The collaborative film production platform WreckAMovie.Com is growing steadily. We released the official beta of the platform few months ago when we got the MindTrek Grand Prix, and the most interesting feature we added then was the ability to add your own productions. Right now, WreckAMovie.Com is growing steadily, as we add features and make it more compelling for filmmakers and fans to work on with. Right now, we have 1213 registered Wreckers on the system from 38 different countries, working on 27 productions, ranging from feature films to short internet episodes, from films in very early developement stage to films already in theatrical distribution. But that’s not enough for us - we are looking forward into building WAM into a platform that hosts hundreds of thousands of active users and thousands of films, pushing out to worldwide markets of all sizes hundreds of films every year.

Our aim is to keep WAM running steadily for the next year, while we develope the platform and it’s functionalities, and drop from beta somewhere early 2010. And you can join the process as well, by joining the Wreck A Movie Platform production on WAM, where you can share your ideas and thoughts of the system in general.

I thought about doing a short sneak peek into three interesting productions right now active in WAM. There’s a lot more, but I’ll bring these up for now:

Star Wreck 2pi is a fan film of a fan film, a film set in Star Wreck’s universe, and taking place - as the name says (2pi=6,283…) between Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning (”VI”) and the rumoured Star Wreck VII. The film is in canon with Star Wreck universe (well, as far as I know), and they are right now developing the script with a pretty fast pace, looking forward to shoot the film next year. They are right now looking ideas from the community for the script - jokes, ideas on how the world is in 2010, how Pirk’s fleet should be like etc. The people working on this - Fabienne & Thierry Gschwind - are rock-hard Wreck fans, but have also produced a massive fan parody production about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, called Verhäxt und Ufgspiesst (the monster-of-a-name means “Jinxin’ and Stabbin‘” or something like that :), that’s already finished, and also in production on WAM.

What Became Of Us is a feature-length film about class reunion, made by a group of Finnish guys who did an awesome youth film, funding it out of their own pockets, called Graffiti In Us (Graffiti meissä, 2007), which won the AFIA film festivals last year - and which I’ve seen, and know it’s pretty darn good. I’ve also had a change to look at some material for the upcoming film, What Became Of Us, and it looks *very* convincing. The film is right now in post production and should be out in 2009 . They are looking forward to get some help with their marketing and website, cuz the film is pretty much done by now.

Son Of Man is not actually a film - it’s a book. At first, when I noticed this production being set up to WAM, I was a bit worried, but then I realized that what the hell, it’s all about collaboration, and if people want to work on a book on WAM, it’s just wonderful! Then I realized who’s behind the production - Mike Pohjola, a Finnish writer, who also wrote the official Star Wreck RPG few years ago. Mike is looking for recommendations on films and asking where the future is taking the book format.

Well, that’s it for now! Stay tuned, we’ll be back with you already before the end of the year in various shapes and forms, just like Cthulhu monsters!

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

I returned from my London-Stockholm-London -trip back to Finland in Saturday, and right away took a cab to Kaapelitehdas in Helsinki, to Alternative Party 2008, where the other guys from Energia were already waiting. We had been preparing to do what we called the “Hakenkreutzierungmachineworkshop”, a small workshop where we asked our people - the Iron Sky community - to help us out with a certain prop we needed for the film.

The prop, called indeed the “Hakenkreuzierungmachine”, (e. “The Swastika Machine”, f. “Hakaristeytyskone”), had been a tricky item for us for a pretty long time already. It had been written to the script, and it plays sort of a big role at least at some point of the film, but we had been debating for as long as the script has existed on how the thing would actually work, what it would look like, and how it would be operated.

Story requires that it is supposed to be sort of an “audioweapon” built by the Nazi scientist in their great wisdom during the 70 plus years they’ve been hiding in the far side of the Moon. In it, they have compressed all the speeches of Adolf Hitler and Josef Göbbels in a soundburst of one second, which is transmitted in various different wavelenghts, that are thought to affect the human brain subliminally, to the audience. See, dr. Reinhardt Richter, the developer of this awesome device, has found out that average non-Aryan human being actively only uses 10% of his or her’s brain capacity, but is capable of far more complex processing if treated the right way. Dr. Richter believes that the device will make all those that are under the influence of the soundburst to understand all the relevant messages of the National Socialism in just few seconds, thus becoming Nazificated. Obviously, he has been unable to test the theory and the machine, given the fact that all the Nazis in the Far Side of the Moon are already Nazificated.

