilot’s helmet. Basicly it’s a space suit, since the Mig-25 was designed to reach altitudes around 25 kilometers. It’s also one of the fastest aeroplanes ever built, with a top speed of Mach 3.2 (that’s 3500 km/h or 2,170 mph). Back in it’s day it was considered so awesome that the Hollywood propaganda machine sent Clint Eastwood to steal it’s fictional successor in the film Firefox. Sadly it weas quickly made obsolete by missiles, so these days only couple of third-world airforces operate the plane and there’s even two of them sitting here at the Tampere airport, just rusting away.

Spotted this painting of Adolf Hitler at a local flea market. Obiously it was tempting, but a bit too expensive at 70e. Also quite frankly I was kind of worried about giving money to someone who would have a painting of Hitler lying around at their house…

That year we also shot a music video for White Flame at an abandoned insane asylum near Tampere. The band’s singer is captured by evil totalitarian uniform wearing women from the Moon, played by Swedish girl band Sister Love.

The shoot was fun and the post-production was long, but checking the upper floors of the huge, dark asylum for trespassers at 2am was a very memorable experience. I’ll never watch horror films the same way again.

And talking of horror, here’s a Shoggoth on the roof during the 2007 Finncon. Later that night after a “few” more beers Timo tried to eat a log.

That’s all I’ve got, so I guess next we’ll take a look at pictures from Samuli’s phone…

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

Iron Sky teaser in Lego

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:26:16 GMT

Toni Nummela has done a great job re-creating the Iron Sky teaser with Lego. This joins Rust Sky in the Hall of Awesome Iron Sky Remixes.

Iron Sky teaser done with cheap Duplo LEGO standins. This video was shot in about two hours and edited in about five hours. No pre-planning was made and everything was shot adlib and in order. Difficult part was to make this all by myself: move the camera, match the timing and move the LEGO-stuff – or find a creative way to do it otherwise.

For those familiar with Iron Sky teaser: watch out for an infamous rendering bug after the motorcycle.

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

Top 7 SciFi settings I’d like to live in

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 21:32:27 GMT

Filmmakers are not the most positive bunch when it comes to future. The visions of tomorrow are rarely too encouraging – usually, it’s just death and oppressin waiting for us.

But not always! Every now and then, a sci-fi film comes up with a world to come that’s almost beararble.

Almost.

Zombie Room takes a look at the top-7 most promising days after tomorrow. Enjoy.

7. VANILLA SKY

You know Second Life? Yeah, it’s the hyped application where you are able to create your “second life” – you know, own a home, look cool, have actual friends and have no bad hair days. The only thing is that uh… Second Life sucks the shit out of your ass through your mouth – it’s ugly, it’s slow and it’s the birth place of the saddest Internet phenomenon out there: Second Life sex.

Can’t beat the SL Sex

In Vanilla Sky future – it’s all happening. And the girls… they are not just any random pixel lumps, but look amazingly like Penelope Cruz or Cameron Diaz.

But in real life, we still have few miles to go…

6. BACK TO THE FUTURE

Hoverboards. Do I need to say more?

I do? Well, one-size-shrinks-to-fit-all -jackets!

5. MINORITY REPORT

In the future, there’s no crime – and even those who are planning to do them, get their asses kicked by Tom Cruise and his special pre-crime unit. But what’s even cooler is that in the future we go back to the times when working on computers actually felt like something. Instead of your boring old mactop, you need a huge room with a screen the size of a small movie theater, special gloves to operate it – and a physique of a sports hero to use things like the Internet. In Minority Report’s future, there’s no more fat nerds rotting away in their mom’s basements – these guys and girls are out on the squash range to be in enough good shape for some serious Googling.

Nerds of the Minority Report future stay fit.

4. THE TRUMAN SHOW

Imagine this: no more Big Brother. No more The Bold and the Beautiful. No more crappy talent shows and no more Survivor – everything is made obsolete by the biggest reality TV show ever – The Truman Show. And what’s even better: instead of you hoping every day you pass a newspaper stand that these clowns on Big Brother, Talent and Idols would get in the same car and drive off the cliff, dying a quick but an extremely painful death – you’d actually care about the main guy! The world would be again a bit nicer place to live, and everybody wins.

Ok, it might not be the most ethical thing – but all we’re asking for is a bit of sacrifice to keep the rest of the world is happily sedated.

3. MOON

In Duncan Jones‘ Moon, everything is just fine. The world’s energy crisis has been solved: we’ve finally established a Helium-3 mining station on the Moon, so no oil or nuclear energy problems anymore!

Helium-3 is an extremely powerful source of energy which we don’t have too much on Earth, but Moon (supposedly) has quite a lot of it. And what’s even better, it only takes one guy to take care of the whole operation. It’s not like he’s going to start rebelling against Earth or anything, he’s pretty much stuck there – and even finding a replacement for him once things go wrong isn’t a problem, thanks to our friend, technology!

Again – it only takes a little bit of unselfish scarification. Come on, you can give that much to your community, right?

2. WALL-E

One thing we all hate is cleaning up the mess we make. Now, in the perfect future, there would be robots to do that for you, right? In the Wall-E future, we would get on a huge spaceship travelling away from Earth – and we’d had to do absolutely nothing in order to survive. Just sit down, chat with our mates and let the ship take care of every need we come up with.

And yeah, we’d be coming back to Earth one day, once the mess we made was cleaned up. And next time, we didn’t have to worry so much about things like environment etc. – the ship would stay there, so if everything would go to hell again, we could just jump onboard and come a back a few hundred years later!

