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!