We gathered two small groups of Iron Sky -enthusiastics, told them the above and then gave them some instructions on how to work. Basically, we wanted them to design us the Hakenkreuzierunmachine, a portable model of it.

And off they went. One hour of tight collaboration, the two groups came up with awesome results, both of them very funny, well-thought and right to the point. We had a hard time to decide which of the designs was better, but finally settled with design by the group number one.

Here’s the result, and the description:

HAKENKREUZIERUNGMACHINE

The HK Machine consists of a main unit with numerous gauges, dials and switches, two separately adjustable loudspeakers, and a fuel tank which accepts a torpedo-shaped cartridge of crystallised Helium-3. The backpack-sized contraption is so heavy it needs one person just to carry it around, who must wear a protective suit because of the heat (and noise) generated. A separate operator then prepares and activates the device. The procedure goes like this:

1. The carrier dons the protective suit and straps on the device.

2. The operator inserts a fuel cartridge and secures the tank lid.

3. The operator makes sure all the switches are in the “Off” position; checks the H3 pressure; sets the desired range; and adjusts the loudspeakers for either a wide or narrow area of effect.

4. The carrier assumes firing position. Proper bracing is important. The operator slams down the firing lever. A tape begins playing, saying “Bitte hören, bitte hören” (“hear ye, hear ye”). Studies have shown that a polite request like this improves the device’s effectiveness. The operator supports the carrier and counts aloud: “Drei… zwei… eins… feuer!” The sound blast is released. A tremendous recoil knocks the carrier back.

5. The lever is returned to the up position and a 20-second cool-down period begun (because the sonic vibration heats up the device). The fuel cartridge is good for about four blasts, after which it must be replaced. A fit, Aryan operator can carry about half a dozen cartridges.

It was very delightful to find out that the people – a totally random groups of folks – were able to pool their creativity, engineering skills and minds together and created something we desperately needed for, and the result was much better than we had ever hoped for.

In addition of providing us the crucial plans of the design of HK-machine for Iron Sky, I’m delighted to find out again how collaboration with the audience can be very effective, fun and turn into something much better than what filmmakers could’ve come up just by themselves.

This is also the whole core idea of WreckAMovie, just in analog form. We are hoping to build a forum, a gathering place for people from all different fields of life, pool their resources and enthusiasm together, and serve it for the use of filmmakers around the world.

Energia Productions would like to thank everyone who participated the workshop, as well as the organisers of he Alternative Party this year! And to the filmmakers around the world – don’t be afraid to work with your audience – your community. There’s an ocean of possibilities out there just waiting for you to use them.

The Swastika Machine Architects In Action: Juho Hartikainen, Eevi Korhonen, Lare Lekman, Joonas Mäkinen, Matti Pajunen, Jalmari Raippalinna and Osma Suominen (in no particular order) sweating their asses off to create the greatest invention in Nazi Science!

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

Power to the Pixel is a part of London Film Festival held in - surprise, surprise - London. It’s a technology-minded part, a bit separate from the festival itself, and it humours the subject of filmmaking and -distribution online. This year, they had a nice lineup of people flown over from the States and some from the Europe - the online filmmakers family get-together, more or less.

Again, the topics were the same I’m quite used to: everyone can make films, nowadays everything is cross-platform, utilize your community, don’t work with the old media industry, piracy is good, copyright is bad - maybe not so original, but hopefully for somebody it was inspiring. I think somebody said it well: “Nowadays, there’s no more “audience”. Today, it’s the community. So act accordingly.”

And eventually everyone was asking and trying to answer the question: how to make money with your film that’s released for free. And, as usual, nobody was able to answer to it. Why? Because there’s not one idiot-proof model to it. It’s stream of revenues that combined make the profit. One thing is for sure, at least: nobody has made a million with it. And on the Internet, you only count in millions. But then again, in the ideal world, every filmmaker would be happy to make a decent living and enough revenue to do the next film. But I don’t think that most important issue is the money, it’s the way of working, the philosophy of working with your audience, your community. If it’s sustainable, it will turn to dollars. If it’s not, it would’ve died already - so guess it’s on the good route, let’s just stick to it.