1. IDIOCRACY

If ignorance is bliss – then Idiocracy is the ultimate utopia. In this future scenario, created by Mike Judge (of Beavis and Butt-Head fame) claiming aloud that your highest principles in life are sex and money is OK – actually, it’s considered as a damn philosophical statement! Ok, the world might be going to hell, and yeah, maybe watering your plantations with Gatorade is not the best idea out there – but hell, travelling in time there with your current brain capacity – which we both know is not much – you’d still be the combination between Einstein, Sun Tzu and Aristoteles.

(Via Zombie Room)

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

It was a hot, slow day in the Shire, and my office was filled with the sound of nothing happening.

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 10:56:06 GMT

A number of things occurred to me recently. For one, next week it will be eight years since Peter Jackson’s first Lord of the Rings film came out (and seven and six years since the second and third ones, respectively). Second, the 25th would be Humphrey Bogart’s 110th birthday, were he still alive. Also, apparently writing commenced on what would eventually form the novel Lord of the Rings in December, 1937; we recently covered a “retro-reimagining” of Matrix; and not long before that, the “pre-made” Raiders of the Lost Ark trailer gained considerable popularity at the offices. (How’s that for a strained lead-in?)
With all that in mind, I thought this a perfect moment to feature something that combines two things rather close to my heart… film noir and Lord of the Rings. What if the complications in getting his novel published had led the frustrated Prof Tolkien to offer his text to Hollywood instead?

As usual, Gollum takes the cake as the most memorable character, even though he’s up against some pretty tough competition here… including Bogie and even Godzilla!

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

Iron Sky offices – as seen by Timo’s phone.

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:35:26 GMT

Storyboarding

What’s been happening in Helsinki is a lot of storyboarding. Then some of the most difficult scenes have been turned into animatics, or crude 3D scenes where you can test camera movements etc. And of course the storyboardskeep changing, because it’s always a process. Meanwhile back in Tampere Jussi is doing production design ie. planning all the Nazi spacecraft, interiors etc.

Budget meetings

There are a lot of these. And they’re not that interesting to talk about. Or take pictures of. Unless someone breaks a chair.

One is a budget meeting in Helsinki, another a budget meeting in Berlin. Turns out budget meetings look exactly the same in both countries!

Living on the edge

Samuli doing some network troubleshooting at the Tampere offices. What might look like chaos is actually a well organised storage unit for high-quality network cables.

Wardrobe

Near the Helsinki offices the costume department is stepping into gear with costume designer Jake Collier.

Location scouting

Meanwhile in Germany the set design is getting into full swing. To complement the built sets we’ll be using both virtual sets and location shooting. That means a lot of time spent location scouting in damp tunnels and abandoned factories in Berlin and Frankfurt. It’s wellw orth it though, since some of the places are absolutely awesome.

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

Kitty has reached critical mass.

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:31:28 GMT

The Xbox Zune marketplace opened here in Finland as well. This means that for the first time we have a VOD service that is 1) As easy to use as The Pirate Bay 2) Offers instant viewing 3) In good quality and 4) Is almost reasonably priced. The price being “almost” since it depends on the film, if you watch HD or SD and where you buy your Microsoft points from. But for example Babylon 5: The Lost Tales would cost you some 2-3e, while a current blockbuster in HD would be 4-5e.

But because the studios are still hell-bent on committing a slow suicide there are two major problems. First is the selection – it’s small, ridiculously small. There are fewer films on offer than there are DVDs on my bookshelf. But this should be only temporary. The second problem is that to watch the HD videos you need a HDCP enable tv that is connected to your xbox trough hdmi. This means that if they want me to pay the 1,50e extra for watching fiolms in glorious Full HD I need to buy a new tv AND a new Xbox (I’ve got one of the older models without hdmi).

This copy protection bullshit is absolutely ridiculous. HD is still in adoption phase, it’s not mainstream. And yet the studios are trying to slow down the adoption by building artificial barriers of entry. The second is that the studios need to sell the HD to get the price of films back up. The price of DVDs has dropped like a rock – the old bargain price of 9.99e is the new norm with films coming down to 3-7e in a month. Still every dvd produced costs, the printing fees, copyright fees & rating fees tend to stay the same even when the selling price goes down. And it’s the part that goes to the filmmakers that gets cut. And if that’s the price of a physical disc, why pay more for a download? Yet the price of online VOD is kept artificially high. HD streaming has the promise to offer the extra value and get some people to pay more. So slowing down the the adoption of HD is just plain stupid.

However, even though most people won’t be able to watch the HD streams in the next few years, the Zune marketplace is still the best VOD service available in Finland right now. And it’s good enough to have the potential to reach critical mass and finally bring film rentals online.

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. Please leave any comments there.

Things we didn’t know about: Iron Sky Erotica.

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:04:20 GMT

Iron Sky images get appropriated for softcore Nazi porn without our knowledge.

It’s another ordinary Monday at the offices. However we got some unexpected entertainment. While looking for reference images, our concept artist Jussi was kind of surprised when he found his own works being used as backgrounds for softcore Nazi porn. On a site with the catchy title “Goetia Naughty Alien UFO Vril Society Girls“. The site is very NSFW, but if that’s not a problem you can find it here.

More strangely familiar looking occult erotica...

