“The arts is a broad subdivision of culture, composed of many creative endeavors and disciplines.” says Wikipedia. And who are we to argue with the collective wisdom of mankind.
Timo just got back from the Grossmann Film & Wine Festival held in Ljutomer, Slovenia. There he ran into the notoriuous Uwe Boll so he had to ask his opinion on Moon Nazis.
I posted the video to our Facebook page and the comments keep rolling in. It’s amazing how everyone seems to have an opinion about Uwe Boll. Hell hath no fury like a gamer scorned, even though it’s actually been quite a while since Uwe has made a truly bad film.
What, you don’t believe that previous sentence? Check the reviews for “Rampage” on iMDB and prepare to shit bricks.
Jussi's concept art for the first Iron Sky teaser.
The second teaser for Iron Sky> was released a week ago – and we couldn’t be happier! Since then it has traveled all around the world in the internets, gathering nearly half a million views in the first week!
We’ve been reading your comments, on blogs, forums and even the feared YouTube comments. let me tell you, they make us very, very happy!
“I can’t wait to see this friggin’ movie! It’s Nazis in space!”
-David from Geek, Actually.
“if its possible to have an orgasm in your eyes, i would? have had one right now.”
-Comment on YouTube
“Yes the Iron Sky is finally about to fall on our heads and I couldn’t be happier.”
-Mark Kermode
The count likes to count…
While the teaser has gotten most of it’s views on YouTube, it’s spread across the world and different video sharing sites. Thats how the internet works, so that’s why we try to track all copies, so we’ve got a true view count. And it’s pretty damn awesome! At the time I’m writing this the overall amount of views is 492,000! That’s missing the views on hs.fi, wich should push past half a million!
On YouTube the teaser has been the second most watched movie trailer, right after Christopher Nolan’s Inception, being the 5th most watched video in the “Film/Animation” category.
To put this into perspective, Variety releases a top list of film trailers every friday – on it we’d be number 10! Sadly, we don’t qualify with Iron Sky not coming out until next year.
We also owe you guys a huge thanks, because you’ve been marvelous helping us spread the word! Thank you!
Panda by Jeff Kubina
Big in China
To our surprise the teaser has been watched over 100,000 times on Chinese video sites. it seems to be rather popular in the land of the panda bear. There was even a article on Yahoo China. Google’s machine translation tells us that:
…the film is clearly not singing for the Nazi elegy, at the end of Nazhi head of the Nazi eagle statues beckons pigeons shit is a great irony that a black comedy.
They also seem to like Timo:
Directed by Yulia Vuorensola the age of 28, is a sci-fi movie fanatic fans, but also a computer genius
What I’d like to know at what stage did “Timo” turn into “Yulia”, is it Google or?
Lego Pirates by pasukaru76
Piracy on the high seas
However, it hasn’t all been fun and games. Early in the week it appears someone tried to steal our teaser from us on YouTube. And I do mean “steal” as in “we take it and you no longer have it“. This is made possible by YouTube’s “content ID” service. Partners have the possibility to identify and take control of duplicates of their videos.
Long story short, this company claimed the original Iron Sky teaser was their property. First we thought it had to be a bug, after hearing from other producers it seems the company might be deliberately hijacking movie trailers.
In our case the dispute was resolved in our favour. However, we’re a bit worried they might try the same on the teaser remixes you’ve uploaded. If you’ve received suspicious content ID matches – please let us know.
We’ll keep you up to date if there’s need for further action.
I’ve just returned from the Cannes Film Festival, and for me – this year’s hubbub is now done, and I’m not missing it one bit. That doesn’t mean we didn’t have fun – hell yeah, we did – or that the festival was not successful – quite the contrary, but there’s nothing better than come back home, to the warm spring weather of Finland, and get back to work.
The main news out from Cannes this year were, that we opened up a possibility for fans to Invest in Iron Sky (press release); we released some footage from the film in the form of a new teaser (press release); Laibach will provide a soundtrack for the film (press release); EMI will be distributing the Iron Sky merchandise, and fans can join to design it (press release), and last, but not least, we managed to gather over 120000€ in under a week from the Investments, and that we’re going to shoot half of the film in Australia (press release)!