Before the model starts to work, or - God forbid - to make money, we need to sort out the biggest problem of the whole new industry. Why so few filmmakers make films online - there would definitively be a huge market for it, and when thinking further on the Long Tail theory, if that applies to film, there should be hudreds of thousands of new, aspiring filmmakers utilizing the Internet in the future. But there is not. It’s almost impossible to find good case examples from the Europe (Star Wreck is one of the very, very few), and in the States it’s mainly the same guys they wheel to festivals all the time - Four-Eyed Monsters, We Are The Strange and Steal This Film. So what’s the problem? Everything is out there, why don’t people make more Internet films, but stick to the old, supposedly non-working models and industry that they voluntarely let assrape them over and over again? The fragmentation of the whole field (of Internet filmmaking) is the biggest problem. Nobody would know where to start out with - there are dozen of community funding possibilities, tens of tools to collaborate on the film, and hudreds of ways to self-distribute it on the Internet and make some cash out of it. But there’s nobody that’s gonna take you by the hand and show how to use the Internet for filmmaking.

One of the problems is the platformisation of the working model, versus the requirement for the filmmakers to be independent. There, I am quite aware, also WAM has things to develope. The problem is that nobody wants to be “just another production in a platform”, so they’d rather create an own platform to it (if they are ambitious enough to start with, and if they are not, prolly they never finish the film anyway) instead of setting their films to a heap of other films fighting for the lebensraum. Instead of everyone flipping out their platform plans, the independent internet filmmakers should focus on trying to find ways to make the process as clear as possible, as understandable as possible, and have some good references of successful executions to back up the message.

There are few that try to do this - From Here to Awesome and Workbook Project, also IndieGoGo has some good guidelines on the Internet. But I’m looking forward into even more clearer system that would answer the few main questions *every* filmmaker has to ask:

1. Where to start?
2. What then?
3. Will I get paid?
4. Who have succeeded on it before, and how well?

When these questions are answered, filmmakers are more willing to approach this model. And eventually, it’s the filmmakers that need to be assured, definitively not the distributors and other middlemen. If somebody answers the four questions there in a convincing and clear way, it’s the middlemen that lose their jobs. But fear not, there’s always room for middlemen in whatever kind of industry future, and eventually it will be as always - the middlemen make the money. But maybe in the future the filmmakers would be more free to express themselves?

Right now I’m in a SAS plane flying over from London to Stocholm, where tomorrow morning we have a Nordic Cultural Commens Conference , with a discussion about “how to make money by giving away stuff for free”. I’m not expecting any groundbreaking revelations to pop up, but this is the only way - the clearer the concept gets, the clearer people identify the problems and needs of the people on both sides of the community, the closer to the surface the best answers travel.

So let’s just hope next time this industry - no, this form of art, storytelling and entertainment - makes the rules, it’s the filmmakers, not the middlemen, who set them.

M dot Strange talking about his experiences in creating a community around We are the Strange, and distributing the film on the Internet.

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

Woohoo! We’ve won the Grand Prix price from MindTrek 2008 -event in Finland with WreckAMovie.Com! totalling to 20008€, plus also we have been nominated as Finnish candidate to World Summit Awards!

Photo by Tommi Järvinen.

Way to go to the whole team behind WreckAMovie! But MUCH MORE than that, MASSIVE THANKS to everybody already subscribed to the platform, you made it real!

Grande! Muy especiale!

Keep on Wrecking in the free world!

Los Hombres Sexuales! From left: Samuli Torssonen, the Producer; Peter Vesterbacka, the Mobility Mastermind; Timo Vuorensola, the Director; Vesa Nieminen, the Developer; Atte Joutsen and Lare Lekman, the Architects.

Timo.

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

The first film to come out of Wreck A Movie -platform to hit the big screen, a Finnish horror film Sauna (directed by AJ Annila), has been chosen as one of the films in Toronto Film Festival’s programme. The gritty but devastatingly beautiful horror film is quite unlike any horror flick I’ve seen before, and I’m really expecting it to find a good audience through Toronto. But even more importantly for us, it’s great to see a film that has had the Wreck A Movie community touch in it (some of the Tasks brought results that can be seen/heard directly on the screen) ends up to international film festivals.

