blog.starwreck.com

Star Wreck merchandise looks good on anyone! In this picture we stole from IRC-Galleria, Ashura is wearing one of the last copies of the rare CPP Potkustart caps and her horse is wearing the always stylish CPP Kalinka cap.

The Potkustart caps are sold out, but we still have some Kalinka ones in stock, so get one today for your horse! Or buy one for your significant other (if you’re that unlucky).

It’s:
The other day, I was sorting out the day’s orders from the Wreckstore when I came upon an order from California. It consisted of one NTSC encoded (American standard) DVD and one PAL encoded (European standard) one. Curious, and in the interests of better customer relations, I contacted the guy and asked if this was what he wanted. Well, it wasn’t, so we were both glad I did; but that was beside the point, as it turned out when he told me how he came across our film. It seems there is a small Public Access cable TV station operating where he lives, and it showed In the Pirkinning one night. He had tuned in in the middle, and since there was no programming information and no station breaks, the guy had no idea what on Earth he was watching… or what language the characters were speaking. (His guess was Russian.)

So he called a friend (who was presumably knowledgeable about things filmographic), described what he’d just seen, and asked if the friend could enlighten him. Here I have to quote the viewer: “He was sure that either I was crazy or I had fallen asleep and had dreamed the whole thing up.”

Luckily, our hero wasn’t convinced, and some Googling later, had found our website. The moral of the story: if you see something that’s so out of this world your friends think you’re nuts, investigate the matter to find out the truth rather than accepting the obvious conclusion and checking in at an asylum.

To celebrate the first year of Mike Pohjola’s Star Wreck Roleplaying Game, we have decided to do what we promised would happen someday. In last year’s Ropecon we released the groundbreaking Finnish roleplaying game, the first one made out of a Finnish film ever, and one of the very few that was made directly to English language.

Star Wreck Roleplaying Game has won Kenneth Hite’s ‘Outie’ -award, and has been celebrated for being a very fun, easy-to-use and flexible roleplaying game, that works as well for non-experienced soon-to-be-roleplayers, as well as for experienced players looking for a change to run a ridicilously fun scifi-game.

The game is now being released for free on our webpage, under CC Attribute-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, meaning you can (and should!) distribute it to your friends, as long as you don’t start selling it.

Also, the original print-version of the game has *almost* ran out of prints, we still have ~3 copies left, and this version of the game will *not be reprinted again*, so if you want this collector’s item, you should drop your order now! If we run out of print, Fantasiapelit might have few copies still left as well.

On our Forum we have a discussion area designated for the RPG, where there are also some new stuff too.

And be sure to check out the author Mike Pohjola’s next game released couple of days ago in Ropecon, called Tähti (in Finnish only). It’s a great game, set in near future, where you can play a girlband - and not just any girlband, but a Maoist mutant girlband!

The Energia team once again visited the Assembly -event, held at Hartwall-arena in Helsinki. Although almost everything we had planned for the event went crashing down, we managed to get our stuff together and crafted a nice joint out of nothing. A lot of peepz stopped by to greet us, support our cause or just to take a glimpse of the video collection we had constantly running on our monitor.

Photo by Sampsa Kurri, borrowed from Muropaketti’s Assembly Photo Report

At first, our idea was to get the same cool stuff HP had made for our Star Wreck –stand at Microsoft’s Vista launch – the bridge of the Kickstart – but, surprise, surprise, they didn’t exists anymore. Too bad we found that out on friday morning, *after* we had rented a van to get the stuff. Well, there’s nothing you can’t fix with a roll of duct tape, few construction site lights and red cloth! Eventually, our stand became a nice, cozy, joint which was positively campish unlike the boring corporate stands over at the hallways.

Energia was fully manned at Assembly – Atte, Samuli, myself, Antti and Jarmo, we all took the weekend off of our schedules and came over to meet our fans and new faces. Our primary idea was to get over there and to promote our next film, Iron Sky, and get our merchandise available to those who never get their hands on it anywhere else. On top of that, we were invited to have a seminar to talk about Iron Sky.

Friday was mostly about building and rebuilding our stand. During the night, Antti ran the example adventure of Star Wreck Roleplaying Game to a small group of fans, which received much appraise afterwards. I even heard that Antti would be posting the transcription of the game here later, but we’ll see what’ll happen.