So we did take a giant leap forward, and next up is the shootings. We’ll be travelling over to Australia to do some casting and scouting surprisingly soon (hell, I’ll be jumping on a plane in just few weeks), and after that it’s going to be a huge rush for the whole team flying between Frankfurt, Sydney, Brisbane, Zürich, Helsinki, Berlin, Stockholm and Tampere to get us ready for this fall’s shootings. So stay tuned, we try to keep you guys informed as much as possible!
I’m assembling here a small scrapbook from the festival, just to give you an overall idea what happened there – welcome to the Cannes 2010 Memory Lane!
First few days of the festival were mainly about setting up our office in the Grand Hotel terrace. The location was just the best anyone could’ve asked, since most of the business in Cannes takes place in or very close to the Grand Hotel.
Setting up a nice and visible banner to the balcony is a custom many production companies or distributors tend to do, so we wanted to have our part of the fun. Pekka did a great job designing and doing the dirty work with the banner.
But of course, our puny attempts to surpass the big Hollywood money which they pour in the advertisement in Cannes are feeble. Take a look at some of these ads. And although they might seem ludicrously expensive – which they are – this year things was much smaller than last year.
But this year, the most expensive spot in Cannes was taken by the French. The price for that is 70,000€, plus the banner, design etc. of course.
This year’s logo of the festival did have some serious 80’s vibe to it, but I liked the cool colors, which definitively connected well with the cold weather…
Finally, the teaser arrived, and we were one happy campers, the whole bunch of us!
And of course, a big thanks went over to the main CGI wizard Samuli in Tampere!
But as said, the weather was mostly quite crappy this year. Although there was sun in the daytime, I was mostly freezing in the balcony of our office – it was actually much warmer in Tampere this year than in Cannes, which has always been the other way around.
Every now and then, being in Cannes, surrounded by all the glamorous people and parties, you might feel like living in a bubble. Well, at least this time we got to try that out for real.
And of course, when in Cannes, you can’t avoid popping by at La Petit Majestic, a small pub just around the corner behind Grand Hotel, where everybody gathers after the day is over (and nobody wants to spend 15€ to a G&T on Grand Terrance or Carlton anymore…)
One of the coolest people in Cannes we got to meet this year were the Norwegian Ninjas, as we call them. We of course mean the people from Tordenfilm and Euforia, and the freaks working on the hugely awesome Norwegian Ninja -film that’s coming out later this year. We got to see a sneak peek of the trailer, and although I’ve been waiting for the film – it kicked ass much more than I had expected! They will release the teaser on the Internet quite soon, and we’re definitively going to tell you about it. I mean what more can you ask, a good political ninja spy movie set in Norway?
We visited the Norwegian Ninja party on the last day, and enjoyed some Norwegian sausage.
The trip to Cannes 2010 was very good also on the media front, conducted by our not-anymore-so-green publicist Janos, who passed the ultimate crucible of Cannes with awesome grades. The teaser spread over the Internet like a wildfire, gathering in just few days a quarter of a million views on YouTube, and piles of excellent articles both in media and blogs.
My favorite stories were the ones by Mark Kermode’s awesome BBC video blog, and the Der Spiegel’s thorough story.
To check out the articles we spawned from Cannes, check out this link.
See you next year, Cannes! We’re off to make the movie!
The Iron Sky team has landed again to Cannes to participate in Festival de Cannes 2010 event. This year, we have an office right down in the center of where it all happens, the Iron Sky Lounge, and most of us live just few blocks away in quite a nice apartment. This year, Cannes had a bit of crap falling on them just before the festivals – the weather was horrible, some huge waves destroyed much of the structures the builders had been putting together on the beach, and the Iceland volcano ash cloud complicated the travel arrangements.
But we’re about to have a blast here. You can follow our doings and wrongdoings here through various Social Media platforms – so keep yer eyes peeled to the Internet!
