In this episode of Iron Sky Signal Timo spills the beans on our shooting schedule. And tells you how you can help get Iron Sky in to the theater near you!
Hint: Demand to See Iron Sky: http://www.ironsky.net/demand/
Stuff about Iron Sky, the next film from Energia.
In this episode of Iron Sky Signal Timo spills the beans on our shooting schedule. And tells you how you can help get Iron Sky in to the theater near you!
Hint: Demand to See Iron Sky: http://www.ironsky.net/demand/
The third and last part of our trip to Germany took us back to Berlin, which for some of us meant sitting in an endless stream of meetings about the budget, the details of props and costumes, the CGI and so forth – both in Berlin and in Potsdam. There was also a preliminary costume fitting for the main characters, as well as casting some roles that hadn’t been filled yet.
On weekend we had one of our very rare free days, which for some of us meant attending to just one meeting. Timo, Samuli and I even managed to find time for a short bar crawl around the Prenzlauerberg area. We also had a wonderful movie moment when we stepped into this small lo-fi bar around three in the morning. Everybody in the bar turned around to stare at us and the music just happened to pause at the same time. Nobody drew out a Colt, though.
On Monday Julia Dietze, Götz Otto and Tilo Prückner came in for some costume work. We had our costume designer Jake Collier and his assistant Heli Karhunen come to Berlin with some early samples of costumes which the actors could try on. There wasn’t still a whole lot to see on that front and the costume fitting was more about taking measurements and planning the future. Julia and Götz stayed to hang around in the office to chat with the crew and go over some details with Timo, both of them being very fun and charismatic people.
(Check out the Flickr photoset!)

The essential tools for doing the measurements: a measuring tape, a leather belt, some adhesive tape, a sewing bag and two pistols. Actors, they can be a feisty bunch.
There is one interesting thing about the costumes and filming Iron Sky in general in Germany, something Jake luckily thought about in the last minute before packing up the costumes and jumping into the airplane: importing any kind of Nazi insignia or regalia in to Germany is illegal, as well as possessing them. If the German customs had caught him and Heli with Nazi uniforms, they may have been faced with legal action, as in fined, jailed or possibly deported. This meant that all the Nazi symbols had to be removed from the costumes before the trip. Also, while eventually shooting the movie, we have to apply for a special permit to use those symbols and be careful that none of them are visible to the general public during the shooting.
CASTING
Timo spent most of Monday with our casting agent Uwe Bünker, choosing actors for some of the roles that still hadn’t been filled, and I joined him on Tuesday with my cameras. Casting is a very interesting process and Iron Sky has attracted the attention of surprising amount of actors that are well known in Germany and in some cases abroad too.
What happened in practice was that Uwe had chosen a bunch of actors that fit the requirements of the roles in question. The actors had been given a short part of the script, Timo briefed them about their characters and the scene, and they acted it in front of a camera helped by our placeholder actor Marian Meder, who did all the other roles. There were several variations of the scene, like doing it so that the character was really strict, really friendly, totally stoned etc. All of these were recorded for Timo and the rest of the team to go through and make the final choice.
We were casting for several roles, and without going too far into specifics one of them was a slightly comical Nazi trooper, one was a rather tragic older woman role, the third one was an old Nazi general and the fourth one was actually a combination of six roles, a room full of arguing heads of state. I’ve of course read the script and many of its different iterations, but this was the first time I saw the characters come to life.

A view from behind the casting camera. In the back there you can see the cockpit of a two-seater Nazi ufo, but you already guessed that, didn't you?
Unfortunately because of various reasons we couldn’t really film or photograph the auditions for you, the least not being that we don’t want to spoil some of the essential moments and laughs of the movie. In any case, the hardest thing during the casting was not to laugh out aloud during the recording, since some of the performances were truly hilarious. For example one of the actors managed to completely demolish a chair by sitting on it while just acting like he was fat.

Uwe and Timo watching the actor do the lines and recording it for Timo and the rest of the team to watch later and make their final choice.
The casting more or less concludes our trip to Germany. We got a whole lot done and as I said earlier, people switched into a completely new gear. Things are going forward, decisions get nailed down and the actual start of the shootings doesn’t feel like a faraway prospect, but a concrete thing that’s getting closer and closer.
Now the three of us are going to hit the Berlin nightlife with Heli, Jake and the others and wind down a bit, before heading for home. Stay tuned for more nifty stuff in the blog, including video diaries from these trips!

Has a Swastika shape been found on the moon?
This weekend a new thread was posted on the Internets’ biggest conpiracy website, Above Top Secret. The thread started with a starling claim:
The photos reveal a structure in the Schroedinger crater near the southern lunar polar region; official sources have failed to provide an explanation for it. Scientists are baffled by the discovery, and numerous UFO and conspiracy researchers have interpreted it to prove the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.
And not only that, looking at the picture there was no change of mistake, the huge structure was shaped like a swastika. It quickly gathered several pages of discussion and soon was one of the most popular topics on the site. By end of sunday over 11,000 people have clicked trough the link to read the news.
It was just the kind of news people browse conspiracy theory forums for, something that would change the world as we know it. And they’d be the first to know. There was just one small problem. The news was published on a newspaper called “The Truth Today“.

The Truth Today paperboy distributes newspapers at the Berlin film festival.
Yeah, you might remember we gave away The Truth Today at the Berlin and Cannes Film Festivals. After that we also set up a website to archive all the great stories people from Wreckamovie had written. Volunteers are to start updating the Truth Today website with fresh articles soon, but lately the paper has lived a quiet life as we’ve gotten ready to start the production.
Apparently it was all a well-meaning mistake, the original poster hadn’t checked rest of the stories before posting the story on ATS. It didn’t take long before people started pointing out that it’s all just marketing for the film Iron Sky. Still, even on page 6 of the discussion some are still wondering if the picture has been Photoshopped. Some have even been going over Nasa’s employee records to prove there is no Roslyn Villacorta working there!
Honestly, we’re all very flattered by this. I barely had 15 minutes to Photoshop that picture so I’m really happy it stand up to scrutiny!
The story has now been moved from the conspiracy forums to the movie forum, wich is quite an elegant move from the moderators in a situation like this. Hopefully no one feels hoaxed, because we honestly never have tried to pass The Truth Today off as a real newspaper. And quite frankly I never imagined it even could be mistaken for a real news (something many commentators also pointed out).
And remember – don’t believe everything you read. Anywhere.
As the previous blog post revealed to you, the Energia team is currently in Germany to meet the local (wo)manpower and handle various things having to do with the movie project. After finding out what the art department had been up to we headed off to Frankfurt to spend the next few days checking out the future shooting locations, ie. doing recce.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

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!