blog.starwreck.com

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!

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.

In early November, we here at Energia began an experiment in community
creativity on our discussion board. The task was to design elements around
the Nazi base on the far side of the Moon, freestyle, no restrictions.

The amount, diversity, creativity and sheer quality of the submissions were
a pleasant surprise for us – we knew to expect the community to be active,
but it was nice to see how eagerly people took to the task and how much
effort they put to their work. Based on a month of active discussion on the
forum, we have now put together a selection of the best ideas and
formulations, and the next step will be to refine them into elements for
the Iron Sky demo. The thread on our board amassed a total of 283 replies
from 53 individual participants, for a grand total of almost 20 forum pages
of discussion.

Creative communality has once again demonstrated its power, for which a
great big thank-you is in order to all participants! This thread will make
a fine example to show filmmakers when discussing the potential of
communities in motion pictures, but the process was by no means an
uncomplicated one. It is not a question of whether communities can offer
new avenues for filmmaking, but rather of how to control, motivate and
schedule the community.

The phpBB-based discussion board we use is far from the best possible tool
for this. As many of you will know, we are in the process of developing an
online production platform better suited for the communal creative process
– Star Wreck Studios – which is scheduled to be released for use with Iron
Sky early next year. The goal is to provide an answer for the problems of
the forum model, as well as developing a quality community service for
films in production.

The best use for communality was found in situations where a single
participant presented an idea that he or she found interesting, then
someone else developed it further and suggested some references, from where
a third person took it and modelled, drew or otherwise realised the final
result. As an unexpected bonus, much discussion centred on questions far
more scientific than the original task, not to mention the wildly divergent
tangents that developed internal details for the station or just generally
speculated what life might be like for the Moon Nazis.

The community experiment now concluded was an excellent experience for us,
and provided an extra push for the development of the Star Wreck Studios
platform. Anyone interested can visit www.starwreckstudios.com to let us
know something about themselves and their interests, as well as sign in the
beta testing team who will help us test and develop the platform towards
initial release.

Once again, thanks and a deep bow to everyone involved!

Some Statistics:
- Forum pages: 20
- Total replies: 287
- Individual collaborators: 53
- Textual ideas: 48
- Reference pictures: 30
- Sketch images: 13
- Links: 65
- 3D-models: 8
- Indirect textual ideas: 14
- Production pictures: 5

ENERGIA PRODUCTIONS WEBSITE REDESIGNED:
The Energia Productions website has been redesigned. The new, improved site showcases our 3D and community engineering expertise. Take a look (especially all you bosses of rich international businesses).
www.energiaproductions.fi

CHRISTMAS GIFT FROM STAR WRECK STORE
We’d like to celebrate having come this far by giving away holiday gifts to customers at the Store. Everybody who makes a purchase of at least 10 euros will get the original Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning DVD AND its original soundtrack CD for free! You have both of them already? No worries, the christmas is coming and you can give them out as a present! Hooray, Emperor Pirk!

Dear Wreckers & Iron Sky people, we need your help!

One of the biggest challenges in the production of the Iron Sky demo has been creating the Nazi Moonbase. Although we’ve had some pretty wonderful submissions by great artists from all over the world, we also want to hear your ideas.

The Nazi Moon Base itself is pretty much ready (although texturing and detailing are still a work in progress), but we need you to help us with designing the surrounding of the base. Everything from a brief idea description to a full 3D model are appreciated!

This task is open until 30 November 2007.

DESCRIPTION OF THE TASK

Design elements for the environment surrounding the Nazi Moon Base. Submit your ideas and textual descriptions to the forum. Pictures can be submitted either there or directly to us via email.

TASK REFERENCE

The Schwarze Sonne, the secret Nazi stronghold located on the Far Side of the Moon, is a huge complex built to house thousands of Nazis and their war machinery. The central structure is the fortress built in the shape of a swastika. Surrounding the main construction, many smaller elements have been built to support the everyday lives of the Nazis and the preparation of their return to the Earth.

