Beyond the Iron Sky

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.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 7th, 2007 at 17:54 and is filed under Star Wreck Studios, Travels. You're welcome to comment below, or link to this post. The comments are not moderated, but behave or Santa will smack you with a shovel.