Antti at the Raven Lounge

On Saturday we kept on going, with our outpost manned 24h/day. We had prepared a video collection out of every video we’ve ever produced - including a shitload of stuff never meant for anybody’s eyes - to run constantly on our monitor. Although Media Player Classic let us down more than often, there was always videos on screen and music in the air, and a lot of people visited us and some of them stayed even to watch a film or two. One visitor that made me extremely happy was this 6-7 year old kid who watched the Legacy-collection Star Wrecks and giggled through them and explained the jokes to his dad who had fun as well. This led me to the conclusion that an animated TV-series of Star Wreck for kids just has to be made!

The Iron Sky –seminar was pretty crowded and we had some fun time there, rambling on about this and that and showing some exclusive material. One of the funny things I found in my email in the morning was the trailer of Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning (Original Version) dubbed in German by a group called Crash Dub Studios, and it was actually pretty darn good! I’ll post it here later, once I get the final version from the guys.

More information and discussion about the seminar can be found from our forums, in both English and Finnish.

After the seminar Samuli beat the shit out of some kids at Command & Conquer (yeah, don’t fuck with the Emperor) and went out to represent Iron Sky in the Helsinki nightlife. Me and Antti and Jarmo kept things running. Last year Antti had a group of followers (his “court”) sitting by at our stand all the times, but it was Jarmos duty to gather his own people this year, and he did as good job as Baldur von Schirach would’ve done back in the days!
Assembly-TV was also pretty interested on our presence this year, and we did a long interview there, talking about what we talk about the best: ourselves. (Yeah, we are sorry, we can’t hear you from the sound of how awesome we are). The interview (in Finnish) can be downloaded from here.

In the wee hours of morning we were also invited to join the Assembly-TV’s Nightchat, where me and Jarmo continued where the interview left us. There was a question and a nice reward for it: “What would you like to see in Iron Sky, a film about Nazis on the Dark Side of the Moon”. A lot of funny ideas came along – people wanted to see Samuli in the film, space battles and that sort of stuff – but the winner was the one we agreed the most with: “I want to see Jürgen Prochnow in Iron Sky”. So do we, and by our dirty toes, we’ll give him a call! Yes, we’ll let you know what he thinks. If you have other actors you’d like to see on Iron Sky, you can join the discussion about the actors here.

(There was some asswipe who jumped onstage at the studio after popping some pills and acted like a dipshit he was, but we heard that he was later thrown away from the festivals after being beaten by the cops outside the place. Don’t fuck with us, we’ve got the law on our side!)

Sunday was mostly about getting the hell out of there, but we decided to stay put until every last one of the programs was over. Nothing special went on, I dozed off for a few hours and Antti and later also Jarmo and Samuli joined us at the stand once again. After the closing seremony was over we got our stuff together, tetris-fitted them to Jarmo’s car and left the sunny Helsinki behind.

All in all, we enjoyed our stay at Assembly, and would like to thank everybody supporting our cause at the Raven Lounge, spent some time chatting over there, everybody joining the Iron Sky –seminar, and congraculate the winners of Assembly-TV’s Wreck/IS –related compos. Same time next year, I think!

We have been planning that in the next (summer) Assembly we’re going to do something so amazing nobody else has done it ever before, but let’s see if we have the resources to do it! Until then – take care! And if you got pictures, get them to us by posting them here! And check out our own photo report from the Photoblog as well.

Ps. You might also want to check out our previous blog entries from last year’s Assembly 2006 –event (in Finnish): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and Sherrypie’s opening speech at Short Film Compo last year:

The Assembly has started! It’s Finlands largest computer festival with over 5000 participants over four days. The Energia crew will be there 24 hours a day from mid-friday until the bitter end on sunday. Last year was blast (even though for Antti it resembled a extreme sporting event, with sales shifts going on for 40 hours straight). This year we aim for a bit more organisation and less sleep deprivation, but well see.

This years programme includes our talk about Iron Sky, Samuli and Timo taking part to a night chat on TV and propably something very unexpected. If you can’t make it to Helsinki, the whole event is broadcasted live on Assembly TV. We’ll also be blogging and Twittering form Asm as soon as we get out net connection up.

Oh and the now traditional Assembly special of The Raven newletter is out as well, if you’re not a subscriber you can read it here.

