2009 « Beyond the Iron Sky

Archive for 2009

It was a hot, slow day in the Shire, and my office was filled with the sound of nothing happening.

December 11th, 2009 by Antti Hukkanen

A number of things occurred to me recently. For one, next week it will be eight years since Peter Jackson’s first Lord of the Rings film came out (and seven and six years since the second and third ones, respectively). Second, the 25th would be Humphrey Bogart’s 110th birthday, were he still alive. Also, apparently writing commenced on what would eventually form the novel Lord of the Rings in December, 1937; we recently covered a “retro-reimagining” of Matrix; and not long before that, the “pre-made” Raiders of the Lost Ark trailer gained considerable popularity at the offices. (How’s that for a strained lead-in?)
With all that in mind, I thought this a perfect moment to feature something that combines two things rather close to my heart… film noir and Lord of the Rings. What if the complications in getting his novel published had led the frustrated Prof Tolkien to offer his text to Hollywood instead?

As usual, Gollum takes the cake as the most memorable character, even though he’s up against some pretty tough competition here… including Bogie and even Godzilla!

Posted in Books, Films, Funny stuff, Videos | No Comments »

Two of a Kind – the mystery of the Norwegian wormhole

December 10th, 2009 by Jarmo Puskala

Two of a kind: Norwegian Spiral UFO & Fukov's Maggot Hole

Yesterday morning a glowing, rotating spiral appeared in the skies above Norway. End of the world conspiracy theorists suspect a black hole caused by the LHC in Switzerland (Norway is “close enough” they say), new age conspiracy theorists think it was a spaceship from the galactic Federation of Light. In the scientific circles (and even more literally on betting sites) the money is on it being a failed Russian missile experiment.

At the time of the press we were unable to reach commander Treholt of the Norwegian Ninja Force for a comment.

All we know is, it looks just like the maggot hole Fukov discovered in Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning.

Posted in Awesome, Funny stuff, Soviet Russia, Star Wreck | 1 Comment »

Iron Sky offices – as seen by Timo’s phone.

December 8th, 2009 by Jarmo Puskala

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.

Posted in Films, Iron Sky | 13 Comments »

Kitty has reached critical mass.

November 18th, 2009 by Jarmo Puskala

The Xbox Zune marketplace opened here in Finland as well. This means that for the first time we have a VOD service that is 1) As easy to use as The Pirate Bay 2) Offers instant viewing 3) In good quality and 4) Is almost reasonably priced. The price being “almost” since it depends on the film, if you watch HD or SD and where you buy your Microsoft points from. But for example Babylon 5: The Lost Tales would cost you some 2-3e, while a current blockbuster in HD would be 4-5e.

But because the studios are still hell-bent on committing a slow suicide there are two major problems. First is the selection – it’s small, ridiculously small. There are fewer films on offer than there are DVDs on my bookshelf. But this should be only temporary. The second problem is that to watch the HD videos you need a HDCP enable tv that is connected to your xbox trough hdmi. This means that if they want me to pay the 1,50e extra for watching fiolms in glorious Full HD I need to buy a new tv AND a new Xbox (I’ve got one of the older models without hdmi).

This copy protection bullshit is absolutely ridiculous. HD is still in adoption phase, it’s not mainstream. And yet the studios are trying to slow down the adoption by building artificial barriers of entry. The second is that the studios need to sell the HD to get the price of films back up. The price of DVDs has dropped like a rock – the old bargain price of 9.99e is the new norm with films coming down to 3-7e in a month. Still every dvd produced costs, the printing fees, copyright fees & rating fees tend to stay the same even when the selling price goes down. And it’s the part that goes to the filmmakers that gets cut. And if that’s the price of a physical disc, why pay more for a download? Yet the price of online VOD is kept artificially high. HD streaming has the promise to offer the extra value and get some people to pay more. So slowing down the the adoption of HD is just plain stupid.

However, even though most people won’t be able to watch the HD streams in the next few years, the Zune marketplace is still the best VOD service available in Finland right now. And it’s good enough to have the potential to reach critical mass and finally bring film rentals online.

Posted in Films, Finland, Piracy | 2 Comments »

Things we didn’t know about: Iron Sky Erotica.

November 16th, 2009 by Jarmo Puskala

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].

Posted in Awesome, Iron Sky, Nazis, Piracy | 12 Comments »