We had absolutely no idea about this, so as you can imagine we’ve had quite a bit of fun and several “WTF?” moments checking out where our pics had ended up… The site is the work of one Mark Dunn, who has basically Photoshopped a lot of naked or nearly naked girls to pose on the Iron Sky concept art pictures. And written a lot of text in between the pics, ranging from the etymology of the word “Easter” to Adolf Hitler. Why? I have no idea since I didn’t even read half of it, sorry.

Hot jetpack Hitler?

It’s not all Iron Sky, there’s a lot of other stuff, like this picture of a Hot Jetpack ~~Hitler~~ Nazi… And suddenly I get a slight shudder at the thought of what kind of Google searches will find this post*.

Anyway, many say that a porn parody is the highest form of compliment. However Mark does seem to be very serious about all this, especially copyright:

All © Copyright of Works, Art & Writing Above & Herein belongs to the Creator of this humble Web-Site, Artist and Author Mark Dunn, whose Magickal-Persona of Artistic Pseudonym among many being Faustus Crow.

He’s also added a big “copyright by” watermark into every picture. So Mark, if you’re reading this. We don’t really mind Photoshops of half-nekkid women. Actually, if I were to hold a vote here at the office they would turn out to be quite popular. However, it’s a bit unfair to use pictures from another artist and then claim copyright on them.

Don’t get me wrong, whatever the copyright law says, it’s not our business what you do with your spare time, if Photoshopping Nazi erotica rocks your boat then go for it. We’re just saying you shouldn’t claim credit for work you didn’t do. Also, if you use Iron Sky stuff making occult erotica, don’t credit us either.

*Speaking of Google searches, the scariest search we’ve spotted in our logs was “i want to by man eating plankton” [sic].

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

Blowing up toy cars in slow motion.

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:01:47 GMT

Some friday fun for your inner 9-year old. You know you like it.

There’s really not much else to say about it. Just be happy that we live in a world where geeks can film anything in slow motion and upload it to YouTube in HD. I bet you couldn’t have imagined future would be this cool back when you were blowing up toy cars. Just don’t mention anything about not having jetpacks.

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

LA Times interviews Samuli.

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:58:22 GMT

Samuli doing what Captain Pirk does best.

Linda Whitmore of LA Times’ Hero Complex did a very thorough interview about Samuli couple of weeks back. Now the results of that interview have been published witht he title “Star Wreck, from Finland, with love“.

I rarely blog about things that are written about us, but this is an exeption, mostly because a) It’s a very good interview, as Kris from our forum put it “Anyone at all who likes Wreck should read that interview” and b) because the Finnish press thought it was newsworthy, with one of our two biggest tabloids, Ilta-Sanomat, writing an article about the interview… Sometimes journalists work in mysterious ways.

What would happen if the Starship Enterprise and “Airplane” crashed into the Babylon 5 space station somewhere in the skies above Finland?

The loopy result would be “Star Wreck (The Imperial Edition),” the Starfleet parody from a Finnish writer-actor-producer named Samuli Torssonen and his crew of amateur moviemakers. Seven years in the making, the farce opens on the bridge of the USS Kickstart with the not-so-cosmic sound of a toilet flushing – the men’s room, it seems, is conveniently located right next to the vessel’s command center.

There’s also an interesting notion from Samuli:

The team of five people formed by accident. The director, Timo Vuorensola, was not a “Star Trek” fan at all — which ultimately was a very good thing. Usually, fan-film directors know too much about the subject, and the film doesn’t make any sense to non-fans.

That pretty much sums up five years of critique towards fan films. People making them just know too much. And it seems the problem is kind of creeping to mainstream cinema (and TV), with some re-boots spending far too much time making knowing references to the original to become interesting films in themselves.

Head over to Hero Complex to read Samuli’s interview.

Oh, one other thing. If you’ve seen Star Wreck we would really appreciate it if you took the time to write an review on Amazon and let others know what you thought.

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

What if Matrix was shot in the silent film era?

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:14:07 GMT

At least in the silent film era Neo would have had more than one facial expression.

An ingenious silent film treatment of Matrix from the Russian group “Big Difference“.

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

VOD – Voyage of Despair

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:36:52 GMT

(This post was originally published on Zombie Room. This is the second part of the Zombie Room’s look into the world of Video-On-Demand. You can read the first part here.)

THE WEBSITE

CDON.Com is a web store that operates in the Nordic countries. It’s owned by Modern Times Group, a company that created the Metro Newspaper, and specializes in entertainment - music, movies and consumer electronics.

The site has tucked the Video-On-Demand -service in the lower parts and shadier corners of the huge site, that’s hoping to serve every customer’s needs. Once you realize where it is, the basic functionality is quite simple. The site looks as clear as a web supermarket can - which means loads of ads blinking everywhere, and very little useful information anywhere.

FINDING A FILM

CDON.Com has a variety of films categorized under top lists, most viewed and by genre. Scanning the site we very quickly noticed that their Finnish language is horrible. Finding a film to watch is equally painful: from their mediocre selection of few hundred film - that’s basically a smaller (and much worse quality) selection than any video rental joint - we ended up picking Choke, a crappy drama based on Chuck Palahniuk’s quite awesome text.

In general, webstores do have a problem with shelf space - in any store you register at least on some level hundreds and hundreds of products, but on webstore you either have to have something in mind already, or you are relying on what other people are watching - unless they have a very advanced search and recommendation system.

CDON hasn’t made the film search too easy: apart from first ~20 films in every category, they just offer a plain list of titles, and even the mouseover that reveals a small picture of the cover works very randomly.

Some kind of a film suggestion system would be preferrable, but with a selection of few hundred titles, making it useful is impossible.

