Summer at Energia...

Finland got caught in the worst heatwave in recorded history and the temperatures stayed around 30C for two months. Now you’re probably thinking that doesn’t sound bad at all, but remember we’re Finnish. We don’t have air conditioning. Instead our office has ten people and some 50 processor cores crunching numbers at full steam.

The end result was an office that was hotter than rooms some foreigners call saunas. Even our internet connection kept crashing constantly because the ADSL modem overheated and as much as we love a good sauna we weren’t doing much better than the hardware.

At least Finland didn’t have radioactive forest fires like they did in Russia. However since this was the epic Disaster Movie Summer of 2010, we had obviously had to have a tornado destroy a trailer park.

With the heat we didn’t even have have energy to muck about, not to mention blog. Well, except when the 3D guys accidentally locked the bank vault we have at the office. The one we use for storage and that no-one has keys for. It took a visit from a “safecracking specialist” to get it open, but disappointingly there was noneed for dynamite or thermal lances.

Why do we have a bank vault in our office? Well, no-one knows. One theory is that it might have been built to house old-fashioned nitrate films when this place was a movie theatre. You know, the kind they want to blow up Hitler with in Inglourious Basterds.

Working on a 3D film (re-enactment)

Part of the 3D team actually spent the summer months working on another film project – a 3D horror film with a huge monster. The film shares a producer with Iron Sky and when they needed to outsource some shots on a tight schedule they came to us. Turns out, making monsters is almost as fun as making moon nazi spaceships.

Fun fact: While we did have modern LCD shutter glasses etc. we still used those silly looking red-green cardboard glasses when doing rough animation. They are far easier to use, no need to fine-tune the refresh rates or change batteries, just put them on and work.

The CGI guys do some cool stuff, but doing it does not photograph well.

Jussi, as you would expect, is working on concept art. Guess we’ll have to honor the traditions and post one of the new pictures when the Iron Sky page on Facebook reaches 30,000 likes.

Meanwhile 3D modelers are creating models that will be used in Iron Sky. We can’t wait to get to show you the current model in progress – a huge and hugely detailed space zeppelin. Animators are working on creating animatics, or relatively simple 3D animations of the film’s scenes. Right now our cinematographer Mika is going trough the scene for first real action scene of the film. Since the scene is running in real-time it means Mika can try what different angles, camera movements etc. would look like.

All this will eventually mean you’ll see some incredibly detailed spaceships and tight action scenes on the screen. Right now, however, it’s just a bunch of people sitting in front of monitors. If it was 1989 we’d be doing all this stuff with loops, action figures and cardboard boxes. That would certainly look fun in the making of, but then again there wouldn’t be internet where to watch it.

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!

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

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.

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.

As usual it all starts with massive amounts of fail with missing stuff, missing Up and being stuck in Dusseldorf. However by episode four we’ve reached epic win with some great news about the funding of Iron Sky.

There are more to come, so keep watching our channel on YouTube.

Episode 1 – Stuck in Dusseldorf

Episode 2 – At the Cannes Office

Episode 3 – What’s Up, Doc?

Episode 4 – Money Makes the World Go Round…

Energia, the creators of Star Wreck and Iron Sky, today publicly launched their latest project, a new web video series about cyber crime. The production was launched on Wreckamovie, the collaborative movie making community and as it’s first task the Wreckamovie community came up with a working name for the new production: Project WORM.

Project WORM will be directed by Timo Vuorensola, director of “Star Wreck – in the Pirkinning”, and it will be created by the Wreckamovie community, making it one of the first crowdsourced internet video series. Just like “Star Wreck – In the Pirkinning”, Project WORM will be distributed for free on the internet.

“The Star Wreck experience showed us that free distribution and working closely with the community is the way to go. Since we released Star Wreck for free we have seen over 8 million downloads making it the most downloaded Finnish movie of all time. With Project WORM our ambition is to reach a much bigger audience as we are creating a truly global production from day one.”

Crime on the internet is a growing problem and spam, botnets, viruses, worms, and Nigerian letters are affecting millions of people online every day. “I have been long fascinated by the scams like the Nigerian letters offering tens of millions in return for doing next to nothing. What kind of people hide behind these? And what are these botnets that we hear about all the time nowadays that are taking over our computers? Who is operating these botnets and for what purpose?”

Project WORM will be a fictional web video series, but our intent is to work very closely with industry experts and the Wreckamovie community to make the stories feel very real and realistic. And we believe that there are so many untold cyber crime stories out there that are just waiting to be told as part of Project WORM.

The great new is that now anybody out there on the internet can join the production on Wreckamovie and work together to create a new and unique web video series.

The initial production plan includes the creation of six episodes, all shot in different locations around the world, working very closely with the local communities through the global Wreckamovie service.

Join the production today at www.wreckamovie.com!

Finland has been known for quite a long time as one of the most uncorrupted countries in the world. Yesterday, this was changed. A law dubbed as “Lex Nokia” was lobbied and steamrolled through in the Parliament of Finland. The law has received a lot of criticism from the law professors, general public and Internet actives because of it’s vague wording which, in the end, may give certain parties in Finland more power to watch over the Internet than for example police has nowadays. In addition to that, it has come clear that a lot of a bit strange lobbying and even threats have been attached to the preparation process of the law. It is said that Nokia has threatened to leave Finland and take the 16000 jobs with it, if the law doesn’t go through.

The law itself gives the right for the employers to monitor the emails of the employees, but the law extends also to other communities, like housing cooperatives, which makes it even more ambiguous and vague.

One of the saddest things was that some parties that I would’ve expected to vote against the law either staid out of the conversation, or changed their view in the end. The biggest disappointment was the Green Party (Vihreät), from where only Energia’s main favourite MP Jyrki Kasvi and Johanna Sumuvuori was doing the right thing and voting against it. Strangely enough, both Perussuomalaiset (far-right) and SDP & Vasemmisto (left-wing) both were collectively against the law, but all together almost 1/4 of the Parliament were not present at the voting, and it was smashed through with a clear majority voting for the law.

Here are the results of the vote.

Makes you think, makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

We’ll be handing out the first issue of The Truth Today and well, actually we’ll be playing! So come and beat the Energia house band at Rock Band and win stuff.

That’s about it I guess, now off to the batcave! See you at Assembly. And as long as the wlan at the party place stays up we’ll be Tweeting.