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Archive for the ‘Energia’ Category
Stuff about our production company, Energia Productions Ltd.
Iron Sky Goes Germany: Location Reconnaissance in Frankfurt
January 17th, 2010 by Janos HonkonenAs the previous blog post revealed to you, the Energia team is currently in Germany to meet the local (wo)manpower and handle various things having to do with the movie project. After finding out what the art department had been up to we headed off to Frankfurt to spend the next few days checking out the future shooting locations, ie. doing recce.
So, this is how things more or less works with us: the German art department checked out the storyboards and the concept art of the film, came up with their ideas about the sets and checked the demands our illustrious director Timo and director or photography Mika had for the locations. After that they hired a location scout, whose task it was to find the actual physical locations that matched the demands as well as possible.
(Flickr photoset from the trip)
Timo is planning on buying some cheese, and judging by his expression our director of photography is pondering whether it's "shoes first, pants after" or the other way around.
What we did from Wednesday to Saturday was to go around the locations our scout Regina Kaczmarek had found, after which Timo and Mika checked them out together with our production designer Ulrika. Timo made sure that the look and the feel was correct for the scene he had envisioned and Mika was there to determine how the scene could be filmed in the real life, where the camera would go, which locations required chroma (a fancy word for a green screen) and so on.
Skyscrapers in downtown Frankfurt.
This part of the trip was sort of surreal, but very enjoyable for me as a whole. The surreal thing was that we basically spent 12 hours on the road, sitting in a car and occasionally jumping out to visit some really weird or cool place. A good example was our first stop, a very interesting communal antroposophic biofarm called Dottenfelderhof. It was basically a collective of several families, who were into hardcore farming, cheesemaking, baking, animal husbandry and things like that.
Fresh bread, straight from the oven.
Some of the other locations couldn’t have been further away from the first one. We visited really hardcore iron railway bridges, got on top of skyscrapers to see the massive view all around Frankfurt, skulked around an abandoned paper factory, drew long stares from guards in rather luxurious lobbies of large office buildings, screwed around in the news studio of a regional German television station and went for a trip to old and abandoned military tunnels that apparently stretched kilometers inside the Earth. One of my hobbies is urban exploration, so especially the tunnels and the abandoned factories made me want to call for a break, so I could spend a hour or two just inspecting them.
Deep inside a mountain.
Top of the world, on the roof of one of Frankfurt's skyscrapers.
In a local TV studio. I think we got the lighting covered.
The last location of the trip was in many ways the most interesting of all: our potential new studio. It will be the place where the larger sets will be built in and where we will do all the difficult shots that require lots of green screen, constructed sets and controlled environments. What we got was three enormous hangars for the sets, a couple of smaller (relatively) halls which will be the set builders’ workshops, plus a big bunch of offices and such.
Yeah, guys, I don't think we are in Samuli's parents' basement anymore.
If all this sounds really glorious, you haven’t thought about the basics, which boils to this: we spent 12 hours in a day in the same car with the same people, who in this case happened to include Timo and Samuli. Then consider that one of Samuli’s maxims for humour is that “up in the ass of Timo” has to be incorporated in as many jokes as possible. Or situations. Or just repeated out aloud. So yeah, the humor in the car started of as loud, drifted off into hysteria and plunged into murky depths of retardedness. I’m honestly surprised our German hosts didn’t just strangle us and leave us at the roadside, but maybe we were saved by the language gap.
The mood in the car got a bit... restless in the end of the evening.
A light snack, German style. This is us having lunch in a local restaurant in Frankfurt, full of older people eating dishes that were basically "sausages with a side order of meat". The food was delicious!
All right, next we’ll be returning back to Berlin to see some of our actors try out their costumes, and for several full days of casting new faces for the movie! Stay tuned to more blog posts on the road, don’t forget to check our Flickr for more photos and if you want to see links to new posts right in your Facebook feed, join as a reader of Beyond the Iron Sky in Networkedblogs!
Energia mobile office on the train - working high speed throughout Germany!
Blackstar Halo – Energia’s first Red camera vfx shots
January 5th, 2010 by Samuli Torssonen
My longtime friend Hannu Kumpula has been doing his own “starwreck” with a music album – he has been working for four years now with zero budget and now it is complete: Blackstar Halo: Illuminated.
