Beyond the Iron Sky

I broke my record. One week of work with only 8 hours of sleep. And I didn’t even leave the office during that time! Beat that! Only Imperial Edition deadline rush came close…
A couple of months ago we decided to do Energia’s first music video: White Flame - Hour of Emptiness. And now some will undoubtably ask “why are you wasting time on some stupid music videos, do the fucking movie!” Well, the answer is very simple: we need practise, practise and practise before filming the Iron Sky. Timo needs to practise directing, I need to figure out how to produce on a larger scale, our CGI team needs superior 3d skillz etc… After all, we don’t want to practise with Iron Sky - it needs to be perfect - at least very close to it:)

A band playing on the moon and “Ilsa the shewolf of SS” sounded like a good idea. And were able to use some elements from the upcoming Iron Sky demo - which made the video possible in such a short production time in the first place. We ended up with 100 composite shots, about 1/3 of those were 3d tracked shots. And that means awful lot of work! But we enjoyed the challenge as always. Although I doubt that my body enjoyed so much. After the week I was crippled in every possible way, I couldn’t even speak decent sentences!

So was it worth it? Well hell yes! We gained much needed practise on basic filming with tight schedules, 3d tracking, greenscreen filming. I really enjoy being on the set during the shootings (with beautiful women), it’s fun! The deadlines are not fun - but you really can’t avoid those in this business.

So check out the video now and get a glimpse at some (unfinished) elements appearing in Iron Sky demo! One more thing: this is not an official Iron Sky music video, it only happens to use the same moon setup :)

Here’s also a better quality non-cropped h264 version (.mp4) . Use for example Quicktime or VLC media player to view it.

And remember to vote the video so that we can see it on tv primetime! Write “White Flame - Hour of Emptiness” to the second box.
http://www.voice.fi/chart2.jsp?subpage=kotimaa&chartId=2897781

So, April Fool’s day is yesterday, it’s time to be serious for a moment…

Iron Sky is doing well. We are preparing our asses to go to Cannes again this year, and this time, we’re gonna be there with our demo for *real*. I don’t expect for you to believe, but you just need to wait and see :D We are actually teaming up with the guys from Bronson Club (who are working on Sauna), and armed with Iron Sky and Wreck A Movie, we’re aiming to get a serious start for the first funding round of Iron Sky. We might *still* be just a little bit too early, since we’re not planning to shoot Iron Sky in 2008 anyway, but it’s a good place to start.

And that leads us to the actual topic of this post - 404.

What’s that, you might ask?

Well, that’s a short film I’m planning to film this year, if I can come up with the funding. We already have a production companies (BSP & Energia), a very talented team and a full script. And the story is a kickass one! It’s a real netnerd story - as one might guess from the name already - and it’s written by Janos Honkonen and Susi Vaasjoki, both of them very skilled writers.

We submitted the film for YLE’s annual Short Film project, where they, together with Finnish Film Foundation, fund 4 short film productions from upcoming directors. It’s a pretty long shot, since there’s gonna be tens, if not hundreds, of submissions, so changes are not too big. But who knows! It’d be great to shoot a film this year, while we are still pre-producing Iron Sky and not actually shooting anything…

So cross your fingers and hope for the best, we should know by May 15th if 404 is going to happen or not. And if it’s going to, we’re gonna need your help on that one.

In other news, we are right at this moment finalizing a music video for a band called White Flame, as we’ve written earlier. Stay tuned, for we’ll post the video here once we have a green light from the record company - that should be somewhere during the coming weekend.

I didn’t have any pictures, but posting without pics is usually forbidden in any self-respecting medias, so here’s a picture of Samuli with a Hello Kitty hat on top of a German WWII helmet. Enjoy!

EDIT:

Oh, there’s something pretty cool news also - Blabbermouth just reported that Candlelight is gonna release in the States the album Robin by Farmakon, a Finnish metal band I happen to know, and of which’s singer can be seen on Star Wreck as well (the guy who’s sitting next to Fukov at the P-fleet’s Captain’s Meeting), so that’s a pretty clear reason for me to promote that. Right? In addition, I’d like to say Farmakon is a darn good band, and if you are into high quality death metal, go check them out!

And I said there’s no pictures? Well, not directly related to this post, but I just found out from Twitch that there’s few new pictures from Sauna released, you ought to check them out as well!

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