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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We’ve got some good news!

The British Stealth Media Group will be handling the world sales of Iron Sky and fund the film with up to 1 million euro. This means they will be in charge of selling it to distributors around the world and we here at Energia and Blind Spot can concentrate on actually making the film. Stealth will begin marketing Iron Sky this week at the American Film Market.

Currently we have distribution deals in place for Finland (Walt Disney), UK (Revolver), Norway (Euforia) and Poland (Kino Swiat).

The actual sum of Stealth’s investment will be between 500,000 and 1 million euro depending on how negotiations go with other potential investors. The final budget for Iron Sky will be at least 5 million euro. However what’s important is that we know now that we can stay on track with the timetable and start shooting early next year.

What we’ve done lately is a lot of planning. Starting from concrete things like schedules and renting locations (most of wich will be in and around Frankfurt, Germany) to creating storyboards and animatics. Set design is also going ahead, with set building starting a month or two before the shooting.

For the last couple of months Timo and Iron Sky writer Johanna Sinisalo have also been working with screenwriter Michael Kalesniko (best known for Howard Stern’s Private Parts and currently working on a comedy with David Fincher) on polishing the English language dialogue.

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.

Diese fuckers at ze NASA tried to ruin our operazion yesterday!

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

The grandest of all Nazi films lately is coming to the theaters tomorrow here in Finland, so we decided to celebrate it with a small video we made with the Iron Sky team while in Cannes.

Enjoy ;)

Shot and edited during one quite fuzzy and hot day in Cannes by our wonderful Pekka Ollula, directed by umm maybe me or something :)

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

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.

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.

I just learned a new word - recce. Didn’t know what it was until I embarked on one, and now I know. It’s basically a trip where you check the possible shooting locations - known also as location scouting.

Wikipedia definition is quite clear:

Recce (pronounced “recky”) is a military term that has been borrowed by media production in the United Kingdom, derived from “reconnoiter” (the verb form of “reconnaissance”). It is a pre-filming visit to a location to work out its suitability for shooting, including access to necessary facilities and assessment of any potential lighting or sound issues.

We did the first Iron Sky location scouting some two weeks ago in Frankfurt area, where we are planning to shoot most of the film - well, at least as much as possible.

Hessen area is quite good for filming Iron Sky, a film that takes place both in the Far Side of the Moon and New York, because it has quite a nice skyline and a lot of military- and mining facilities close by. We’re trying to avoid shooting in New York itself as much as possible, given the fact that although it’s quite easy to shoot there, it can become quite damn expensive.

We visited some bunkers, some quite nice skyscrapers, a botanical garden and finally Club Cocoon - so far the most impressive club I’ve seen in my life - check out their site, it’s awesome.

The most amazing location we visited was called Großmarkthalle in the middle of Frankfurt. I can understand where the word “Groß” comes from - it used to be the biggest building with one huge open space in it before the War. Being used as a vegetable market for the most part of the last century, the morbid side is that it was also being used as the collecting point for the Jews during the WWII, who were being sent over to concentration camps all over Europe.

One - admittably quite a big - thing Frankfurt is missing is a proper studio. They have huge studios all over Germany, but none in Frankfurt. So we need to build one by ourselves.

The place we’re planning to turn into our studio is located in a closed military area used by both the Nazis and later by the US troops which is now mainly a big storage area for Dunlop wheels.

Possible studio location for Iron Sky. Photo by Ulrika von Vegesack.

The place has tens of different kind of buildings slowly crumbling away unused, some quite nice bunkers and a big plane hangar which we could turn into our studio. It’s been left almost completely unattended for several years, which gives the place a nice not-too-far-post-nuclear-war look and feel, with streets and buildings still in place, but heavily overgrown and no living soul anywhere. It actually screams to be used as a location for a radioactive zombie film.

So far, Frankfurt seems like a good choice for shootings. We will continue to search for some locations, and next time I’m looking forward into seeing some mines and underground tunnels!

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

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

Vorwärtz!

After Cannes, things have been moving on with quite a pace. We were able to close most of the funding for Iron Sky at Cannes, so it means that we now actually have a schedule and we really need to start pushing to get things done!

In short, the schedule dictates that Iron Sky will be shot in January 2010, and the film will be finished (not out, though) in January 2011. It’s still a rough estimate, but the best we have for now.

For CGI, here’s how we’re planning to do: we shook hands with a London-based post production house Molinaire. We’ll fly Samuli and his team to London, to Molinaire, to work on the Iron Sky’s special effects once the time is right. This way, we’ll be able to take all the advantage of Samuli and his world class skilled team, without having to worry about building the infrastructure and renderyards to Tampere, and get to work with one of the best CGI people out there.

Right now I’m most worried about finding the locations we need to shoot Iron Sky. We’re planning to utilize an old and abandoned US Army military area located close to Frankfurt for the studio - they have a huge old sport hall that could suit our needs quite well, and possibly some quite interesting other locations as well.

We had an alternative to this place - an old Nazi-era military bunker also close to Frankfurt. The only problem was that there was too much of sheep and TNT in the area. Yeah, sheep and TNT. I can’t get the image out of my head, us shooting scenes on the Moon in the front yard of the bunker, being forced to stop shooting every now and then because a sheep explodes. KABOOM. Sounds quite Pythoneqsue.

Oh, one thing more! I’m not sure if we already wrote about it here, but we’ve moved! The Iron Sky office and Star Wreck Store hauled it’s (quite fat) ass to the other side of the Tampere center, to Hämeenkatu, where we teamed up with Restate, a brand new digital content developer company led by Erik Lydén. As always, the Star Wreck Store is open for visitors, so if you want to take a peek at the Iron Sky production, why not stop by at Hämeenkatu 30 B 1a.

One last thing - I need some of your suggestions for reference films that I should watch. I’ve set up a task where I describe a bit more, just go to Wreckamovie and check it out.

BTW, if there’s any Spotify users out there, I’ve created a collaborative Iron Sky playlist for Spotify, where I’m dragging every now and then some music I think somehow fits the mood of Iron Sky. If you have any ideas, you can put some songs there as well - just open this link to Spotify and start playlisting.

I can’t seem to end this post… But here goes - I also spotted that we have now our own Iron Sky entry on IMDB´- and the good ol’ Wikipedia entry still exists.

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.