blog.starwreck.com

There is life after Vappu, though the quality of it might be a bit questionable… Anyhow, here’s another entry from the Tampere office of Energia. And you’ll be hearing more of us soon.

Energidiots seem to have had a rather silly day at the office while I was away, and the latest Energia Dailies reflected that pretty well, I think. So, it’s good to hear somebody talk something important for a change. So here’s Joi Ito talking about various things - Star Wreck, for example. Take it away, Joi! (From Loic Le Meur’s blog).

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

Finland’s most prominent rock band Poets of the Fall has just released their new album, Revolution Roulette. To get a taster of POTF’s new album, go and visit their MySpace page and listen the song Ultimate Fling.

To those not familiar with Poets of the Fall, they popped up for stardom by doing the wonderful end credits song for Max Payne 2, Late Goodbye.

This morning the news reached me that author Arthur C. Clarke has passed away. He was known as the author of 2001 as well as the father of satellites.

What is not so widely know is that Arthur C. Clarke was the most influential writer of my youth. In my childhood I lived in the countryside. Every saturday a library bus laoded full of books would stop by our house and I would loan a big bunch of comics, Asterix, Lucky Luke, Valerian (there was even one album signed by Mézières himself) and pretty much everything I could find. I think tv had already made me a scifi geek so I eventually started reading trough all the scifi books the book mobile would carry. I think I started with John Carter of Mars but soon I found myself reading Arthur C. Clarkes 2010. It blew my mind. After that I bugged the driver to bring everything Clarke had written and I think I’ve read pretty much every single book of his that the local library had at least three times. Well, with the exception of 2001 that I still haven’t read - the shadow of the movie is just too heavy.

Of all the books I’ve read my all-time favourite is Clarkes The Songs of Distant Earth. I remember one summer night, we we’re returning from a family road trip to Lapland and it was late, the sun had set but there was enough light to read. In the distance there was lightning and I was reading The Songs of Distant Earth. That is the most perfect literary moment I’ve ever had.

So, rest in peace mr. Clarke. You’ve earned it.

His last message:

(As much as I know that this blogpost will be getting the biggest amounts of spam ever, because it has the word ‘Sauna’ in it (foreign spambots obviously think that it’s somehow sex-related…) - our previous spam-magnet has been Atte’s post “Itävaltalaisessa saunassa“, I’m still happy to be writing about it. :)

The Bronson Club -guys have started blogging about their adventures in making the scariest horror-film ever, Sauna. It’s an interesting journey, they are right at this moment shooting in Prague, burning barns and all that… So if you want to have a good view on the production of an interesting film, that’s a good place to start.

Sauna blog.

Good news everyone! HD movies are finally ready to take over the world. HD-DVD players are consumer friendly, work as fast as DVD players and cost as little as 50 euros. Compare this to, say Blu-ray players costing 1600e and taking over a minute to load a disc. The movie prices have also fallen to reasonable levels, costing from 8 euros to some 20 euros for latest titles. And all this is coupled with full 1080p resolution, multi-channel audio and flashy new extras that propably cost an arm and a leg to produce but nobody really bothers going trough.

There’s just one minor problem. This is all due to HD-DVD format being deader than a dead whale that has beached to in Dead walley and blown up by rednecks.

I didn’t have any hurry jumping to the HD bandwagon. In my modest 32″ tv the difference in picture quality is pretty insignificant. I don’t have and propably never will have a sound system that would make it possible to notice the difference in audio quality. The extras might be technologically impressive, but no matter how flashy it is, I rather watch the well-made making of documentary instead of browsing trough “interactive” menus. The ability download new content from the net was kind of neat, I spent couple of minutes checking the stuff of Transformers disc, but there really wasn’t anything interesting.

Still, I’m enough of a movie nut that when I got an xbox I couldn’t resist getting the HD drive as well since they offered 5 free movies. Then, about two months later the format was dead. Kind of a shame. Still, because of this impending death I’ve bought a lot more HD movies than I ever expected. At Amazon.de they start at 8e. If I have the cohoice of buying a DVD or a HD disc I’ll go for the HD. If they kept releasing HD-DVD titles and kept the prices down I’d keep buying them. Unfortunately there propably won’t be any new releases in couple of months time.

Soon I will go back to buying DVDs. For the first time ever my personal level of technology will go backwards.

I’ll step back to HD age sometime, but it will take years - well, at least couple of them. First the price of players has to drop by magnitude of ten. Maybe I’ll buy a Playstation 3, but somehow I can’t see that happening before my xbox* leaves this mortal coil - or GT5 comes out. And still, the price of the movies themselves has to come down by half, 30e is just too much.

My choices don’t matter int he big picture. But what makes me wonder is that I’m one of those geeks who love all the shiny new gadgets (even if I can’t afford them). So if I’m not going to go HD again for a long time, who will? The price of PS3 is going down fast, but it’s still costs two times more than the competitors. It will still propably do to Blu-ray what the ps2 did to DVD, but it will take time and a lot more big screen tv’s.

