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So as the previous post tells you, Timo’s consentrating on his music career and leaving us. What else is there to do but hold a traditional going away party and eat some delicious cake. It just didn’t go quite as we planned:

Anyway, this cake is great. It’s so delicious and moist.

Well, when things change they certainly change fast. Late last night we found out that Älymystö, Timo’s band that he so recently wrote about, has landed a three-album deal with a major record label. As a result of this and long and serious talks together with the band and the Energia team, Timo is becoming a full-time musician and resigning his post as director of Iron Sky, effective immediately. At this moment, we’re unsure who will direct Iron Sky, but Samuli has intimated that locally famous director Timo Koivusalo has expressed interest in the job - we’ll keep you posted. I guess the next best thing to Timo is another Timo!

EDIT 13.06: It seems that Mr Koivusalo won’t be available, after all. So we’ve made the decision to go with what we have, and have Samuli direct Iron Sky.

It has been brought to our attention that Finnish Film Foundation has decided to give the production support for the script of Iron Sky to Johanna Sinisalo. I’m not sure on this, but I have the feeling that this might be if not the first, at least one of the very few science fiction scripts that have received production support in Finland, and I think it’s a good sign!

As some of you have already guessed, last weekend we were actually filming a music video for a band called White Flame! The shootings were great, and we had a lot of fun, although days were exhausting and filled with scheduling problems, but it was good to be on a set, directing, once again, after a pretty long pause. Most importantly, we were able to test out some elements we would later need for the Iron Sky the film, and also filmed some missing stuff for the demo.

The script for White Flame’s Hour of Emptiness video has been forged so, that the production goes partly hand in hand with the last few things we still need to do for the demo. Also, it was good to fiddle around with some nazi flick cliches, like Ilsa and an interrogation room scenario, that would propably be a bit too cheesy as such for Iron Sky’s style, but terribly fun anyhow!

I’ve never liked that much working on music videos for some reason, but they are good for training and pretty challenging - trying to fit minimum budget into maximum production values, and respecting the ideas of a group of half-alcoholic rockers (ok, ok, WF guys are actually nice people :). After that, shooting a film with enough crew, time and everything in my own hands will seem easy as hell! :D

The environment was amazing. We shot the film in the cellars an old, abandoned asylum close to Tampere, where we set up the most roughest interrogation room. The place was pretty creepy, and when we entered the room for the first time, we found in one corner a big pool of blood and some shells lying around the floor. No idea what had been going on there, we hope it was some props for another film that had been shot there several months ago. What made me feel uneasy was the fact that the blood was still wet and fresh…

The second day shootings took place at Akun Tehdas, a small studio in the vincity of Tampere, where we set up the greenscreen and had the band play for the camera. Good fun.

One of the things I’m most happy about was the castings: three super-cute girls from a Swedish pop-trio Sister Love, and a model called Sofia, accompanied by the band - mainly Vince, the singer - and each and every one of them did amazing job. I was especially surprised how well Vince, being a rock-band singer and having virtually no experience in front of camera, worked like a seasoned professional, always in a good mood and sporting everyone else up.

Schedules sucked big time and technical problems were present all times, but the crew was amazing, didn’t utter one word of discontent, and worked like hell despite long hours! The video was shot by Juice Huhtala, directed by me, and produced by Samuli Torssonen. We don’t know the release date yet (it’s up to the recording company), but you’ll be the first one to know! We posted some pictures to our Flickr account, go check ‘em out!

Is that a bit out of focus… Oh, wait, no it’s not!

Photo: Mikko Tikkanen

Yesterday Laku, Samuli and I drove 100km to go trough a bsement filled with of old electrical things, educational posters and stuff. After several hours of rummaging we got back with a car-load of props and reference material. We even found a German cutaway poster of a steam locomotive from the 40’s. It’s a shame that all kinds of useful stuff lies around just waiting to be thrown out. And it’s just matter of luck if somebody know somebody who knows the owner of that stuff.

Anyway, Antti wasn’t there, so when he went to lunch today we hid his phone and replace it with an old service man’s phone. He came back from lunch and didn’t notice anything until the phone rang…

So, this is more like a test than a very important blogpost. Google just announced today that they’ve added an easilly embeddable maplink to their Google Maps -service. Here, let’s try out how it works - this is Star Wreck Store’s new address on Google Maps:

Näytä suurempi kartta

I have to say this is a very well organised service, and the new embedding option makes it much more usable, once again. Few problems there are, though. First, we are not located in the middle of a street, although Google Maps likes to see it that way, and second, funnily enough, Google Maps doesn’t notice the Tampere University or Tampere-talo which are located on the big empty lots, but does mention the Tullintori shopping mall…