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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!

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.

Twitch Film wrote about an interesting Russian nazi comedy called Hitler Kaput, that’s under production at the moment. Production values seem to be satisfyingly high, and/but the comedic style slapstique. It’s yet one more Nazi comedy coming out from a country that has had their own umm… should I say ‘history’ (yeah, I’m talking about Germany’s Hitler-comedy Mein Fuehrer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler). Here’s the trailer - hard to say is it going to be any good or just another ZAZie, but I sure hope to get to see it. The Russian premiere is 20.4.08, if somebody hears when it’s out somewhere with English subtitles, please let me know. There’s not too much info available on the net about the film, but at least they have an IMDB entry (which we, with Iron Sky, don’t have yet - or do we? There’s this one entry that’s mysteriously hovering on IMDB, but none of us knows what it is - if somebody with IMDB Pro access reads this, can you maybe check what’s actually there…)

Oh, and in other news, Inside Steve’s Mind, a YouTube web comedy series of short fiction films has an episode about a love affair between Hitler and Steve, that’s from time to time actually pretty funny. Go check it out here:

(Thanks to Mike for this.)

For the last two years we’ve been touring around the world and talking about idea of collaborative film production. It has been received surprisingly well, although - of course - some doubts have been placed. Alongside with working on Iron Sky, we’ve been designing, funding and building a platform we first called ‘Raven’s Nest’, then ‘Star Wreck Studios’, and now, as we are moving to private Alpha, the name has been fixed to ‘Wreck A Movie’.

The big idea behind Wreck A Movie is what we call wrecking - making films the Star Wreck way. We believe that interesting quality content can be produced via collaboration over the Internet, where resources and talent are abundant, and intelligent distribution on the other end provides a real ecosystem for films made this way.

Wreck A Movie is a collaborative film production platform. It’s free, and will be open for everyone once we enter Beta. In Wreck A Movie the user can both set up his or her’s own production and find people around the world to collaborate on different tasks around the film, as well as find interesting productions and artists and collaborate with them to help other films to be made.

While still in private Alpha, we restrict our users to only about 100, and we only have one production - that’s Iron Sky - but the tasks on Iron Sky are the real deal. The invitations to join as an Alpha user to Wreck A Movie will be sent out during this weekend to those who’ve already signed up to www.starwreckstudios.com as a Beta tester.

I’ll write more on Wreck A Movie later, when we are closing invitation-only Beta - but to make sure you’ll be on Beta list, go to www.starwreckstudios.com and sign up as Beta tester!

Here’s a screenshot of Wreck A Movie Alpha:

Have a great weekend!

EDIT: One thing I wanted to add just to see that this has really been under work for a pretty long time :)

Read the BBC article.

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!

Third morning in Berlin Film Festivals. I’m sitting in the hotel room of Villa Amadeus, in third floor. Sun is shining brightly outside, birds are twittering in the trees and life seems nice. Only one thing has changed: yesterday I met Christopher Lee.

The story goes like this: we were in one hotel in a smoking room, enjoying a cigarette and chatting idly, when AJ (Annila, director of Sauna, which is going to be the greatest horror film ever) spotted a tall guy smoking a fat cigar in the corner. He notified us that there’s a guy who looks exactly like Dracula. We were looking over our backs and realized that oh-shit. That’s him. Mr. Christopher Lee himself. I was totally starstruck, but Ukko (Kaarto, of Bronson Club) went on chatting with him, and led us there. I had to run for another meeting, but had a chance to introduce myself to him, and told him Iron Sky’s logline (”In 1945 the Nazis went to the Moon. In 2018 they are coming back”) and gave him a leaflet we had created. He laughed and said he liked the idea.

And then I had to go. But Ukko and AJ stayed there, sat down with him and what do you know, Christopher actually knew Finland pretty well, because during the World War II, he was fighting in Finland as a volunteer. So, naturally, they had a lot to talk about, and later found themselves singing Finlandia in Berlin with mr. Christopher Lee. Isn’t that just as cool as it can get?

Meeting Lee was my high point here, but I’ve had great time in addition to that a lot. We’ve been going around Berlin from an event to an event, spreading the Iron Sky word and meeting with a lot of people. This year for Finns, Berlin has two important films. First, of course, Black Ice (”Musta jää”), the film that’s competing in the Berlin festival competition. They had a wonderful party in embassy on day 1, a party that lasted to about 6 in the morning. Then there’s Lordi. Dark Floors, I mean.

I’ve been following the discussions around Lordi the film, and would like to hear your opinions, dear readers, if you’ve seen the film. I myself don’t believe a word of the reviews, because what I know is that Finnish film reviewers don’t know jack shit about horror films. I believe much better those who actually know the genre, and one of my very favourite film reviewers, whose opinions I’ve learned to trust (also, I met with him in a dinner on wednesday) is Todd from Twitch Film, and he said it was awful lot of fun. Todd writes:

Now, Dark Floors is clearly not a perfect movie. The script shows signs of being written outside of the author’s native language - which it was - in some unsteady dialog and spotty character moments. There are also a couple of obvious plot holes - more logic problems, really - that the film asks you to accept. But perfect or not it is an awful lot of fun. The logic issues are nothing beyond what you see in any number of films, the major ones basically coming down to cooked up obstructions to force the characters to stop on each floor rather than descending directly, and the dialog issues are more than overcome by an immensely likable cast.

I have the feeling that Todd sums it up well, but then again, I haven’t seen the film yet, and I’m planning to go with Energia posse back in Tampere to go and watch it.

Well, I’m signing off now, I need to run to the main festival building to meet a distributor. You people have fun, I try to write more as I have some time. Also, I will upload some pictures as soon as I get them off my phone!