The technology is pretty much 40’s style, since technologically the Nazis have not been developing much since they came to the Moon. But they’ve had plenty of time to build big, strong elements, tools, vehicles and weapons. You may think of this as a crude steampunkish world, but please keep a touch of realism to your designs.

The fortress is located in a shadowy crater, about 2 kilometres across, and the main building is about 1.2 kilometres in diameter, making it about twice the size of the Pentagon. Around it can be pretty much anything, from barracks and construction platforms to whatever you can come up with - you have the freedom to invent anything. Use your imagination!

SUBMITTING IDEAS / PICTURES / 3D MODELS

We accept anything from short idea descriptions to detailed documentations, from raw, hand-drawn sketches to detailed 3D models.

Material can be posted to by “>replying to the thread, or by sending them to our email address at info@ironsky.net.

COPYRIGHTS & CONTACTING

All the rights to the material submitted must be in the possession of the contributor. The contributor must allow the worldwide, royalty free commercial use of the material in the production of the film “Iron Sky”, and other material related to it (mainly: the demo and promotional material).

REFERENCE MATERIAL

Here you can find some reference material to help you understand the scale and form of the surrounding area and the fortress. You may download these and start working on them, or just use them as a reference - whatever suits your methods best.

This is a draft render of the scene. The camera angle & picture framing are quite close to the final.

To understand the scale of the fortress, here’s a quick mockup of the surroundings of the Pentagon.

Other images for reference can be found at our newly created Iron Sky gallery.

WHY TO DO THIS?

We like to believe that the community can be an active producer of quality content, and would like to use this as a test platform for the idea itself. Your help will be crucial and your participation highly appreciated!

If you produce something that can be utilised, your name will be mentioned, of course, in the thanks. If you produce art that can be used to create a 3D model, you’ll be credited as a ‘preproduction artist’. If you produce a model fully usable in this process, you’ll get the title of ‘modeller’. And naturally, you still hold the moral rights to the material, just as long as you grant us the rights to use it in Iron Sky.

Get creative and discuss the task!

As you may remember, some months ago we were asking our community to participate to Tampere University’s PARTECO-research on Star Wreck -related research, asking questions like ‘who is our community’, ‘why did they participate in Star Wreck’s production’ and ‘what did they expect to get from out of it’. During Mindtrek-festival here in Tampere, Atte and Katri Lietsala, the researcher, presented some of the results to the public. You may check some of the interesting stuff from these slides:

In other news, a Catalonian university has been interviewing me on similar research. It’s always fun to hear that our film is relevant even on University level :)

This is a wee bit late hour for the entry, but just wanted to say few words about New Context Conference 2007 in Tokyo, where I attended as a speaker. Our collaborative online film production platform, called Star Wreck Studios, was first time introduced in iCommons 2007 event in Croatia, and invitation to speak at NCC07 was a follow-up of that.

The conference was stacked with pretty high-level speakers – Joichi Ito (Creative Commons), Ashwin Navin (BitTorrent), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn) and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), as well as loads of not-so-well-known guys behind Technorati and Google AdWords etc. – oh, and me somewhere between there as well.

I was invited to talk about Star Wreck as a case in a Creative Commons panel, and after that had my own one hour presentation about the production and distribution of Star Wreck, as well as our idea of collaborative film production. Basic stuff, that’s what I have been talking about last two years now…

But I wasn’t prepared for the simultaneous interpretation that was going to take place during the speech – and I was asked for my presentation and a script of what I’m going to talk there for the interpreters. Of course, I didn’t have them. My presentation was halfway done, and I’ve never written a script about what to talk, I just let my presentations roam freely… So I was swamped with work throughout the whole conference, and couldn’t attend any speeches other than my own ones, and the last one about Mission Eternity.

