blog.starwreck.com

Just bumped on this story on Twitch about a Chilean science fiction comedy Chile Puede, which has the look and feel of good production values, although the budget of the film - I suspect - won’t be anything close to what a film like this would cost in USA. Check out the trailer here via YouTube, or with a bit better quality on film’s official site.

So, this is more like a test than a very important blogpost. Google just announced today that they’ve added an easilly embeddable maplink to their Google Maps -service. Here, let’s try out how it works - this is Star Wreck Store’s new address on Google Maps:

Näytä suurempi kartta

I have to say this is a very well organised service, and the new embedding option makes it much more usable, once again. Few problems there are, though. First, we are not located in the middle of a street, although Google Maps likes to see it that way, and second, funnily enough, Google Maps doesn’t notice the Tampere University or Tampere-talo which are located on the big empty lots, but does mention the Tullintori shopping mall…

…they’d come up with the design of Kalinka. Well, at least our fan from Helsinki, avaruus-apina (Finnish for “spacemonkey”), also known from our forum as Joutilas, and by his real name, Petri Liuhto, did. He’s been drawing/painting cool stuff from Star Wreck and also some fan art for Iron Sky. Here’s his latest work, C.P.P. Kalinka

Go check out his gallery at deviantart!

Ps. My kindness towards my wife got awarded by Lynch’s Twin Peaks golden box and INLAND EMPIRE, of which the latter I’m about to watch very soon! So remember, be kind to your loved ones and you might get Lynched as well!

…and thanks to the modern, snowless Decembers here in Finland, I’ll keep on dreaming. Meanwhile, some other good things of Christmas remain. Them being: food and presents. And although we cannot blog any food directly to you, we’ve prepared a little present on Energia’s behalf. The idea was ignited by one of our fans, who was asking about the speeches of Sherrypie from Star Wreck on our forum. We realized that we haven’t released the script of Star Wreck, although we didn’t have any reason to hold it back.

So, as this year’s Christmas present, Energia releases the script of Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning in it’s latest and most complete form. Since the script was never officially ‘finished’, and kept on changing until the very last months of production, the version I put together is different from the film itself, but the clearest one we had. Hope you enjoy!

As the film is in Finnish, so is the script too - sorry for our international audience. But fear not, we have a little something for you as well! I dug out the remaining storyboards that had survived through the years, scanned them and pushed them online.

Ps. Easiest way to view the script is to either print it or view it as flashpaper (two buttons on the right corner of the Scribd screen), but you can also download the .pdf versions from here: script and storyboards.

Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning - Script

Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning - Storyboards

The whole Energia team would like to wish you a peaceful and merry Christmas. Keep on Wrecking in the free world!

From the Finnish independent filmmakers, an oldskool production crew that goes by the name Acid Cinema is about to release their next short film in 27.12., and although I have *no* idea on what will the film be about and what the heck is going on there, the teasers sure look interesting. As YouTube seems to be sucking pretty rough today, you can also download the teasers from here (first teaser) and here (second teaser).

Here’s the first trailer:

And the new teaser released today:

Acid Cinema is known from their earlier films like Protocop, Juoppojen sota and Planet of the Bouncers, and they have a pretty convincing catalog of 20 short films released before The Jolly Scoundrel.

The Trailer for the Lordi movie Dark Floors has been released. Of all the places in the (virtual) world it’s available on Habbo Hotel. Check out the trailer there.

The video size is ridiculously small it’s hard to say much about the film yet, but what I can see it looks pretty cool. Though for us Finns it’s hard to take Lordi seriously as evil monsters. Even though the Eurovision song contest is close to hell winning it made the band national heroes.

In early November, we here at Energia began an experiment in community
creativity on our discussion board. The task was to design elements around
the Nazi base on the far side of the Moon, freestyle, no restrictions.

The amount, diversity, creativity and sheer quality of the submissions were
a pleasant surprise for us – we knew to expect the community to be active,
but it was nice to see how eagerly people took to the task and how much
effort they put to their work. Based on a month of active discussion on the
forum, we have now put together a selection of the best ideas and
formulations, and the next step will be to refine them into elements for
the Iron Sky demo. The thread on our board amassed a total of 283 replies
from 53 individual participants, for a grand total of almost 20 forum pages
of discussion.

Creative communality has once again demonstrated its power, for which a
great big thank-you is in order to all participants! This thread will make
a fine example to show filmmakers when discussing the potential of
communities in motion pictures, but the process was by no means an
uncomplicated one. It is not a question of whether communities can offer
new avenues for filmmaking, but rather of how to control, motivate and
schedule the community.

The phpBB-based discussion board we use is far from the best possible tool
for this. As many of you will know, we are in the process of developing an
online production platform better suited for the communal creative process
– Star Wreck Studios – which is scheduled to be released for use with Iron
Sky early next year. The goal is to provide an answer for the problems of
the forum model, as well as developing a quality community service for
films in production.