PAYING FOR THE FILM

Once you have something in mind, it’s relatively easy to pay and play. Registration isn’t necessary, and it takes about 10 minutes until the film is on. Payment options are either Visa or Mastercard - so eveyone with no credit cards; sorry, no service to you, sub-humans.

The prices are the best of the whole test - from 0,95€ to 3,95€, which is acceptable (I think 2 bucks a stream is what I’m willing to pay - in a perfect world), and they even have a “free film of the month”. After the purchase, you can either download the film or stream it. However, they’ve added some stupid download manager which, of course, destroys your digital copy after 24 hours.

WATCHING THE FILM

Quality is fuzzy DV, and there’s no subtitles. But the film starts right after you’ve paid it, and the player works perfectly.

SUMMARY

A service which offers the lowest prices, but stumbles with quite a bad selection of aging semi-blockbusters for general audience.

Zombie Room review: 2,5/5

- - -

Movie-TV is the Internet-end of a small, Helsinki-based DVD-outlet called Keskus-Video, located at Eerikinkatu. The shop is a wonderful place, a small, labyrinth-like maze filled from wall to wall with DVDs - and the prices are very much right. It’s one of the places I avoid unless I have loads of money, since I end up spending a 50-100€ every time I just step on Eerikinkatu. Luckily, we live in Hakaniemi…

THE WEBSITE

Hats off to the developers of Movie-TV - they’ve boldly entered into a market that’s very soon going to be dominated by big-ass players, and only very few of the smaller ones will survive. I’m not sure what’s the business idea behind Movie-TV, but what I can gather from the site is that it’s basically a very comprehensive DVD shelf of a real movie nerd commune - it doesn’t have that many titles, but among them are some quite fascinating pearls: a wide collection of Haneke, loads of action films from the 80’s, nice amount of horror, and even kids’ animations and anime. Instead of trying to push aging, two-year-old semi-blockbusters, it’s selling me good films.

Technically, the site isn’t flawless - the design is a bit clunky and usability is lacking certain amount of intuition.

FINDING A FILM

At first, the site throws on my face a random collection of DVD covers. Too small to be of any use, but at least I get an idea of quite a colourful selection. The films are categorized under top lists and genres. We decided look scan around for a while, and ended up on I Heart Huckabees (no idea why, and I still regret the decision).

PAYING FOR THE FILM

Let’s start with the bad news - the pricing is absolutely mindless. They ask 6€/streaming, and there’s no possiblity for download - excuse me, what the hell? It took a while for us to convince that we’re willing to pay, but - reminding us of the test we were working on - we gave up and paid… But, really: please, think about it - what are you doing? You should be competing with Pirate Bay and Mininova, not with Sokos and Stockmann.

But then came the nice surprises: instead of the credit card requirements, you can decide to pay either with a card, directly from bank account, or even with an SMS or a phonecall. No registration is required, so they won’t be spamming me for the rest of my lifed just because I wanted to see a film.

WATCHING THE FILM

Once you’ve selected the film, it takes only 5 minutes before it’s is rolling - and there’s a possibility to choose whatever quality you like - even HD, if available. The film plays nicely and the quality is good - even subtitles are available.

SUMMARY

A small but devoted service with an interesting selection of ridiculously overpriced films.

Zombie Room Review: 3/5

- - -

Red-themed Film2home -service is owned by Bonver Videodata, a company that claims to be the single biggest home entertainment distributor in the Nordic countries. The service is available in Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

THE WEBSITE

Film2home is devoted to films and TV-serieses, and they begin serving you with two major disappointments: first, you need to use Internet Explorer for the service to work, and second - they have a whopping library of “almost 1000 films”. Now having 1000 films in your home shelf is quite a lot, but you’ve picked them yourself. For a service trying to serve thousands of customers on daily basis, 1000 titles is just not enough.

The site looks nice enough and it has big, clear and clickable buttons everywhere for the ease of use.

FINDING A FILM

The selection is limited, yet they’ve been able to drag some quite fresh films there, too. Well, fresh considering their DVD release schedule in Finland… The service is putting a lot of effort in offering enough interesting information about the titles, so you don’t have to go digging for IMDb - they even have a user rating system, which reminded me of how completely inexistent the social dimension in mostly all of the VOD services is.

The films have been categorised in quite an intuitive way - in addition to genres and top-lists, the titles can be searched by the name of actor and theme etc. This is important, and it’s completely unacceptable that services out there don’t put enough effort into good and clear categorizing and search methods - the only reason for that is that mostly they are lazy and don’t give a shit about the user experience.

PAYING FOR THE FILM

There are films you can only “rent”, and films you can “buy”, too - that means, of course, downloading. But basically, that’s what it does anyway, it’s just a minor difference in the tech on how it’s executed - but the pricing is just ridiculous. They expect me to pay 15-20 € for a digital download - it’s really one of the worst deals… I pay considerably less on mostly any DVD, and I get best quality, a physical copy, all the extras and so on…

Again, these services should be competing against Pirate Bay, not Stockmann.

Price range for download is around 4 euroes, you get something a bit cheaper and there’s even a free film for members (this month it’s Mission Impossible…). Payment methods include Visa and Mastercard.

WATCHING THE FILM

Now here comes the shit. First, we needed to change from Firefox to Internet Explorer, go through the painful setup process of a Microsoft products, before nd finally we were able to start viewing. Oh, no - we of course needed install Adobe Flash Player. That’s OK, only problem is that it refused to install - the reason was, eventually, because we were using 64bit Explorer, not the regular one. I almost gave up trying to figure this out, since there was no error messages or anything, it just didn’t work. It took almost 15 minutes from the moment we decided we wanted to see In the Electric Mist, before it was actually running.