Hotel La Quinta Austin Airport, 22:56. Outside, in the darkness, storm and police sirens are constantly wailing. I’m starting to feel a bit tired already, after full day of working just here in the hotel room. Tomorrow, I’m about to head home, and hope to be back in Finland on Tuesday. Back to the cold, dark and sloshy Tampere, away from the scorching sunlight, t-shirt weathers and reasonably prices *everything*. And I’m really looking forward to it. Here I tried to list few things I’ve missed while in Texas:

- Food. I can’t wait to get something real to eat, something that’s not dipped in grease and rolled in marinade, something that’s not either sweet or tasteless or both at the same time, and something, that won’t make me feel hungry in seven minutes I’ve finished eating it.
- Euro. I hate converting everything in my mind to dollars and back. More than that, I hate tipping. What the hell is that supposed to be, add it to the price and quit whining about tips…
- News. I’m looking forward for good Finnish news, those that are laid-back, serious and informative, and don’t get interrupted by ads every 30 seconds.
- Grumpy people. I just haven’t understood the American way to be always shiny, happy and fake-interested on other people. I really miss the grumpy Finnish folk just caring their own business and being quite honest about it. I hope not to hear any more “AWESOME, MAN! JUST AWESOME! YOU’RE LIKE THE BEST GUY IN THE WORLD” -comments. Good old “Yhm…” will do.
- Family. You know, it might sound fun to travel around the world, meet people and party all the time, but it’s not like that all the time. Even less when you have a family back at home waiting, and who you miss constantly.

But the trip hasn’t been bad, not at all. I’ve enjoyed some parts more than others, but I’ve really had great experiences here as well. Here’s a list of what I’ll propably miss of Texas:

- Fuddruckers. Easilly the best food-chain I’ve bumped to. The only meal I actually enjoyed here in Texas.
- The sun. The weather has been the perfect Finnish summer weather all the time, and I’m really not aching to see the sorry-ass wanna-be -winter of Finland at all. It’s just plain depressing.
- The malls. If you don’t find something here, you propably won’t need it. And if you do find, you propably don’t need it anyway. But if you just have time and endurance to race the 20 huge shopping centers and malls that are spread around the city, you’re in the shopping heaven. I happen to hate shopping, though.
- The bus trips. I’ve really enjoyed the local bustrips I’ve had, rolling around a strange city, listening to music (mainly PMMP and Disco Ensemble, plus a bit of Deftones), reading a good book (Lauren Weisberger’s Devil Wears Prada) and trying to interpret the cryptic bus route map. It’s like playing chess with yourself. And I’m just as good in that as well…
- The live music. Wherever you turn your head in the downtown Austin you can hear live music ringing loud from some of the bars. The SXSW is really a street festival at it’s best - a lot of closed streets, music everywhere, and a lot of people.

Last few days have been all running around the city after certain miserable softwares I’ve been trying to hunt down from here. After my failure couple of days ago, I spent the day after that in even worse hell, walking 10+ kilometers on different malls, waiting for buses to get to another mall that’s more than 10 kilometers away, leaving off on wrong busstops and trying to cross half-deserted lands with a huge Target’s sign as my guiding light shining somewhere in the distant horizont. And even worse than that, listening to people’s totally f*cked-up advice on where some place is and how to get there. It seems like Americans just can’t admit they don’t know something, they rather keep on talking and talking and giving their best guesses until you’re just too exhausted to care and find yourself walking again 5 kilometers to wrong direction just because that nice old gentleman didn’t have a clue on where CompUSA actually is, because he didn’t even know *what* it is… Grr…

I left my hotel room 10 o’clock AM, and came back 11 o’clock PM, totally beaten, and with only a pack of socks with me, since I hadn’t found anything else I was looking for.

The next day was even worse. This time, I knew where I was going to, but that day being Saturday, when already very bad public transportation had halted most of it’s buses, I found out that to get where I wanted to, I would have to get off the bus 5 kilometers away from the mall I was going to. Well, not a problem, yesterday I had walked around even longer trips and the sun was shining bright on a clear blue sky.

And it really wasn’t a big problem to get there - weather was good, Paprika Korps gave the extra push to me and I was feeling good. But one thing I didn’t know was that the software I was going to get wasn’t just your normal DVD-cases, but they were packed in 10-15kg boxes filled with manuals and everything. And I had to carry two of them, walking five kilometers under mercilessly hot sun… When I finally collapsed to my room, I was half dead.

Since Saturday was the last day of SXSW, I wanted to go and see the city for a bit, so after gaining enough strength I hopped back to bus and traveled this time to the Austin center, which was filled with partying people. I just walked around, watching people have fun, visiting pubs to listen few songs by the endless stream of mediocre indie-rock bands, and finally decided to call it a day and took a taxi back to the hotel.

And that’s about it. Today all I did was worked in my hotel room, visited Denny’s for a disgusting dinner, and came back to hotel. I’ve been mainly packing my stuff, trying to fit all that I bought into same two bags that were already totally full when I came here… And tomorrow I’m about to head back to Tampere.

On a related topic, here’s a motivational poster for the week!