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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!

Unlike in most film festivals I’ve visited, in SXSW I’ve actually had time and opportunity to visit and see some of the films they are showing here. Around the center of Austin there are several film theaters with films for the festivals, and to get in you need to line up about 30 minutes prior to the beginning of the film to get in with the pass.

What I really love about the theaters is that they act as a very discreet restaurants at the same time. Between each row of seats there are aisels where the waitresses can walk around, and you can order food and drinks during the shows. That’s really a thing I would love to see in Finland, and propably would boost up people visiting film theaters as well, as you can really build an experience around watching films.

Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie

The first film I went to see was called NOT YOUR TYPICAL BIGFOOT MOVIE, a documentary on two guys who really strongly believe they are tracking bigfoot in the forests nearby. It’s a heartwarmingly saddish story on these two elderly gentlemen who have a very special relationship between each others, and who really see what they want to see - bigfoot in every pixel of crap-quality pictures they’ve been taking from the woods. The synopsis says:

NOT YOUR TYPICAL BIGFOOT MOVIE provides a look at the trials and triumphs of life Appalachian foot hills. Through the experiences of Dallas and Wayne, two amateur bigfoot researchers in southern Ohio, we see how the power of dreams can bring two men together in friendship, and provide hope and meaning that transcend the harsh realities of life in a dying steel town.

The film is slow-paced, with slow guitar music in the background, and floats through the lives of Dallas and Wayne slowly. It’s funny in a sad way, and at one point you start feeling bad laughing at these two men chasing their dreams, really believing and wanting to believe into something in the woods, that doesn’t exist. I think I might say I liked the film, but I have to admit that after spending 20+ hours in an airplane and airports, I dozed off few times, and didn’t get to see the big picture very well to actually rate the movie in any way. I blame the super-comfortable soft seats in the theater… This is not a film to see when jetlagged, the slow pace really get you.

Dance Of The Dead

The next day we went to see the midnight show at Alamo theater called DANCE OF THE DEAD. It was a pretty risky shot, since we had to stop partying and go out to a film theater to see a zombie movie I had never heard of, but it turned out to be a good decision. Dance of the Dead is a story about a zombie infection that turns loose during a high school prom. In the best possible American way, of course, the ones who save the day are nerds, and a cute girl, while the high school athleths and staff get killed and turned into zombies. So in many ways, Dance of the Dead is nothing new. What I loved about the film was that the director was really able to pump enough adrenalin to every part of the film - actors did a good job, cinematography was excellent and even the makeup and special effects worked. Obviously, Dance of the Dead is not a big-budget zombie movie, but it pretty much succeeds in keeping up with enough production value and good-enough cast and script to make it stand out among most of the zombie flicks out there.

Woodpecker

WOODPECKER was a film that many people were talking a lot about in the festival, so I had my hopes up when entering the theater of seeing a really worthwhile film. Instead of trying to explain, I let the synopsis speak for itself:

Fanatical birdwatchers have descended upon a small town in the Arkansas bayou in hopes of finding the celebrated Ivory Billed Woodpecker. Declared extinct in the 1940’s, the bird has apparently been spotted by numerous experts. Enter amateur birder and poet Johnny Neander, who has convinced his taciturn sidekick that he will be the one to find the elusive woodpecker. The ensuing chaos divides the small town between believers and non-believers, rabid environmentalists and opportunistic entrepreneurs. Much like the bird itself, Woodpecker explores the intersection of fact and fiction, manipulating our notions of documentary and narrative techniques within a tragic comedy about hope, perception, and some very very strange birds.

From the first moments on this film reminded me of Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie. It was shot in a document format, and had some real documentary elements on it, the camerawork was very simple, handheld and not very high quality, and the two main actors, Johnny and Wan, were improvising most of the lines. The story started to unfold a bit slowly, and it took me a while to understand why I should be interested in Ivory Billed Woodpeckers that should have been extinct for several centuries, but pretty soon I started to understand about the characters in the film, and see this more like a tragic comedy of people chasing their dreams. There’s that subject again… Americans seem to love people chasing their dreams.

At one point, there film was so great I wished for it to never end, watching the main character Johnny slowly losing his grip to the reality as problems started to pile up and the bird was nowhere to be found, but then the film was Kummelized, the joke was over-streched, and some unbelieveable elements were introduced, newsflashes and fake environmentalists and that sort of things, that took off the edge from the story of slowly drowning into insanity and alcoholism. Without knowing what parts of the story have actually happened and what have been scripted in I can’t judge on how strong the script actually was when compared to real events, but eventually I felt the film to be a bit too long, but overall a very good experience, that’s gonna win a lot of awards in smaller festivals around the world.

Heavy Metal In Baghdad

‘Till now, the last film I saw was called HEAVY METAL IN BAGHDAD, and so far it has been the greatest film I’ve seen here, and one of the best documentaries about war, and about heavy metal, I’ve seen ever. The story starts when a reporter for MTV went to Iraq to do a story on the only heavy metal band in Iraq, Acrassicauda (“Black Scorpio”). Later on, after USA invasion, they came back to see if the band is still alive, and filmed footage on their last show in Iraq, while car bombs were blasting around the city, AK-47 -fire banging endlessly and mortar explosions ringing al over. That is true heavy metal.

The documentary follows the guys of Acrassicauda and their struggle to survive in a total chaos, but it also describes very well on how the civil war in Iraq actually is. It’s rude to see the pictures of an middle-eastern city bathing in beautiful sunlight, cars passing by, people walking along, and in the background people talking about that if they stop here they will most definitively be killed.