Don’t know is this somehow Flash Player -related problem, or something to do with the service - but we weren’t able to pause the film without having to stop and start over again from the beginning (Buffering… attempting to reconnect… buffering… … …). Doesn’t sound a biggie, but remember that “pause” is the greatest feature of home cinema compared to theaters…

SUMMARY

A nice-looking service built on nearly unusable tech, with quite a small selection of films.

Zombie Room Review: 2/5

- - -

Filmnet is a VOD service that operates in Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. It’s “powered by Canal+”, which should promise plenty of interesting content available.

Well, not so much. They have exactly 133 titles in the library, which is basically not even a library - we have over 400 DVDs in our shelves. But there’s one we, the Zombies, like very much: they have Dead Snow!

THE WEBSITE

The site looks nice and sleazy in its glossy black suit, almost like an aging playboy in a bit shady nightclub, serving Mickeys for the girls.

FINDING THE FILM

The films are categorized clearly under normal genre categories, and as a nice plus, they have a “recently watched” films in the front page - almost like RedTube!

But here’s an interesting question – during the last 5 days I’ve visited there, the recently watched films –box’s content hasn’t changed a bit. Makes you wonder if it’s either broken, or they have no users.

The site has striking resemblances in general look and feel to the free porn sites on the net – and they even have a 18+ section which has almost as many films as the non-porn site has!

PAYING FOR THE FILM

Payment options are limited, and the system gives a strange errors, trying obviously to hint the user to use Internet Explorer. The price for the films is expensive - 4,25€/film, regardless of how old the film you are watching. You also need to register in order to be able to pay, which is kinda stupid.

WATCHING THE FILM

But the nice thing is that the service is quite straightforward, and it took us only 4 minutes until the film was up and running. The quality is OK, the connection works quite well - only kinda embarrassing thing we noticed was that their subtitles didn’t support the Nordic characters - the “ä”’s and “ö”’s.

SUMMARY

A service that’s clear, fast to use and straightforward, but looks more like a porn site, has terribly bad selection of films (ok, they have Dead Snow, which is a big plus) and the pricing and the subtitles suck ass.

Zombie Room review: 1,5/5

- - -

My expectations for SFAnytime weren’t too high to start with, given the experiences of Jarmo Puskala from Energia. SFAnytime has been for quite a long time the biggest VOD-site in Finland, and they’ve been promoting heavily. And at the same time, it has been criticized the most.

THE WEBSITE

SFAnytime looks neat and clean, and you get very quickly a good idea on what the service is about. The impression of a professional VOD service crumbles quite fast though, when an unexplainable error message halts the process, and you are required to register - after which the service just crashes immediately.

FINDING THE FILM

The film catalogue is nice – not specifically new, but has some good films in it. We decided to pick Steve McQueen’s debut film Hunger, which turned out to be an excellent choise.

PAYING FOR THE FILM

Trying to pay for the film was, again, very cumbersome. The process begins with a strange DRM notice, after which you need to re-register. Visa and Mastercard are accepted as payment methods, and right after the payment, it comes apparent that Explorer is required as a browser. The price is 4€ - again, quite expensive, especially given the overall quality of the purchase process.

WATCHING THE FILM

The service gets stuck into “acquiring media usage rights” –message, and we’re able to continue watching after we had changed the browser. At this point, I’m almost willing to give up, but force myself to continue. The quality of the download needs to be chosen from a very complicated and badly advised menu. It takes total of 10 minutes to get the film rolling. Luckily, Hunger is the best film we’ve watched during the test, so my pain is alleviated.

SUMMARY

A service that has been around for quite some time, and just fails to fix its basic problems, but it still remains to be the first place to go because they’ve managed to establish themselves in Finland as the definitive VOD service, thanks to big promotion and marketing.

Zombie Room Review: 1,5/5

- - -

We had already almost given up hope for a decent service by the time we finished watching the film from SFAnytime, but then our friend Eric Vogel tipped us about The Auteurs, a fresh VOD service we had never heard of.

THE WEBSITE

The Auteurs is a VOD service unlike anything we had encountered ever before. Right from the beginning, it’s apparent that this is something different: the website looks much more like a social network site than a VOD service, it’s clear, simple and focuses more on content than shiny skin - and it makes me feel like it’s made by people who actually have a respect for great films.

The experience starts with a beautifully simple Facebook Connect login. After that, you end up into a site that promotes loads of great films in very informative and detailed way, with big pictures and clear links.

The site makes watching films online a social experience, where you share your reviews, your wishlist and films you watch with other people - and it’s very tightly connected with Facebook and Twitter. You can create your own profile, they have a forum for discussions, and everything you do and see is easilly shareable.

FINDING THE FILM

Unlike most of the other services, The Auteurs has really done a great job in presenting, suggesting and categorising films. And what films they have! No bullshit, only good films by great filmmakers. Masters of cinema like Kubrick, Lynch, Fellini and Svankmajer populate the amazingly international and high-quality film listings.

The problem is that most of the films they have on the site are not available for viewing, at least not now. The site makes it clear that it’s still in Beta, so most of the issues are acceptable - they are working on it, and doing a great job. But you can very easilly just sort the films available for viewing in your area, and although the catalog is not huge yet, you get an impression that somebody has really been working on it.

