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.

(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.

(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.

It’s time for the makers of the Iron Sky game, the Jyväskylä, Finland based IGIOS, to step out of the proverbial closet. They have released the community pages for the game, titled Iron Sky: Operation Highjump on Wreckamovie, Facebook and Twitter.

You might have heard that someone was already making a game based on Iron Sky - that’s us.

We are looking forward to working together with the WreckAMovie community on a game that will mirror the enthusiasm and creativity seen in Star Wreck and Iron Sky -movies. We, the people behind the production, are fans of the movies as well as gamers, and we have no intention of making another half-assed movie-based game that limits itself to retelling the plot of the movie. Rather, we want to tell a story of our own: one that is related to the one told in the movie, but can also stand on it’s own.

The first task is already up, and so are our brand new pages in Twitter and Facebook (links attached). Welcome aboard, based on the quality of shots in we’ve already seen here in WreckAMovie, we believe that the community here can provide us some great insights and help us make an even better game.

- Matti Delahay, IGIOS

Operation Highjump will be a real time 3rd person action adventure game set in the WWII era. A standalone story in the world of Iron Sky, the plot revolves around a secret underground Nazi base in the Antarctic. Rather than plain vanilla technical and graphic splendour, we aim for good playability, immersive plot content, strong dialogue and atmospheric environments. (Yes, that’s what they all say. But we mean it.) Add a nice big cup of strong, black humour, and you’ve got a general idea of what we’re shooting for.

You can read more about the real-world Operation Highjump at Wikipedia. Also known as “The United States Navy Antarctic Developments Program, 1946-47″, it was a massive naval operation where a taskforce consisting of 4,700 men, 13 ships, and several aircraft sailed to the Antarctic. Officially it was supposed to be a training mission, but conspiracy theories suggest it was a full-blown military operation to wipe out the secret Nazi base in the Antarctic.

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

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.

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.

The Finnish Film Foundation just released their latest funding decisions.

Obiously the big news for us is that Iron Sky will be receiving 800,000€ in production support. Most Finnish films receive support from the Foundation and it’s often a big part of the budget. We’re obiously very, very happy of their support. If you read Finnish there’s a lot of other info on the film as well, maybe even bit of a spoiler in the synopsis, so watch out.

Also, it’s been very interesting lately to read the support decisions. There are many interesting projects in developement right now and I’d go as a far as saying that the field of Finnish film is changing. The gem (that has absolutely nothing to do with us) in this month’s support decisions was called Zombie-Risteily, that would translate to “Zombie Cruise” about a cruise ship overrun with, you guessed it, Zombies! And what’s even better for us Finns is that’s it’s one of the ferries sailing between Sweden and Finland - also affectionately known as “drilling platforms” and many other names. Basicly they are huge cruise ships with about 2000-3000 passengers that are not so much going somewhere as going to the ship to get absolutely and totally wasted. There are thousand and one stories to be told on those ships and zero films thus far.

Also in the scripting stages is a film adaptation of Kimmo Risto Isomäki’s book Sands of Sarasvati. A thriller about the climate change - and trust me, it’s good. It should also adapt to the screen very well. If you want to have a look the comic adaptation is already translated into english, but the translation of the novel isn’t out just yet.

Other interesting genre-ish films are Haaska (aka. Carcass) - a horror film about a nature photographer in the Finnish wilderness. And Lykantropia (Lycantrophy) that’s to be a drama/thriller about child killing wolves in the 19th century.

And since we’re talking about Finnish films I can’t resist gushing on about the teaser for Mothgirl, upcoming film from our friend Toni Pykäläniemi.

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

Let’s star with the good news:

Thanks to Twitter I came across this upcoming web serial called The Mercury Men. It’s not the first pulp scifi series on the internets, but judging by the trailer it’s the most promising. Scary glowing men shooting lightning from their hands, ray guns and scientists, what could go wrong? However what I found most promising was the actor playing the scientist, he has the perfect face for the role.

There have been rumors of Peter Jackson and Nazi zombies and Stephen Fry as a guest on Simon Mayo’s radio program last weekend claimed the following:

Fran [Walsh], who is PJ’s wife and writes with him, they’ve come up with this idea called The Christ Must Die in which Nazi zombies go back in time to stop Jesus from being born.

Slashfilm has some more info, including official denial from Jackson’s manager. However no-one seems to be certain if it’s a joke or a real project. Let’s keep thumbs up for the latter. Also, to increase the coolness the hosts commented that the film reminds them of this film called Iron Sky.