When he asked me to help in some of the shots in the music video I couldn’t say no. With the help of great vfx trainees Energia delivered its first red camera composite shots – in floating point color space. After messing around 7 years with 8-bit DV footage (star wreck) this felt totally unreal!
And I also felt the pain of using After Effects for this job!
Iron Sky will be also shot in Red camera format so this was a good tryout what we are up against. We are now looking into Nuke as the primary compositing software which is able to handle floating point image sequences better.
So, check out the music video now! I want to praise Ville Salminen (Obscure Entertainment) for the great look and feel! He color corrected & did the post in full HD with some low end laptop, ugh :)
One easy way to support their music is to buy their new album: http://www.blackstarhalo.com/buy
Hubaa Radio Millenniumissa – armottoman tehokasta!
November 6th, 2009 by Jarmo Puskala(This post is in Finnish and it’s about sketch comedy segments we produced with our friends from the sketch comedy troupe Huba. They’re running on TV right now.)
Tiesittekö, että 95% hammasbakteereista esiintyy suussa? Entäs sen, että uudet Huba-sketsit ovat pyörineet TV2:n sunnuntai-illassa jo useamman viikon?
Energia on Huban kavereiden kanssa tuottanut joukon sketsejä TV2:n Radio Millennium -ohjelmaan. Jaksot tulevat ulos sunnuntaisin 23.20 ja uusitaan myöhään tiistaina. Huba-sketsejä nähdään yleensä yksi tai kaksi ohjelman “mainoskatkolla”, jossa tulee myös muiden tuottamia sketsejä. Sekoittamisen vaaraa ei pitäisi olla, Huban sketsit kun tuppaavat erottumaan.
Ja koska elämme tulevaisuudessa, niin sketsit löytyvät myös YleX:n sivuilta:
Korvaako koulutus kaiken?
Piilokameran parhaat
Länsimarket
Oral Attack
Käykääpä katsomassa.
Gettin’ busy.
June 10th, 2009 by Timo Vuorensola
Vorwärtz!
After Cannes, things have been moving on with quite a pace. We were able to close most of the funding for Iron Sky at Cannes, so it means that we now actually have a schedule and we really need to start pushing to get things done!
In short, the schedule dictates that Iron Sky will be shot in January 2010, and the film will be finished (not out, though) in January 2011. It’s still a rough estimate, but the best we have for now.
For CGI, here’s how we’re planning to do: we shook hands with a London-based post production house Molinaire. We’ll fly Samuli and his team to London, to Molinaire, to work on the Iron Sky’s special effects once the time is right. This way, we’ll be able to take all the advantage of Samuli and his world class skilled team, without having to worry about building the infrastructure and renderyards to Tampere, and get to work with one of the best CGI people out there.
Right now I’m most worried about finding the locations we need to shoot Iron Sky. We’re planning to utilize an old and abandoned US Army military area located close to Frankfurt for the studio – they have a huge old sport hall that could suit our needs quite well, and possibly some quite interesting other locations as well.
We had an alternative to this place – an old Nazi-era military bunker also close to Frankfurt. The only problem was that there was too much of sheep and TNT in the area. Yeah, sheep and TNT. I can’t get the image out of my head, us shooting scenes on the Moon in the front yard of the bunker, being forced to stop shooting every now and then because a sheep explodes. KABOOM. Sounds quite Pythoneqsue.
Oh, one thing more! I’m not sure if we already wrote about it here, but we’ve moved! The Iron Sky office and Star Wreck Store hauled it’s (quite fat) ass to the other side of the Tampere center, to Hämeenkatu, where we teamed up with Restate, a brand new digital content developer company led by Erik Lydén. As always, the Star Wreck Store is open for visitors, so if you want to take a peek at the Iron Sky production, why not stop by at Hämeenkatu 30 B 1a.
One last thing – I need some of your suggestions for reference films that I should watch. I’ve set up a task where I describe a bit more, just go to Wreckamovie and check it out.
BTW, if there’s any Spotify users out there, I’ve created a collaborative Iron Sky playlist for Spotify, where I’m dragging every now and then some music I think somehow fits the mood of Iron Sky. If you have any ideas, you can put some songs there as well – just open this link to Spotify and start playlisting.
I can’t seem to end this post… But here goes – I also spotted that we have now our own Iron Sky entry on IMDB´- and the good ol’ Wikipedia entry still exists.
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