And the categorization of films is highly advanced - the site has wonderful lists like Festivals, where they’ve listed all of the films in competition on every major festival, beginning from early 30’s.

Each title is described in great detail, and you can view what others have thought of it. For us, unlike in other services, it was a problem to decide which film to watch out of the great selection, and we settled down eventually with Primer.

PAYING FOR THE FILM

The first real issue is the price. At least that’s what I thought first, but then I realized that hell, it’s really not the price I’m paying, but the experience and the extra I get with it. Each feature film costs 5€, and short films 2€ - there’s even some free films available. And even better, you have a possibility for a monthly subscription - with 18€/month you get an unlimited access to the ever-growing selection of the site’s films, and with 10€ you get to watch 4 films/month.

This is almost too good to be true.

WATCHING THE FILM

And as I suspected, it is too good. With the following comments, please be aware that the site is still in beta, so there are problems and beta users need to bear with it. And I’m also not sure why watching the film sucked, and if it has anything to do with the site itself, but it did. And we tested it out with two different computers.

The film twitches a bit. It’s an amazingly annoying feature, and I’m not 100% sure if it’s a problem with every film (we, obviously, tested out just one), but watching Primer was really painful. Bad quality can be forgiven - and the quality at Auteurs is very good - but skipping and twitching can’t. The film was nearly unwatchable, and I felt very bad about it, even more since the site was tuned exactly the way I want a VOD site to be, and they’ve even say: “P.S.—By the way, we’ve worked hard on the quality of the streaming and we are very proud of it… just wanted to let you know…”

I don’t know what was wrong with it, but it sucked big time.

EDIT: As Eric wrote in comments: “Sad to hear about stuttering/streaming problems with The Auteurs. I’ve watched two films there with none of these issues.”

Another big, annoying minus for the viewing experience was the forced subtitles - in Swedish. Watching Primer, which is quite a mindfuck of a film in itself, that’s twitching every now and then, and subtitled in Swedish was well… not very pleasant. Not worth 5€.

Having said that, the great thing is that viewing is possible with every operating system and every browser out there, and it’s really fast and easy - took us about 3 minutes to get the film rolling, fastest of the whole test.

SUMMARY

A great service and social network that’s suffering from some beta problems, but still manages to rise above all the others. Give it another 6 months, and this thing is going to become the definitive VOD service for film geeks, serving films that won’t be available even on Torrent sites.

Zombie Room Review: 3,5/5 (Note: still in Beta!)

- - -

That’s it for now. Check back at Zombie Room for parts one and two, and my attempt at hoe the Ideal VOD Service should be done.

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

Hubaa Radio Millenniumissa - armottoman tehokasta!

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:51:19 GMT

(This post is in Finnish and it’s about sketch comedy segments we produced with our friends from the sketch comedy troupe Huba. They’re running on TV right now.)

Tiesittekö, että 95% hammasbakteereista esiintyy suussa? Entäs sen, että uudet Huba-sketsit ovat pyörineet TV2:n sunnuntai-illassa jo useamman viikon?

Energia on Huban kavereiden kanssa tuottanut joukon sketsejä TV2:n Radio Millennium -ohjelmaan. Jaksot tulevat ulos sunnuntaisin 23.20 ja uusitaan myöhään tiistaina. Huba-sketsejä nähdään yleensä yksi tai kaksi ohjelman “mainoskatkolla”, jossa tulee myös muiden tuottamia sketsejä. Sekoittamisen vaaraa ei pitäisi olla, Huban sketsit kun tuppaavat erottumaan.

Ja koska elämme tulevaisuudessa, niin sketsit löytyvät myös YleX:n sivuilta:
Korvaako koulutus kaiken?
Piilokameran parhaat
Länsimarket
Oral Attack

Käykääpä katsomassa.

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

Griffin - Web series from Wreckamovie and F-Secure

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:19:36 GMT

The first teaser for Griffin (previously known as Project Worm), the communally produced web series has been released. The teaser features Mikko Hyppönen of F-Secure. F-Secure will take part in the project as cybercrime advisors.

The made-for-Internet TV series F-Secure and the Wreckamovie community are collaborating on is called “Griffin”. The series tells the story of Griffin Sharp, a good guy with a complex past in the world of cybercrime. It will initially have six episodes each taking place in a different country. “Griffin” is being developed by a web community of enthusiasts on the Wreckamovie platform. The community is creating the stories, the script, visuals and will also take part in the actual filming.

The pilot of “Griffin” will be available in 2010. You can join the “Griffin” community and be part of the story at www.wreckamovie.com/griffin. To watch the teaser, go to www.youtube.com/FSecureNews

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

Dead Snow Zombie Walk in Helsinki 28.10.!

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 15:49:39 GMT

When there’s no more room in hell, the dead shall walk the Hellsinki.

The Norwegian Nazi Zombies are finally crawling to Finland, and what better way to hail their excellency than throw in a proper Zombie Walk! In collaboration with Night Visions and Zombiewalk Helsinki, and my blog Zombie Room is proud to invite all you freaks to join the Zombie Walk from Helsinki Railway Station to Maxim movie theater, and then watch the greatest nazi zombie film ever - Dead Snow.

Dresscode

Well, it’s simple - Dead Snow Zombies are deceased soldiers and wear military - you know what I mean. Now add some blood, guts and gore and you’re all set. Then show up at Helsinki Railway Station at 20:00 on Wednesday, October 28th - and be sure to book your ticket for the screening beforehand! The price ain’t bad - 7,5€. You can order them in advance (and you should!) from here.