Peter Jackson is also producing the above South-African feature District 9 that is based on a short film made famous on YouTube. To oversimplify, the idea is “Apartheid with aliens”. The short film was inspiring on it’s own and the feature is pretty much unmissable.

Unfortunately universe has balanced all this awesomeness out with bad news from two other Nazi zombie projects. Both Finnish led WWII zombie film Stone’s War and Dutch nazi zombie flick Worst Case Scenario are in a limbo.

Worst Case Scenario is/was the Dutch flick with the teaser showing ballooning nazi zombies. According to Twitch the film is pretty much dead in the water right now.

due to “productional stalemate” the film is again very much locked in development hell. Apparently there is a Catch-22 in there somewhere, with several parties waiting for each other to proceed and there is no obvious way out in the foreseeable future.

The situation with Stone’s War is even more confusing. Stone’s War is the zombies in WWII movie from the Finnish director Marko Mäkilaakso. The film has been in a literal developement hell for years with the first attempt at filming it being shut down because ofmoney trouble - causing them to loose not only all the filmed material but also the rights to the original title War of the Dead.

We talked to the director last year at Assembly and at that time it seemed the film was almost complete and should come out during 2008. However something went wrong and the film vanished.

According to what little info there has leaked from a blog at Suomen Kuvalehti and Yle news, the film is supposed to be ready. However it seems the film’s Lithuanian producer Ramunas Skikas is sitting on the release. Press hasn’t been able to get a comment from him and the distributors are being told that they’ll get their copies soon. While Hollywood studios sometimes sit on finished films there are very few producers in Europe who could afford to do that for long - if the film has been made and paid for they need the get the investment back.

Nobody seems to know what’s going on, but a safe bet would have it having something to do with money being owed by someone to someone else. Let’s hope the film sees the light of day soon. Meanwhile director Mäkilaakso is apparently working on his next film with Stan Lee.

Not to end with a downer one more bit of good news for Finnish horror:

Skeleton Crew, the horror project by our collegues from the neighboring city of Ylöjärvi will come out on DVD in the US on 21st of June. We saw a short reel last year, but have yet to see the whole film. However there are already some reviews online; one, two, three.

Would love to get a look at the finished film soon. We shot the music video for Hour of Emptiness at the same abandoned mental hospital last year, and actually with a lot of the same crew as the film.

Edit: The great guys from @empiremagazine were awesome enough to ask Peter Jackson about the Nazis vs. Jesus film in a recent interview. Unfortunately it looks like it’s not happening.

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

(This post is in Finnish. Mostly because there is no shortage of Twitter articles in english.)

Twitter palveluna on ollut melkoisen hypen kohteena viime kuukausina. Nyt myöskin Suomessa ollaan heräämässä ja Helsingin Sanomat julkaisi juuri artikkelin Twitterin käytöstä markkinoinnissa. Asiasta tullaan varmasti lähitulevaisuudessa esittämään huomattavan paljon asiantuntijamielipiteitä ja kaksi vuotta Twitteriä käyttäneneä haluaisin kertoa teille muutaman asian mitä me täällä @energiassa olemme oppineet:

1. Seuraajien määrä ei ole menestyksen mitta.
2. Twitter ei ole televisio, radio, lehti, puhelin tai MySpace.
3. Sen sijaan Twitter on tori.
4. Siksi ota oppia torimyyjistä - mutta unohda huutaminen.
5. Ei ole kaavaa, ohjelmaa tai asiantuntijaa jonka voisit ostaa, unohtaa ja silti hyötyä Twitteristä.

Ihmiskunnan historiassa Twitterissä ei ole mitään uutta. Se on vain yksi uusi väline keskustella, jatkaen samaa linjaa savumerkkien, puhelimen ja IRC:n kanssa. Myöskään Twitterin markkinointikäytössä ei ole uutta - se jatkaa samaa asiakkaiden kanssa keskustelua mitä kyläkauppiaat ja torimyyjät ovat harrastaneet läpi historian.

Se, mikä markkinoijia ja yrityksiä järkyttää on se, että Twitter tuo keskustelun 2000-luvulle jossa mainonta ja myynti on keskittynyt massamedioihin. Televisiomainoksen katsojan kommentteihin ei tarvitse vastata, eikä Helsingin Sanomat saa kirjeitä joissa kysytään kuinka uuden Mazda 6:n ajovalon polttimo vaihdetaan.

Haluaisinkin siis toivottaa myös Suomen yritykset tervetulleiksi takaisin henkilökohtaisen palvelun pariin. Vastahan siitä päästiin eroon supermarkettien ja mainostelevision myötä.

p.s. Meitä voi tulla morjestamaan myös irkkiin, tuohon palveluun joka voidaan nähdä Twitterin vanhempana ja viisaampana esi-isänä. Meidät löytää IRCnet -verkosta kanavalta #starwreck.