For a person living in Iraq, Baghdad, the everyday life is really hard, since it’s totally impossible to know when a sniper kills you, a car bomb takes you out or your family out or whatever - but for a metalhead singing “americanized” music “for satan”, as local people think of that, it’s totally impossible. Wearing a Slipknot t-shirt can really get you killed. But the guys, one of them being a father of a young child, just keep on pushing. They’ve managed to organize 5 gigs in 6 years, and every time it has been a full house of Iraq metalheads pogoing around, but the death keeps on lurking outside.

One example of how just normal things can be hard in a country that’s in a total state of chaos is headbanging: it resembles the jewish praying in some ways (they keep on bowing their heads when praying), and people don’t dare to do that because if Iraq police would see that, they would put you in a prison for the rest of your life. Just for headbanging. And not to mention growing a long hair, that’s just totally out of the question.

As the director said in Q&A after the show, the bands in the west are getting it very easy. Yeah, it can be hard to organize a gig or two now and then, or find money to go to a studio, but it’s nothing compared to the fact that every day you go to your training joint, you have to carry openly a gun for not being killed.

You need to really check out the website of the film, there’s a lot of more information on Acrassicauda and a possibility to donate them to help them further, and be sure to check out their blog, it’s an interesting read. They managed to raise enough money through the Internet after Toronto film festival screening that they were able to travel to Syria, then Turkey, and they are right now in Istanbul, but are having a very hard time over there as well.

All in all, this film was a great piece of documentary, be sure to check it out when it’s available. Here’s the trailer:

Ok, that’s it for now. Today I’m heading again to the festival, although now the Film-part of SXSW is starting to be over, there are screenings still but no other programme, and everything is Music. I’m gonna go and see some bands, and spread the good word of Iron Sky!

As an European filmmaker I don’t, surprisingly, know anybody from the states. Coming to a festival in Austin, Texas is pretty much like moving to a totally new city, where you don’t know anybody, and trying to find interesting people is really a shot in the dark, total random. So I was a bit afraid that I’d waste all my time in Austin just by walking around and trying to find people.

But what I did eventually was that I went and checked out the profiles of interesting panelists, and dropped an email where I asked to meet them. First person to answer was Brian Chirls, a filmmaker and a distribution/sales manager for a film called Four Eyed Monsters, that was a huge Internet hit in 2005 as well.

So after few mails he asked to meet me at a party called From Here to Awesome, where I ended up. And there was *everyone* I wanted to meet - all the independent Internet-minded filmmakers, people from Opensourcecinema, TubeMogul and IndieGoGo, plus a lot more. And Brian, being the great guy he is, took as his personal responsibility to introduce me and my films to everybody - and suddenly I was no stranger to SXSW anymore. So I really owe him a lot! Thanks, Brian, if you happen to read this!

For the last two days I’ve been mainly meeting different interesting people, going to panels and in the evening to different parties, and I’ve also managed to see some films. The most interesting panel was absolutely about communities and filmmaking, and speaking there were a lot of people with an open mind to Internet and a great understanding on Internet communities. What I’ve found out is that we’re totally not the only soldiers with Wreck A Movie who are trying to make the collaborative, open-source based filmmaking, funding and distribution as a de facto for indie films.

A problem I see is that everybody is doing their own stuff in their own way. It’s a bit problematic when trying to introduce the idea of Internet-minded filmmaking to independent filmmakers struggling to get their films made - there are tons of services where you can do smalls parts of it, and everybody is focusing on different areas. What I would love to see is to find some sort of a way to work together with these great services and people, and build a really strong pipeline for independent filmmakers to really take the best out of the Internet - and not see all these services ending up competing with each other.

One of the interesting people I’ve met was M Dot Strange, a filmmakers who did a feature called We Are The Strange. I’ve been having a lot of great talks with him about Nazi UFOs, a subject he’s more or less passionate about. Obviously he loved the idea of Iron Sky, and gave some good tips on that! I also had a great chat with the people who made a documentary called Nerdcore Rising, and I’m looking forward going to see the film on Friday.

Tonight there’s a very interesting-sounding party in the woods close to this place called Enchanted Forest or something like that. I understand it’s an outside party and an art exhibit, and it sounds pretty interesting. Karl, a friend of Brians told that just by visiting that event for five minutes is gonna be worth my flight tickets back and forth from Finland. That’s a big promise, but then again, who knows!

Timo signing off, I’ll write more tomorrow! And try really hard to get some pictures.

I’ve always thought that when flying east the airports get shittier by both service- and condition standards, but I think I must’ve been wrong… Heathrow was my first stop, and boy that was in a bad shape, but little did I know until I entered here in Chicago O’Hare. Talk about big-ass airport! And ugly, and some sort of a creative chaos everywhere, totally uncomprehensible gate calls ringing out constantly, a lot of fat yanks thumping around…

Well, however, so I haven’t even reached South by Southwest yet, and I’m already complaining. The 8-hour flight from Heathrow to O’Hare was dull, I watched loads of Dr. Who until my battery of both iPod Touch & my laptop ran out, then I dug out Lauren Weisburg’s The Devil Wears Prada, and jumped into the world of high fashion. I’ve always thought that the book must be pretty crappy, but since Janos (Honkonen, mr. Fukov) suggested for me to read it, I decided to give it a try, and I have to say it seems to be pretty good one!

So, here I am, in front of gate H16, logged to Boingo’s crappy and expensive WiFi-access and try to find something to do, try to stay awake so that I don’t miss my flight…

Anyhow, my idea is to blog about what I see, who I meet and what I learn while in SXSW, hopefully next entry has more substance than just me complaining :)