And remember to RSVP to the Facebook event here!

Competition

There’s also a competition here! The Night Visions organizers will pick the most rotten zombie corpse among all of the Zombie Walkers and hand out some cool prices.

Oh, how about the film? Yeah, we’ve seen it - we were actually among the first ~15 people who saw the film - and you can check out a review for the film from here.

TL;DR: Fucking awesome.

Here’s the trailer:

Here are some photos from the movie for inspiration:

For more info visit the official site www.nightvisions.info
Check out also the Helsinki Zombiewalk official site
And here’s Dead Snow official site.

(Via Zombie Room)

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

Star Wreck fanfilm crew invades the Energia offices!

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:48:13 GMT

Couple of weeks ago a group of fans from all over Europe gathered at the Energia offices in Tampere. They were here to shoot a fan film of Star Wreck called Star Wreck 2pi. The shoot was arranged by Swiss fans Thierry and Fabienne Gschwind on Wreckamovie. Samuli and Timo reprised their roles as Pirk and Dwarf and all of us from Energia had a lot of fun.

In case you don’t believe me I asked British filmmakers Martin Lejeune to do a guest blog about the shootings. You can read his recollections below and if you’re into apocalyptic comedies you might want to check out his short film Untitled Dystopia.

So, here I am running on about three hours sleep, holding a microphone below a man who is painted like a chocolate bar in a heavy metal wig as he barks orders at a battle fleet which is presumably somewhere behind the green screen we’re in front of.

Hang on. Let’s back up. After a day of travel, I’ve been sleeping on a sofa at the offices of Energia productions in Tampere, Finland. Not very much - mind you - due to the two hour time difference. Everyone’s been setting up equipment like it’s nine in the morning, but I could swear it was still closer to seven.

Something which is not helped by the fact I’d arrived late the night before and been handed a bottle of rum by someone determined to make a case for Fin’s being the most welcoming culture in the world.

It’s as cold as a fridge outside so to wake myself up I go for a walk and grab some breakfast. So I head out to take my first daylight glimpse of Tampere.

Accidentally, I manage to make brief eye contact with a group of old men sitting on a bench, which I soon find out is a massive taboo here as one stands up and starts getting irate with me in Finnish. I ignore him until he goes away. It is later explained to me that in Finland the most interesting thing to do is stare at is your feet. Always.

Upon my return to the office to discover a pair of scantily clad women throwing themselves from imaginary computer terminals and falling out of chairs.

We are shooting Star Wreck 2pi the Swiss-Norwegian-Finnish spin off to 2005’s “Star Wreck: In The Pirkining” and this is just the kind of thing that is to be expected.

Most of the forty minute film has been shot in the Swiss town of Basel with a new set of characters, but the production team has come here to shoot some important crossover scenes with the original cast to tie both films together.

The Energia team has been a fantastic host. Whilst various extras were being shot to be placed in the background I had a chat with Jarmo Puskala and Antti Hukkanen, two of the guys who make Energia tick. We tried to work out what made British and Finnish comedy so similar; The Fast Show still plays on national TV out here and the self depreciative nature of both cultures provide a lot of the fodder for their respective senses of humour.

In the afternoon Star Wreck’s lead actor Samuli Torssonen arrived to reprise his role as Emperor Pirk. With the help of a crack team of interpreters the script was translated from German to English to Finnish; for the jokes work in all three languages it’s got to be good.

Timo Vuorensola was also on set for an hour to do his scenes as Lt Dwarf. Although he didn’t have his full “Plingon” ridges he quickly got into character and gave a very loud performance in a very short space of time.

The second day of the shoot it was my turn to be made up. I was to be wounded facially. Luckily I’d brought Ena with me to do just that kind of thing. So she started covering me in blood and scars.

I was promptly instructed to throw myself around as if on a ship taking hits from torpedoes. It took a couple of takes for everyone to throw themselves in the right direction. Then to disguise myself I put on a heavy metal wig and shot more sequences of being blown up, injured, running and generally swearing; in German of course.

The production team took advantage of the ‘Wreckamovie’ platform a website for making films collaboratively. This is how they have found people from all over Europe to work on the project. After putting the project online last November forty seven people have joined up to offer advice, help or to work on the film, from concept art through to helping with the post production workflow.

Unfortunately with my time on set at an end, I was shown around the annual fish market where we enjoyed some local fried herring and other delicacies, but as I dig in, I am especially cautious not to make any unexpected eye contact…

Martin Lejeune is an Exeter based filmmaker and Effects Artist, He also enjoys wandering the world as a digital vagabond.

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

What Became of Us: The Attack of the Amateurs!

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 22:00:50 GMT

On Wednesday was the premiere of a Finnish indie movie What Became of Us. This was actually the second screening of the film in Finland since it was also shown to a sold out theatre in Love & Anarchy film festival a couple of weeks ago. The Zombies were invited to the premiere and after seeing the movie I felt compelled to spill my guts about the experience.

First off you should know that What Became of Us is a no-budget movie that is completely independently made. There is no distributor, no professional actors or even professional film makers involved. Regardless of this What Became of Us is one the best Finnish movies I have seen in years. It is not even in comparison to most of the so-called professional films that are produced in Finland each year. And do you know why? The answer is simple; the movie actually manages to move, make you laugh and surprise you. This is unfortunately more than I can say about most Finnish movies.