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

Cultural differences 101 - or the trailer for AJ Annila’s Sauna from it’s American distributor IFC.

Finland has been known for quite a long time as one of the most uncorrupted countries in the world. Yesterday, this was changed. A law dubbed as “Lex Nokia” was lobbied and steamrolled through in the Parliament of Finland. The law has received a lot of criticism from the law professors, general public and Internet actives because of it’s vague wording which, in the end, may give certain parties in Finland more power to watch over the Internet than for example police has nowadays. In addition to that, it has come clear that a lot of a bit strange lobbying and even threats have been attached to the preparation process of the law. It is said that Nokia has threatened to leave Finland and take the 16000 jobs with it, if the law doesn’t go through.

The law itself gives the right for the employers to monitor the emails of the employees, but the law extends also to other communities, like housing cooperatives, which makes it even more ambiguous and vague.

One of the saddest things was that some parties that I would’ve expected to vote against the law either staid out of the conversation, or changed their view in the end. The biggest disappointment was the Green Party (Vihreät), from where only Energia’s main favourite MP Jyrki Kasvi and Johanna Sumuvuori was doing the right thing and voting against it. Strangely enough, both Perussuomalaiset (far-right) and SDP & Vasemmisto (left-wing) both were collectively against the law, but all together almost 1/4 of the Parliament were not present at the voting, and it was smashed through with a clear majority voting for the law.

Here are the results of the vote.

Makes you think, makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

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

From the depths of YouTube comes a subtitled version of a classic sketch from one of the greatest tv shows Finland has ever produced, Studio Julmahuvi.

This pretty much shows sums up the whole of Finnish culture and Finnish movie culture of the 70’s/80’s in four minutes and 16 seconds.

What I don’t know if this will be funny to anyone who is not Finnish, but hey, at least it’s educational. This really is a case of “it’s funny ’cause it’s true”. What you see in the video is certain to happen in every rural community in Finland at least once a year.

If you’re Finnish you already know that. And you’ve propably already seen this. But hey, it’s good enough to watch again, right?

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

After work me and Laku decided to go shopping to a local supermarket. Nothing strange about that, except that next to the sliding doors is a trash bin and on top of the trash bin was… this:

A child size glove with a bone sticking out. I would guess it probably tasted like chicken.

It’s full moon tonight alright.

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

The publicity campaign against the blatant-infringement-of-privacy bill about to be hammered through the Finnish legislative system that we recently blogged about has, as of this morning 8 P.M. local, done the impossible: produced a TV infomercial mostly on a volunteer basis (on a schedule redefining the term “tight”) and gone on the air on national television.

Now that they’re public, the “anti-ads” have also been made available on YouTube in HD quality, in order to promote greater public awareness of the unconstitutional monstrosity granting all kinds of operators the right to monitor their users’ emails.

And that’s not all. The Electronic Frontier Finland foundation has announced their intention to take the act to the European Court of Human Rights, should it be passed.

The folks behind the campaign blogged (in Finnish) about the proceedings, saying some very nice things about the work of the participants.

EDIT 3 Feb: It’s scary how badly-informed and willing to give up their freedom the Finnish people are. Today’s Metro tabloid published the results of a poll about whether this bill should be passed. The comments included gems such as “Well otherwise, we’ll be giving bad guys free rein to sell industrial secrets.” How gullible are you people? The selling of industrial secrets will not be deterred one bit by giving other people the right to poke their noses in your emails. All it does is set up convenient loopholes for commercial interests to exploit. (The good news is that 75% of those surveyed were against the bill.)

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

The “Urkintalaki“-thing we have also been involved in few ways seems to have reached its goal of about 10000€ to buy the infomercial that’s going to be aired on TV nationwide next week. “Urkintalaki” - or “Snooping Act” is a law that’s about to be pushed through in Finnish government, that would allow not only companies to keep an eye on emails of the employees, but also other public organizations, like housing cooperatives etc. to do the same. That’s giving a nice kick in the nuts for the constitutional law back here in Finland, making the Land of Thousand Lakes one inch worse place to live in.

A group of Internet activists decided to do what they can, and inform as many people as possible about the legistlative proposal. I’ve seen the rough versions of the infomercials, and they are damn cool! We’ll show ‘em here as soon as they are on the Internet. Check out the Urkintalaki website for more info - in Finnish only, sorry :(

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