Our publicist Janos Honkonen will be blogging all the important news also to Beyond the Iron Sky -blog. I will be shooting small videos and posting them to my TwitVid account under the Director’s Diary -title, and you may follow me, Pekka and Janos on Twitter to see how things progress here. We even have our own Venue on FourSquare for Iron Sky Lounge!
We will also shoot some material and put it out as an Iron Sky Signal a bit after the festival is over.
So this is how it begins!
Just to remind you on how last year went, here’s a small compilation from 2009 – and of course, our awesome Iroun Sky Basterds from last year’s Cannes!
One of the things that makes Iron Sky special is our direct contact with our fans and our activity all around the net. Especially so since all this is on a full swing even now, over a year before the film will come out! Our community has helped us in several ways, from giving us concrete ideas and materials via Wreckamovie to helping us finance the movie by buying merchandise or investing directly in the movie. This help is not cosmetic or a gimmick, it’s very important for us in a very concrete way, and we are grateful for everybody who has participated like this! The ideas are very valuable and the more financing we get from our fans instead of the business side of the things, the more we can keep our artistic vision in our own hands.
There is a third thing people can do that really helps us, but it’s something they don’t necessarily think of as being useful or important. Moreover this is something that’s very easy to do and also free. This something is SHARING.
When we publish something interesting on our blog, the website, Facebook, YouTube or other place we frequent, go ahead and share it to your pals in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, forums you frequent and in your blog; Digg the article and submit it to Reddit, and so on. Also, drop in the www.ironsky.net/demand/ link with the stuff you share, because those red dots on the map are very important for us.
Why is this important? How is the fact that some guy or gal shares our teaser or blog entry to his pals in Facebook actually hugely useful for Iron Sky?
The thing is, publicity is enormously important for indie projects that are not backed by big money. When people think about movie publicity, they think about just getting people to the theaters when the movie is done – and that’s how it might be for the big studio backed movies. Those filmmakers can announce the movie, start producing it and then have the studio throw a few million euros for the marketing when the film is almost done. That’s really not how small or even multi million euro budget indie movies work, especially if it’s aimed for a wide theater distribution.
Indie movie makers need good publicity and buzz right from the moment they start making the film and trying to pitch it to production companies, distributors and people who finance the project. They must convince all those people that the idea is viable, it has potential and that there are people who are interested in it – and keep convincing them until the movie is done. For every Paranormal Activity there’s a dozen films that couldn’t get the buzz going. This is part of why indie projects seem to take an age to be completed: you don’t hear about big studio movies until they are almost done, but indie movies make noise right from the pre-production phase.
(Well, sometimes indie movies do take ages to make… )
So, for projects like Iron Sky publicity not just about the amount of potential viewers: at the production stage it’s almost literal currency with which we can get resources and freedom to make the movie we want to. A project on the scale of Iron Sky can’t get by on crowd funding and the personal finances of the creators alone, although both of those are often extremely important sources of finance. Projects of this size must deal and co-operate with the traditional side of movie business to function – and man, those guys are all about “how much, with whom and how many times”.
Distributors, investors and other such parties are very interested in how much buzz and potential a project has, and these people love numbers and figures. When negotiating with them, website visitor statistics, teaser viewership amounts, numbers of Facebook fans and amount of demands turn out to be cold hard cash and at times the most effective bargaining tool. Remember those red dots on the Demand map? That’s like catnip to the business people. “Here’s our movie idea, and here’s our ready made audience that can’t wait to see the movie – so give us resources and free hands to do our stuff!” It’s also the matter of artistic integrity: the more there is buzz about the film, the less chance there is that they panic and start demanding changes that would make the movie more “commercially viable”.
In 2005 a group of young filmmakers released Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning. Now they're working on Iron Sky, one of the most ambitious Finnish film projects ever. These are their stories.
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New blog post Uwe Boll on moon Nazis: Timo just back from the Grossmann Film & Wine Festival in Slovenia. There he... http://bit.ly/atLVxA8 hours ago
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