Here’s the trailer again:

In other news, VentureBeat featured Wreck A Movie in it’s article, which you can check out here. We are also planning to open the platform for any productions out there in just few days - first it’s for a test, but Wreck A Movie will advance to Public Beta by the end of September, when there will be a re-design of the site’s visual appearance, some major additions to the user interface, and Enter Your Own Production -feature. In other words, much more activity to be expected in coming months!

Keep on Wrecking, and congraculations to the whole team of Bronson Club for Sauna! Be sure to check out also their blog about the production of the film, some interesting stuff there as well.

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

I was invited as a guest to DIY Days in L.A. that was held during the last weekend, but because of Finncon I was unable to attend there personally. DIY Days is an interesting event where people discuss new and fresh ways to make films with the aid of Interent and with an alternative methods of funding and distribution. The panelists were the equivalents of us in the States - Arin Crumley (Four-Eyed Monsters), Ondi Timoner (Dig), Hunter Weeks (10 MPH) and M. Dot Strange (We Are The Strange) - and although we were unable to attend there, we did a “short” (that’s friggin’ 20 minutes of me blabbering with STFU shirt on…) video presentation on our stuff that was aired at the event.

The discussion - The Realities of DIY - is pretty interesting to anybody wanting to do a film but not quite sure how to do it, and more so, how to utilize alternative channels to fund, create, distribute and sustain it. Check it out!

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

So, April Fool’s day is yesterday, it’s time to be serious for a moment…

Iron Sky is doing well. We are preparing our asses to go to Cannes again this year, and this time, we’re gonna be there with our demo for *real*. I don’t expect for you to believe, but you just need to wait and see :D We are actually teaming up with the guys from Bronson Club (who are working on Sauna), and armed with Iron Sky and Wreck A Movie, we’re aiming to get a serious start for the first funding round of Iron Sky. We might *still* be just a little bit too early, since we’re not planning to shoot Iron Sky in 2008 anyway, but it’s a good place to start.

And that leads us to the actual topic of this post - 404.

What’s that, you might ask?

Well, that’s a short film I’m planning to film this year, if I can come up with the funding. We already have a production companies (BSP & Energia), a very talented team and a full script. And the story is a kickass one! It’s a real netnerd story - as one might guess from the name already - and it’s written by Janos Honkonen and Susi Vaasjoki, both of them very skilled writers.

We submitted the film for YLE’s annual Short Film project, where they, together with Finnish Film Foundation, fund 4 short film productions from upcoming directors. It’s a pretty long shot, since there’s gonna be tens, if not hundreds, of submissions, so changes are not too big. But who knows! It’d be great to shoot a film this year, while we are still pre-producing Iron Sky and not actually shooting anything…

So cross your fingers and hope for the best, we should know by May 15th if 404 is going to happen or not. And if it’s going to, we’re gonna need your help on that one.

In other news, we are right at this moment finalizing a music video for a band called White Flame, as we’ve written earlier. Stay tuned, for we’ll post the video here once we have a green light from the record company - that should be somewhere during the coming weekend.

I didn’t have any pictures, but posting without pics is usually forbidden in any self-respecting medias, so here’s a picture of Samuli with a Hello Kitty hat on top of a German WWII helmet. Enjoy!

EDIT:

Oh, there’s something pretty cool news also - Blabbermouth just reported that Candlelight is gonna release in the States the album Robin by Farmakon, a Finnish metal band I happen to know, and of which’s singer can be seen on Star Wreck as well (the guy who’s sitting next to Fukov at the P-fleet’s Captain’s Meeting), so that’s a pretty clear reason for me to promote that. Right? In addition, I’d like to say Farmakon is a darn good band, and if you are into high quality death metal, go check them out!

And I said there’s no pictures? Well, not directly related to this post, but I just found out from Twitch that there’s few new pictures from Sauna released, you ought to check them out as well!

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

For the last two years we’ve been touring around the world and talking about idea of collaborative film production. It has been received surprisingly well, although - of course - some doubts have been placed. Alongside with working on Iron Sky, we’ve been designing, funding and building a platform we first called ‘Raven’s Nest’, then ‘Star Wreck Studios’, and now, as we are moving to private Alpha, the name has been fixed to ‘Wreck A Movie’.