Thinking about my next two trips, first Austria (Zell Am See), then straight into the heart of darkness, Berlin, Germany, one might think me as a method director, trying to understand what a certain madman has seen when building his empire. Well, more than that, coincidence stepped in and arranged these two occasions where I’m heading for: Berlin Film Festival being the other one of them, and a seminar in Zell Am See, Austria, being the other one.

So, it’s on the road with Iron Sky again for this year, and now we have a much stronger repertoire than last year, and we really look forward in closing some essential funding later this year! Cross your collective fingers, y’all!

We’ve been working like madmen on the demo, and although there’s still stuff to do, it’s coming together. We now have a version of the demo we can show to closed audiences (we don’t want the unfinished work to leak) and the feedback has been very good. The main purpose for me on the demo now is to use it as a tool when presenting Iron Sky to possible funding sources, and if it helps us to make this film possible, it has done it’s job and has been certainly worth the time we spent on it.

Johanna has been working on the script very heavily for the last five months she’s been back in Finland, and we’re pretty much all set to move from step outline to first version of the script itself. The way scripts are done - at least in our case, and in many cases as well - are four-fold. First you have the synopsis, a few-page lively description of the story itself. We had about 5-6 iterations on that. Synopsis is then expanded to treatment, more detailed description of the plot and characters - another 5-6 versions of that as well. Then it is expanded into a step outline, the first version resembling more script than a short story, where every scene is separated and described on it’s own - only thing basically missing is the dialog.

We just received fourth version of step outline, and soon it’s time to write the first official version of the script, with all the dialog and the charactes in place. It will take from one to ten versions to get it into a filmable form, but we’re hoping it’s closer to 5 than 10, since we’ve been working on the story so hard, all the twists are pretty much thought through already. But who knows, it’s a creative process and takes as long it takes, and although it never is ‘ready’, we know when it’s time to let it go and film it.

During the different phases of the script we’ve been able to create a very unique story. We’ve had our issues there, and had pretty agitated script meetings from time to time, but every iteration has built the story stronger and the characters deeper.

The service we call Star Wreck Studios - the collaborative film production platform - is coming together very well. The graphics and tech are pretty much in place for the first alpha release (where you guys will be invited as well), and although we know that it’s a *long* way from what it will hopefully be in few years, we’ve got a good start there. What’s dragging behind a bit is funding the platform - we’ve been talking with investors and other funding sources, but haven’t been able to close the first round completely yet, but we keep our fingers crossed and hope to find the right people soon. The team we’ve gathered during the last year for the platform is unbelieveably good, and I’m anxious to introduce them to you when we know the alpha release date, which, hopefully, is soon.

In Austria and Berlin, my aim is to talk about these two things we are working on here, get the people interested and spread the word. Many people might think it’s nice to travel around the world, meet the people and talk about your stuff - like a vacation… Well, it would, but I happen to hate travelling, and I have a family back in Tampere, so my feelings are a bit mixed on these things. But anything to get the sky painted with iron!

I’ll write about my trips here during next week, so keep coming back!

By the way, although I’m not a heavy traveller, I get to go around the globe from time to time, and I added my trips to a service a friend of ours - Taneli Tikka - has been working on, called Dopplr. It’s a service where you just put up your trips and see where other people are going, maybe meet them and read reviews on things like clubs, restaurants and other relevant stuff. Not a bad service, and although I personally hate Facebook, they have a nice FB widget for that as well. I’m there under my real name, find me and I’ll share my trips with you. If we happen to be in the city at the same time, I’d loved to meet our foreign fans, too!

Ps. I know this blabbering about funding may make you feel like we’re focusing on money, not the film itself, but this is a necessity we have to play out carefully to make sure we have the resources available to make the film and not have to do huge compromises during the production. Of creative control we are always hyper-cautious, even to the state of paranoia, and *no* compromises are accepted there. It might turn some people away, but if it does, we know they wouldn’t have been the right ones anyway.

Thanks to Brett Lamb for this great art! Spread it to the Net!

One funny thing that our delayed demo of Iron Sky has produced, is Iron Sky fan teasers. I’ve heard of couple of people working on them, but our fan who goes by the name Mikvi has released in his blog that he has uploaded to YouTube the first unofficial fan teaser for Iron Sky.

Mikvi himself writes:

As many people are interested in different movies the works of Samuli Torssonen have made an impression to me. The Star Wreck-series have been a inspiration for a self-made filmmaker as he has been able to make a reality of his imagination in form of short and feature films.

Star Wreck - In The Pirkinning has been the most viewed finnish movie mainly cause of its distribution way. A whole consept of a free-movie so that everyone could download the movie for free without registrations or extra adds gained a significant amount of viewers. Though the movie is in finnish it still was able to have big number of foreign viewers.

The newest project of Torssonen and his friends is the Iron sky. A fictional science fiction story about a nazis that escaped to the moon after WWII and establish a base there to gather up forces to be ready to return to the earth. The year will be 2018 for their return. More info from the official site : http://www.ironsky.net

As the communitys board there were some fan-made art about the movie appearing - I though if would be nice to make a own fan-made teaser of the movie.

(Via mikvi.com)

Anyways, it’s great to see people enthusiastic enough to take couple of months of their own time and create a fan teaser, that actually looks pretty cool! So while waiting for the official demo of Iron Sky, here’s Mikvi’s fan teaser, check it out (sorry, it cannot be embedded, so you just have to follow the link)!

Ps. obviously this teaser is released 2 months ago, but it didn’t come to my knowledge until now via Google Alerts, when Mikvi wrote about it on his blog.