The best use for communality was found in situations where a single
participant presented an idea that he or she found interesting, then
someone else developed it further and suggested some references, from where
a third person took it and modelled, drew or otherwise realised the final
result. As an unexpected bonus, much discussion centred on questions far
more scientific than the original task, not to mention the wildly divergent
tangents that developed internal details for the station or just generally
speculated what life might be like for the Moon Nazis.

The community experiment now concluded was an excellent experience for us,
and provided an extra push for the development of the Star Wreck Studios
platform. Anyone interested can visit www.starwreckstudios.com to let us
know something about themselves and their interests, as well as sign in the
beta testing team who will help us test and develop the platform towards
initial release.

Once again, thanks and a deep bow to everyone involved!

Some Statistics:
- Forum pages: 20
- Total replies: 287
- Individual collaborators: 53
- Textual ideas: 48
- Reference pictures: 30
- Sketch images: 13
- Links: 65
- 3D-models: 8
- Indirect textual ideas: 14
- Production pictures: 5

ENERGIA PRODUCTIONS WEBSITE REDESIGNED:
The Energia Productions website has been redesigned. The new, improved site showcases our 3D and community engineering expertise. Take a look (especially all you bosses of rich international businesses).
www.energiaproductions.fi

CHRISTMAS GIFT FROM STAR WRECK STORE
We’d like to celebrate having come this far by giving away holiday gifts to customers at the Store. Everybody who makes a purchase of at least 10 euros will get the original Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning DVD AND its original soundtrack CD for free! You have both of them already? No worries, the christmas is coming and you can give them out as a present! Hooray, Emperor Pirk!

Swimming pool, sauna, a table literally filled up with alcohol and food, 4chan, guitar hero and around 50 people was the name of the game for this weekend, when Energia team threw a pikkujoulut-party here in Tampere, the center of the world. The main reason for the party was actually our collective birthday - the Energia office team 140 years birthday. Me, Samuli, Antti, Jarmo and Laku all have b-days pretty close to each others, and since last year we learned that it’s pretty stupid to buy together gifts to each one of us each week, so we just decided that we’ll invite our friends and have a party.

Samuli, Atte and Monto are enjoying the pool. Sorry about shitty picture quality, if I find somebody with better pictures, I’ll try to throw a better one here.

The place we rented was this cool joint with sauna, enough space and as a super bonus - a pretty large swimming pool (the place is called Kotilosauna - it’s reasonably priced, so if you wanna have a good party in Tampere, get that place - end of commercial break!). We had asked everybody to bring along some alcohol and something to eat, and pretty soon there was around nine thousand (maybe a little over) bottles of vodka, beer, koskenkorva and wine to keep us entertained.

I’ve never been a huge fan of company parties actually, since in most cases they have two major flaws: a) somebody has organised a shitload of stupid little ‘games’ to entertain guests, and b) the people would rather be somewhere else than spending time with the same boring faces they barely manage not to kill at workplace during weeks. And usually it gets pretty dirty in the end, somebody says something to somebody, somebody fucks wrong person or something like that… you know the drill.

With Energia, it’s a bit different. Although Antti might disagree, we actually enjoy spending time with each other and our closest business associates - and on top of it all, we are so cool and hypersexy it’s just an aura of awesomeness that nothing else is required! We also decided not to organize any specific program - my experience is, that if you have enough alcohol and the critical mass of good people is reached, nothing else is required.

Only speciality for the evening we had planned - which I would like to suggest also to everybody thinking of something funny in party - was that we looped a slideshow of pictures I had been collecting from 4chan for the last couple of months during the whole party. It’s not intrusive, doesn’t require music to be turned out for example and people sitting silently, and the pictures can just flip in the background, but if somebody wants to have a good 10 minutes of laughter after few drinks, nothing could be better. Me and Antti were literally rolling on the floor with our eyes wet when we just had a little break from sauna and watched some slides.

My personal opinion is that Guitar Hero is the cancer that’s killing good parties. I’ve been to couple of GH-ridden parties and just hate to stand and watch people playing like shit some tunes I would actually like to listen. But regardless of what I had specifically asked for, Laku brought X-box and Guitar Hero… But I have to say it was a good thing. The place was big enough for us to listen to *real* music in the pool room, and the GH-freaks really had a good time playing the game in the adjacent room. So, I think what we learned from this was that Guitar Hero fits to parties ONLY if there’s another same-size room with a stereo playing real music and people are not forced to listen/watch GH.

So, eventually everything went well. It was unbelieveable, but having invited around 50 people there, there was not a single asshole around (a pool full of dicks, though…), not a single passing-out-in-a-toilet-situation, no fights or arguments, only damn good party and nice pikkujoulu. Afterwards we headed - as it seems to be our habit - to YO-talo, where the things kept going on to early morning hours.

Same time next year, I guess!

Ps. as an eye-opening experience, Johanna, our scriptwriteress, brought some cheese and mustard from I think Denmark along, and although at first combining them together seemed like blasphemy to me, they went together very well! Just try, buy Koti Sinappi for example and some Mustaleima, and try them together, it’s great!