The big idea behind Wreck A Movie is what we call wrecking - making films the Star Wreck way. We believe that interesting quality content can be produced via collaboration over the Internet, where resources and talent are abundant, and intelligent distribution on the other end provides a real ecosystem for films made this way.

Wreck A Movie is a collaborative film production platform. It’s free, and will be open for everyone once we enter Beta. In Wreck A Movie the user can both set up his or her’s own production and find people around the world to collaborate on different tasks around the film, as well as find interesting productions and artists and collaborate with them to help other films to be made.

While still in private Alpha, we restrict our users to only about 100, and we only have one production - that’s Iron Sky - but the tasks on Iron Sky are the real deal. The invitations to join as an Alpha user to Wreck A Movie will be sent out during this weekend to those who’ve already signed up to www.starwreckstudios.com as a Beta tester.

I’ll write more on Wreck A Movie later, when we are closing invitation-only Beta - but to make sure you’ll be on Beta list, go to www.starwreckstudios.com and sign up as Beta tester!

Here’s a screenshot of Wreck A Movie Alpha:

Have a great weekend!

EDIT: One thing I wanted to add just to see that this has really been under work for a pretty long time :)

Read the BBC article.

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

Dear Wreckers & Iron Sky people, we need your help!

One of the biggest challenges in the production of the Iron Sky demo has been creating the Nazi Moonbase. Although we’ve had some pretty wonderful submissions by great artists from all over the world, we also want to hear your ideas.

The Nazi Moon Base itself is pretty much ready (although texturing and detailing are still a work in progress), but we need you to help us with designing the surrounding of the base. Everything from a brief idea description to a full 3D model are appreciated!

This task is open until 30 November 2007.

DESCRIPTION OF THE TASK

Design elements for the environment surrounding the Nazi Moon Base. Submit your ideas and textual descriptions to the forum. Pictures can be submitted either there or directly to us via email.

TASK REFERENCE

The Schwarze Sonne, the secret Nazi stronghold located on the Far Side of the Moon, is a huge complex built to house thousands of Nazis and their war machinery. The central structure is the fortress built in the shape of a swastika. Surrounding the main construction, many smaller elements have been built to support the everyday lives of the Nazis and the preparation of their return to the Earth.

The technology is pretty much 40’s style, since technologically the Nazis have not been developing much since they came to the Moon. But they’ve had plenty of time to build big, strong elements, tools, vehicles and weapons. You may think of this as a crude steampunkish world, but please keep a touch of realism to your designs.

The fortress is located in a shadowy crater, about 2 kilometres across, and the main building is about 1.2 kilometres in diameter, making it about twice the size of the Pentagon. Around it can be pretty much anything, from barracks and construction platforms to whatever you can come up with - you have the freedom to invent anything. Use your imagination!

SUBMITTING IDEAS / PICTURES / 3D MODELS

We accept anything from short idea descriptions to detailed documentations, from raw, hand-drawn sketches to detailed 3D models.

Material can be posted to by

As you may remember, some months ago we were asking our community to participate to Tampere University’s PARTECO-research on Star Wreck -related research, asking questions like ‘who is our community’, ‘why did they participate in Star Wreck’s production’ and ‘what did they expect to get from out of it’. During Mindtrek-festival here in Tampere, Atte and Katri Lietsala, the researcher, presented some of the results to the public. You may check some of the interesting stuff from these slides:

In other news, a Catalonian university has been interviewing me on similar research. It’s always fun to hear that our film is relevant even on University level :)

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

This is a wee bit late hour for the entry, but just wanted to say few words about New Context Conference 2007 in Tokyo, where I attended as a speaker. Our collaborative online film production platform, called Star Wreck Studios, was first time introduced in iCommons 2007 event in Croatia, and invitation to speak at NCC07 was a follow-up of that.

The conference was stacked with pretty high-level speakers – Joichi Ito (Creative Commons), Ashwin Navin (BitTorrent), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn) and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), as well as loads of not-so-well-known guys behind Technorati and Google AdWords etc. – oh, and me somewhere between there as well.

