blog.starwreck.com

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:

The Sun wrote the other day:

Rock legend David Bowie is set to star in Dr Who — as an evil alien abductor.

Producers reckon the Ziggy Stardust singer, now 60, makes a perfect villain because of his “great other-worldly look”.

And he will cross swords with the Tardis’s Time Lord when he kidnaps crime author Agatha Christie — who in real life mysteriously vanished for 11 days in 1926.

Bowie’s willingness to appear in the two-part Dr Who special, to be shown on BBC1 next year, will surprise many of his fans.

This makes Dr. Who even much better that I had ever expected, since Bowie is my personal number one musician in the whole friggin’ world! I’m excited as hell!

In the meantime, it seems like YLE isn’t going to show the second season of Dr. Who any time soon, and the DVD-release with Finnish subtitles for the second season seems to take ages - if it’s ever going to come out. If someone of you guys reading this know something about either one of these, drop a comment. Because how I see things is that about as soon as the analog TV shuts down we lose Dr. Who and get a talk show hosted by Paavo Väyrynen :(

I came across Doctor Steel’s MySpace and enlisted in his army. That’s how awesome he is.

Oh and remember to watch the propaganda videos.

It’s:
The other day, I was sorting out the day’s orders from the Wreckstore when I came upon an order from California. It consisted of one NTSC encoded (American standard) DVD and one PAL encoded (European standard) one. Curious, and in the interests of better customer relations, I contacted the guy and asked if this was what he wanted. Well, it wasn’t, so we were both glad I did; but that was beside the point, as it turned out when he told me how he came across our film. It seems there is a small Public Access cable TV station operating where he lives, and it showed In the Pirkinning one night. He had tuned in in the middle, and since there was no programming information and no station breaks, the guy had no idea what on Earth he was watching… or what language the characters were speaking. (His guess was Russian.)

So he called a friend (who was presumably knowledgeable about things filmographic), described what he’d just seen, and asked if the friend could enlighten him. Here I have to quote the viewer: “He was sure that either I was crazy or I had fallen asleep and had dreamed the whole thing up.”

Luckily, our hero wasn’t convinced, and some Googling later, had found our website. The moral of the story: if you see something that’s so out of this world your friends think you’re nuts, investigate the matter to find out the truth rather than accepting the obvious conclusion and checking in at an asylum.

Iron Sky MySpace

You wouldn’t believe how much work there is in making a MySpace page look like anything but crap. But finally the Iron Sky MySpace is pretty much ready. From here on it’s updates, pictures and little tweaks. We’ll be posting production art, pics and blog posts will also crossposted to the MySpace blog. So join as a friend and help promote Iron Sky!

And for those who like their websites usable, we also have profiles on Facebook and IRC-Galleria (it’s the site that all Finns use - including everybody from Energia, well, everybody but Antti).

And since it’s kind of keeping in topic, a music video from a band I came across in MySpace:

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!

Boy, what we realized today - it was exactly two years ago when we had the first public viewing of Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, the premiere of our 7-year megaproduction, in Tampere’s Kinopalatsi. So this is officially the birthday of Star Wreck!

As a birthday greeting, you can tell us what birthday present would YOU buy to Emperor Pirk, and why.

Here’s few pictures from the Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning premiere, 20.8.2005. (Photos by Janos Honkonen.)

To celebrate the first year of Mike Pohjola’s Star Wreck Roleplaying Game, we have decided to do what we promised would happen someday. In last year’s Ropecon we released the groundbreaking Finnish roleplaying game, the first one made out of a Finnish film ever, and one of the very few that was made directly to English language.

Star Wreck Roleplaying Game has won Kenneth Hite’s ‘Outie’ -award, and has been celebrated for being a very fun, easy-to-use and flexible roleplaying game, that works as well for non-experienced soon-to-be-roleplayers, as well as for experienced players looking for a change to run a ridicilously fun scifi-game.

The game is now being released for free on our webpage, under CC Attribute-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, meaning you can (and should!) distribute it to your friends, as long as you don’t start selling it.

Also, the original print-version of the game has *almost* ran out of prints, we still have ~3 copies left, and this version of the game will *not be reprinted again*, so if you want this collector’s item, you should drop your order now! If we run out of print, Fantasiapelit might have few copies still left as well.

On our Forum we have a discussion area designated for the RPG, where there are also some new stuff too.

And be sure to check out the author Mike Pohjola’s next game released couple of days ago in Ropecon, called Tähti (in Finnish only). It’s a great game, set in near future, where you can play a girlband - and not just any girlband, but a Maoist mutant girlband!