It was clear from the beginning that the movie is made with love and true passion for film making. Even the opening speeches felt different and I could have listened them for hours. The true power of the movie comes from the amazing script, combined with great acting and of course the directors ability to tell a story. It’s the perfect example that you don’t always need money to make a great film, after all it’s about telling stories and telling them well.

What Became of Us is a movie about friendship. It’s a tale of gathering of the former elementary school classmates. At the climax of the story is the class reunion, set on a cruise ship. In the chilling night even the most kept secrets of the past are revealed by the salty sea wind. Only the debt of gratitude of one bullied young man can save the classmates from certain death. Check out the trailer below.

The film is directed by the multi-talented Miika Ullakko, who is also responsible for writing the script and playing one of the lead characters. The movie is more or less a sequel to his award-winning first feature film Graffiti Within, that was also made independently and with only 2000 euros or so in 2006. Here is the trailer, unfortunately I couldn’t find one with english subtitles.

For the past few days I’ve been asking myself what is the difference between an amateur and a professional film maker? The description for amateur from Wikipedia says: “An amateur is generally considered a person attached to a particular pursuit, study, or science, without formal training or pay. An amateur receives little or irregular income from their activities, and differs from a professional who makes a living from the pursuit and typically has some formal training and certifications in the domain. Translated from its French origin to the English “lover”, the term “amateur” reflects a voluntary motivation to work as a result of personal interest in the activity.”

Of course these are just words and pointless titles per se, but as long as you a considered an “amateur”, finding a distributor for your film can be very difficult. If your movie isn’t funded trough governmental money, you don’t exist basically. Even if you have made the best movie of the year, you can’t get help for example making a film print to send to festivals, or you don’t get considered for the Finnish Oscar, the Jussi Award. This doesn’t seem quite right…

I admire the spirit and determination of the film makers and actors involved in What Became of Us. I for one am inspired and a bit more hopeful about the future of Finnish cinema.

Unfortunately I don’t have any news on when or where you could see this movie, but as soon as I do, I will be sure to post it here. Until then visit the official site for more info. And stay tuned for more coverage on these guys and their plans for the future.

(Via ZombieRoom - btw, we just refurnished and redesigned the blog a bit, go and have a look!)

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

Snowblind trailer

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 05:58:18 GMT

Snowblind, a German full-length feature film has just released a trailer which looks pretty nifty:

And of course it is being produced in WreckAMovie, check it out and help these guys!

So far at least many of the backdrops are from the community. I wish I had WAM when we were doing Star Wreck…

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

Hardkor 44

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 07:15:48 GMT

Anyone heard of The Warsaw Uprising in 1944? It was when the Soviet army was approaching the Nazi occupied Poland, and Polish underground forces tried to organize a nationwide rebellion against the Nazis in order to liberate Warsaw before Stalin’s troops.

Right now, they’re making a film about it.

The most interesting angle to it is that it’s a science fiction film, with cybernetic steampunkish Nazi robots fighting in a futuristic setting against Polish rebels. There’s not too much information available in English about the film - titled superbly as Hardkor 44 - but it will be directed by Tomek Bagi?ski, and will be made in the same technique that was used in the making of 300 and Sin City.

The production company behind Hardkor 44 is one called Platige Image, a VFX-heavy film production company that was responsible for most of the special effects of Von Trier’s Antichrist. And the director Bagi?ski has just finished a short film called The Kinematograph, which seems like an amazing animation done with style and integrity.

So I have to say, Hardkor 44 jumped right in the very front of my list of films to wait. Just check out the awesome concept art!

More concept art for Hardkor 44 available here.

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

Cross-media competition from Power to the Pixel

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 07:58:30 GMT

Just wanted to note that Power to the Pixel, a London-based forum for filmmakers with eye on the Internet and future in general, has announced a Cross-Media film project competition, which is accepting submissions now. Here’s what they say about the thing:

The Pixel Pitch is Power to the Pixel’s ground-breaking new pitching forum for up to ten of the best UK and international cross-media film projects.

We are looking for stories that can span film, TV, online, mobile and gaming to be presented to a select group of financiers, commissioners, tech companies, online portals and media companies in front of an audience of PTTP participants.

The selected project teams will compete for the
BABELGUM PIXEL PITCH PRIZE of £6,000.

Teams will benefit from significant international publicity and be introduced to new international business and partnership opportunities as well as one-to-one consultancies.

Last year’s Launch saw four cross-media projects presented to international companies including Babelgum, Sony Computer Entertainment, BBC, YouTube, MySpace, Amazon, Channel 4, UK Film Council, Arts Council of England, Tribeca Film Institute.

So if you feel like you could have a story, why not push it to PttP compo, and start working on it via Wreckamovie!

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

Timo on Iron Sky & Wreckamovie

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 12:45:52 GMT

Here’s an interview I gave to a Finnish-Mexican blog called Tequila Bajo Cero, where I explain a bit about Iron Sky & Wreckamovie.

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

The Truth Today - Issue 2/2018

Tue, 19 May 2009 09:41:57 GMT

Here’s the pdf version of the second issue of The Truth Today distributed in dead tree form at the Cannes Film Festival.

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Magazines & Newspape parody satire onion

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

Cannes Dailies’09 - Merry Christmas!

Tue, 19 May 2009 07:16:03 GMT

In Cannes every day is like christmas.

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.

Cannes Dailies’09 - Palais Paperboy.

Mon, 18 May 2009 20:11:04 GMT

The original paperboy is back, bringing The Truth to the busy people at the Cannes film festival. How do they react to the shocking news of a Space Nazi attack?

Originally published at Beyond the Iron Sky. You can comment here or there.