Everything ready here at the office, next stop tomorrow morning will be Finncon in Jyväskylä. The Wreck-schedule will be this:

SATURDAY 14.7.

10:00 - C1-C2 - Captain Pirk opens Finncon 2007!

14:00 - Ilokivi (downstairs) - Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning - Imperial Edition

SUNDAY 15.7.

10:00 - C4 - Film Now! Timo Vuorensola and Jarmo Puskala discuss with Marko Ahonen a bit about the filmmaking now and tomorrow.
11:00 - C4 - A little bit more info about Iron Sky - and a great change to ask questions from the team.

Other than this, Star Wreck Store On Wheels (hosted by Antti Hukkanen) -table will be open during both days at Finncon, where you can personally come over to meet, greet and maybe even get an autograph for your copy of Star Wreck. Most importantly, that will be the first time when to get Iron Sky T-shirts and Raumsturmführer-caps, so don’t miss that!

We are also looking forward for the evening programme at Bar 68, so prolly you’ll catch us there too.

Those who can’t, won’t or don’t want to come over to Finncon, you can follow our adventures at our photoblog and the little Twitter box on the right.

And those who are coming - meet you there!

Taken from the latest episode of Energia’s official newsletter The Raven:

The Energia foursome takes off on a little summer tour in Finland and the Nordic countries again this year. Star Wreck is pretty familiar stuff to many people already, so this time around, the focus is on Energia’s next feature film, Iron Sky. To hear all about it, situate yourself at one of the following:

FINNCON 2007 – 14-15 July 2007 (Jyväskylä, Finland)

According to rumours, his imperial highness Emperor Pirk has been invited to open the Finncon science fiction event! Later, there will be discussion about the future of Finnish filmmaking, as well as 45 minutes dedicated to Iron Sky. Both fact and fiction will be discussed, plus of course, the thoughts of the production team at this point.

If you’ve missed the Imperial Edition, the Ilokivi show is your chance to see In the Pirkinning in its full glory!

ASSEMBLY 2007 – 2-5 August 2007 (Helsinki, Finland)

The largest computing event in Scandinavia, Assembly Summer, is again set to blow everyone’s sleep cycles to bits. The three sleepless nights will be brightened by the Energia crew with their merchandise and meeting stall. Come join us at the Raven Lounge, chat with the Ugly Guys Who Make a Difference, and replenish your stock of Star Wreck products. There will also be a seminar presentation where we tell you everything we can about Iron Sky.

ROPECON 2007 – 10-12 August 2007 (Espoo, Finland)

Ropecon, the roleplaying con, has always been close to our collective hearts, both as an event and an audience. It was where we first showed the Star Wreck trailer in 2003, and where the Star Wreck Roleplaying Game was released last year! This year, Energia lands among the roleplayers with stories of Iron Sky, tin-foil hat theories, and Moon Nazis.

EUROCON 2007 – 21-23 September 2007 (Copenhagen, Denmark)

So as not to neglect our Nordic friends, the Star Wreck messenger Timo Vuorensola joins the science fiction and fantasy con featuring (among others) Anne McCaffrey and Harry Harrison, to spread the word about Star Wreck and Iron Sky – and here, too, Imperial Edition is part of the programme.

So, do as Pirk did: go there, and destroy any enemies!

Ps. The first Iron Sky T-shirts and Raumsturmführer-armycaps have just arrived!

Kuten jotkut ovat jo huomanneet, Imperial Editionin DVD:n authorointivaiheessa tapahtuneen virheen vuoksi joissakin ennakkotiedoissa mainittu 5.1 -ääniraita jäi puuttumaan. Onneksi levyllä oleva 2.0 -miksaus on kuitenkin onnistuneempi kuin mikään aiemmin kuultu.

Asian korjaaminen olisi yksinkertaista jos kyse olisi muutamasta itse levitetystä kopiosta, kuten alkuperäisen Star Wreck: In the Pirkinningin kohdalla. Imperial Editionin tilanne on kuitenkin huomattavasti monimutkaisempi, emmekä tällä hetkellä pysty valitettavasti tekemään sille mitään.

Mahdolliset reklamaatiot otamme vastaan osoitteessa orderhelp@starwreck.com.

Olemme erittäin pahoillamme tapahtuneesta.

Samuli Torssonen ja muu Energian tiimi.