The hotel, Westin Tokyo, was un-friggin’-believeable. Remember the hotel in Lost in Translation? Well, this is the big brother of that. Servants everywhere, service everywhere, massive lobbies, huge rooms and unbelieveable breakfasts as well… And the conference organized parties constantly, with great dinners (a lot of sushi) and everything. Everything was so well prepared – you don’t get that kind of attention in a normal european conference. Here, I didn’t have to think at all. They had organized everything, from minute-tight schedule to a personal assistant… Well, I can’t complain, it was all good.

I also had some time to visit Tokyo during one day, and I bought a Totoro for my kid, as well as met with our Japan distributors in a great dinner that slipped way beyond midnight – yeah, we had damn fun time.

My experience about Tokyo was faint, since I had only one day to walk around the city. Shibuya and Harajuku were filled with gothlolis and other freakish Tokyo-gals as well as their male counterparts and shops filled with great clothing (not my size, apparently), and everywhere there was a shitload of people walking around in masses. I also bought two albums of Tokyo metal in random, and by accident liked them both.

The trip to Tokyo was something I couldn’t have even wished when we released Star Wreck. Everybody was enthusiastic about the film, our story and our future plans (yeah, got to talk a bit about Iron Sky, too), and I met some wonderful people. My next goal is to bring Star Wreck with me to USA. It’s hard to say how the panel picker voting for SXSW goes, but we’ll see. We should know by the end of the month.

Next to me the folks of Mission Eternity holding a case containing 8 grams of Timothy Leary’s ashes! Photo by Digitalbear.

Star Wreck Studios, the collaborative film production platform we’ve been developing for last 2 years, is about to head to actual production, and we need coders to help us out with it. So if you are one, and would like to participate, send us your CV to address crew [-at-] starwreckstudios.com - and we’ll talk more!

Here’s the work ad:

It’s been both creative and relaxing week back at the Energia office, more or less celebrating the 2 years of Star Wreck.

The weekend Energia and Star Wreck Studios crew got together at a rented cabin in Lempäälä countryside to relax, meet with each other (two companies, different personnel and only Skype to connect each - a bit of human touch don’t hurt) and work on existing productions casually and in a nice surrounding. The place was great - a cabin close to a lake and surrounded by a vast field and forest. We went hiking to a nearby trail, bathed in over 100-year old savusauna and went on a boat-trip. And yes, we enjoyed a lot of alcohol, as the Finnish tradition requires us to. Surprisingly, we succeeded in having fun and doing some serious stuff - worth the while, indeed!

Photo by Lare Lekman. More photos from the Star Wreck Summercamp at our Photoblog.

Johanna, who went first hiking to Australia and New Zeland in the beginning of the year for couple of weeks, and after that hiking to USA for 5 months, has returned to Finland. That’s great, since finally we can start working on the Iron Sky script. We had a dinner with Johanna, and as the evening proceeded had some tremendously important ideas how to strengthen the story up - next, we’ll start opening the now-existing 25-page synopsis to scenes, and after that start writing the script itself, led by Johanna and fueled by our maniac ideas.

We have also started working on the initial background research for Iron Sky, led by Mikko Sillanpää, our history expert. If you think you are an expert on some of the elements Iron Sky is built on about (that is, nazis, ufos, space… you know the drill) and would like to collaborate, feel free to drop few lines to our e-mail address jobs [at ] starwreck.com, and we’ll see if your expertise would come in handy.

Funding-wise, we’ve now covered 2/3 of the development budget (not the entire budget!) of Iron Sky, which is great, meaning we are moving forward as expected.

Yesterday we ended up with Samuli and couple of my friends to YO-talo to check out some local bands. We were all totally blown away by a band called White Flame - you need to check out their stuff, it really rocks the shit out of everything. The singer kept on running around the tables and screamed like Axl Rose back in the days of his prime. Awesome in motion!

Anyway, things are moving nicely, and we had time to have some fun also, and enjoy a bit of summer. You try to do that as well!

Cheers!