I was invited to talk about Star Wreck as a case in a Creative Commons panel, and after that had my own one hour presentation about the production and distribution of Star Wreck, as well as our idea of collaborative film production. Basic stuff, that’s what I have been talking about last two years now…

But I wasn’t prepared for the simultaneous interpretation that was going to take place during the speech – and I was asked for my presentation and a script of what I’m going to talk there for the interpreters. Of course, I didn’t have them. My presentation was halfway done, and I’ve never written a script about what to talk, I just let my presentations roam freely… So I was swamped with work throughout the whole conference, and couldn’t attend any speeches other than my own ones, and the last one about Mission Eternity.

The hotel, Westin Tokyo, was un-friggin’-believeable. Remember the hotel in Lost in Translation? Well, this is the big brother of that. Servants everywhere, service everywhere, massive lobbies, huge rooms and unbelieveable breakfasts as well… And the conference organized parties constantly, with great dinners (a lot of sushi) and everything. Everything was so well prepared – you don’t get that kind of attention in a normal european conference. Here, I didn’t have to think at all. They had organized everything, from minute-tight schedule to a personal assistant… Well, I can’t complain, it was all good.

I also had some time to visit Tokyo during one day, and I bought a Totoro for my kid, as well as met with our Japan distributors in a great dinner that slipped way beyond midnight – yeah, we had damn fun time.

My experience about Tokyo was faint, since I had only one day to walk around the city. Shibuya and Harajuku were filled with gothlolis and other freakish Tokyo-gals as well as their male counterparts and shops filled with great clothing (not my size, apparently), and everywhere there was a shitload of people walking around in masses. I also bought two albums of Tokyo metal in random, and by accident liked them both.

The trip to Tokyo was something I couldn’t have even wished when we released Star Wreck. Everybody was enthusiastic about the film, our story and our future plans (yeah, got to talk a bit about Iron Sky, too), and I met some wonderful people. My next goal is to bring Star Wreck with me to USA. It’s hard to say how the panel picker voting for SXSW goes, but we’ll see. We should know by the end of the month.

Next to me the folks of Mission Eternity holding a case containing 8 grams of Timothy Leary’s ashes! Photo by Digitalbear.

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

Star Wreck Studios, the collaborative film production platform we’ve been developing for last 2 years, is about to head to actual production, and we need coders to help us out with it. So if you are one, and would like to participate, send us your CV to address crew [-at-] starwreckstudios.com - and we’ll talk more!

Here’s the work ad:

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

It’s been both creative and relaxing week back at the Energia office, more or less celebrating the 2 years of Star Wreck.

The weekend Energia and Star Wreck Studios crew got together at a rented cabin in Lempäälä countryside to relax, meet with each other (two companies, different personnel and only Skype to connect each - a bit of human touch don’t hurt) and work on existing productions casually and in a nice surrounding. The place was great - a cabin close to a lake and surrounded by a vast field and forest. We went hiking to a nearby trail, bathed in over 100-year old savusauna and went on a boat-trip. And yes, we enjoyed a lot of alcohol, as the Finnish tradition requires us to. Surprisingly, we succeeded in having fun and doing some serious stuff - worth the while, indeed!

Photo by Lare Lekman. More photos from the Star Wreck Summercamp at our Photoblog.

Johanna, who went first hiking to Australia and New Zeland in the beginning of the year for couple of weeks, and after that hiking to USA for 5 months, has returned to Finland. That’s great, since finally we can start working on the Iron Sky script. We had a dinner with Johanna, and as the evening proceeded had some tremendously important ideas how to strengthen the story up - next, we’ll start opening the now-existing 25-page synopsis to scenes, and after that start writing the script itself, led by Johanna and fueled by our maniac ideas.

We have also started working on the initial background research for Iron Sky, led by Mikko Sillanpää, our history expert. If you think you are an expert on some of the elements Iron Sky is built on about (that is, nazis, ufos, space… you know the drill) and would like to collaborate, feel free to drop few lines to our e-mail address jobs [at ] starwreck.com, and we’ll see if your expertise would come in handy.

Funding-wise, we’ve now covered 2/3 of the development budget (not the entire budget!) of Iron Sky, which is great, meaning we are moving forward as expected.

Yesterday we ended up with Samuli and couple of my friends to YO-talo to check out some local bands. We were all totally blown away by a band called White Flame - you need to check out their stuff, it really rocks the shit out of everything. The singer kept on running around the tables and screamed like Axl Rose back in the days of his prime. Awesome in motion!

Anyway, things are moving nicely, and we had time to have some fun also, and enjoy a bit of summer. You try to do that as well!

Cheers!

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

It’s about time to start wrapping up this summer. Ropecon in Espoo was the last place we were having our little Iron Sky -presentation, and it definitively was a nice ending to it. We’ve been in Ropecon speaking about our stuff now I think about three times, and every time we’ve had a shitload of good time - the audience is always wonderful and the feeling relaxed enough to run a fun presentation.

This year we had a show on saturday, but me and Atte arrived on Friday, since we had a Star Wreck Studios meeting during the day, and Älymystö show in the night. In the meeting we planned on what are the first features to implement to SWS - fact is, we need to pick something to start out with, and after about 8 hours of going through material, researches and ideas, we had a good collection of basic features, which will make it possible for us to start Iron Sky production on SWS, once we (hopefully) get it released.

Älymystö’s show was, again, legendary - unlike last 2 times when we were unable to do a show at all for various reasons, this time we managed to show almost our whole set until the police crashed in and shut us down. It was all good, since the set wasn’t so special, but the last song we managed to play just banged the shit out of everybody. Here’s some photos from the event.

Saturday was much about meeting with old friends who either live aboard or I don’t get to see often anyways. They tend to show up at Ropecon every year, so most of the sunny day went on a beach listening to Bob Marley and sipping beverages.

When it was about time to do the show, suddenly I started feeling very very bad. I was afraid that I had finally been smashed down by the same stomach flu that Imppu (my girlfriend) and Julius (my son) had been having. So while Antti and the others set up and started running the SW sales table, I was wandering outside trying to figure out whether I should cancel my presentation, puke, or try to get myself in a better shape by some other means.

Eventually I got my shit together and we went out in front of the full auditorium audience that welcomed us all with a cheering applauds and a great energetic spirit as a good audience can ever give out. People seemed - in the best Ropecon fasion - to love every word we said, and after the presentation we had a good bunch of questions and some great feedback for a good show. (Ropecon’s own ConText-newsletter wrote a bit about us as well.)

Looking back at our little summer tour in Finncon-Assembly-Ropecon, I think we succeeded pretty well, although we had our doubts about presenting a film which is nowhere near completion. But people took it unbelievably well, and our main point about the summer was to give a little kick start for Iron Sky, so that people know what we are working on back here in Tampere.

There’s a lot of events we are taking part during the year - business as usual - but Iron Sky -specified shows are now over for this year, and we’ll get back on the subject once we have a demo to release and something more concrete to talk about.

Thanks again for everybody attending to any of these great events, it was a blast! Hope to see you next year, when we also try to arrange something very special out for you. But more about that later.

Oh, one thing! If anyone has any pictures of our Iron Sky presentation in Ropecon, I’d like to have some, just to remember the event later on. So send me your photos over to our forum or directly to me if you got some!

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

Hi, folks.

We had a good one-week vacation, during which time we tried to keep our minds off the Wreck and Iron Sky, and focus only on other stuff like doing nothing for example. Now we are back in business, and we’ve been getting our stuff together.
As you might remember, Samuli and Steve had a nice little speech at Creative Commons’ event in Croatia, and they had some great time there, meeting other people with the same kind of thoughts and presenting Star Wreck, Iron Sky and our brand new (well, not so new if you’ve been following our stuff…) concept we call Star Wreck Studios. Although I wasn’t there, I heard that Croatia was a damn beautiful country, sun was shining and people were great and very interested on Star Wreck. We heard a lot of interesting stuff - for example that there’s a fan club in Venezuela having a monthly meeting on Star Wreck, and also in African market there’s a pirate-DVD out as well (in addition to ones we’ve found in Russia and China). Wonderful!

As we’ve had a lot of interested towards Star Wreck Studios concept, we quickly put together a site where one can drop their e-mails to hear first when we are ready to release something more - just visit our teaser site.
Here’s few links from the event:

Wrecking a film

Interview with Star Wreck guys

A sustainable future for peer-production and common-based communities

Star Wreck at iCommons on YouTube

Samuli’s speech (Photo by Joi).

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