blog.starwreck.com

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!

It’s about time to start wrapping up this summer. Ropecon in Espoo was the last place we were having our little Iron Sky -presentation, and it definitively was a nice ending to it. We’ve been in Ropecon speaking about our stuff now I think about three times, and every time we’ve had a shitload of good time - the audience is always wonderful and the feeling relaxed enough to run a fun presentation.

This year we had a show on saturday, but me and Atte arrived on Friday, since we had a Star Wreck Studios meeting during the day, and Älymystö show in the night. In the meeting we planned on what are the first features to implement to SWS - fact is, we need to pick something to start out with, and after about 8 hours of going through material, researches and ideas, we had a good collection of basic features, which will make it possible for us to start Iron Sky production on SWS, once we (hopefully) get it released.

Älymystö’s show was, again, legendary - unlike last 2 times when we were unable to do a show at all for various reasons, this time we managed to show almost our whole set until the police crashed in and shut us down. It was all good, since the set wasn’t so special, but the last song we managed to play just banged the shit out of everybody. Here’s some photos from the event.

Saturday was much about meeting with old friends who either live aboard or I don’t get to see often anyways. They tend to show up at Ropecon every year, so most of the sunny day went on a beach listening to Bob Marley and sipping beverages.

When it was about time to do the show, suddenly I started feeling very very bad. I was afraid that I had finally been smashed down by the same stomach flu that Imppu (my girlfriend) and Julius (my son) had been having. So while Antti and the others set up and started running the SW sales table, I was wandering outside trying to figure out whether I should cancel my presentation, puke, or try to get myself in a better shape by some other means.

Eventually I got my shit together and we went out in front of the full auditorium audience that welcomed us all with a cheering applauds and a great energetic spirit as a good audience can ever give out. People seemed - in the best Ropecon fasion - to love every word we said, and after the presentation we had a good bunch of questions and some great feedback for a good show. (Ropecon’s own ConText-newsletter wrote a bit about us as well.)

Looking back at our little summer tour in Finncon-Assembly-Ropecon, I think we succeeded pretty well, although we had our doubts about presenting a film which is nowhere near completion. But people took it unbelievably well, and our main point about the summer was to give a little kick start for Iron Sky, so that people know what we are working on back here in Tampere.

There’s a lot of events we are taking part during the year - business as usual - but Iron Sky -specified shows are now over for this year, and we’ll get back on the subject once we have a demo to release and something more concrete to talk about.

Thanks again for everybody attending to any of these great events, it was a blast! Hope to see you next year, when we also try to arrange something very special out for you. But more about that later.

Oh, one thing! If anyone has any pictures of our Iron Sky presentation in Ropecon, I’d like to have some, just to remember the event later on. So send me your photos over to our forum or directly to me if you got some!

Hi, folks.

We had a good one-week vacation, during which time we tried to keep our minds off the Wreck and Iron Sky, and focus only on other stuff like doing nothing for example. Now we are back in business, and we’ve been getting our stuff together.
As you might remember, Samuli and Steve had a nice little speech at Creative Commons’ event in Croatia, and they had some great time there, meeting other people with the same kind of thoughts and presenting Star Wreck, Iron Sky and our brand new (well, not so new if you’ve been following our stuff…) concept we call Star Wreck Studios. Although I wasn’t there, I heard that Croatia was a damn beautiful country, sun was shining and people were great and very interested on Star Wreck. We heard a lot of interesting stuff - for example that there’s a fan club in Venezuela having a monthly meeting on Star Wreck, and also in African market there’s a pirate-DVD out as well (in addition to ones we’ve found in Russia and China). Wonderful!

As we’ve had a lot of interested towards Star Wreck Studios concept, we quickly put together a site where one can drop their e-mails to hear first when we are ready to release something more - just visit our teaser site.
Here’s few links from the event:

Wrecking a film

Interview with Star Wreck guys

A sustainable future for peer-production and common-based communities

Star Wreck at iCommons on YouTube

Samuli’s speech (Photo by Joi).

Hello, everybody. It’s been a little while, and we’ve recovered from the exhausting but fun trip to Cannes. Next, the Star Wreck circus is heading east, to Croatia, where annual Creative Commons’ event is taking place this year.

Samuli and the Stephen Lee, the CEO of our new company Star Wreck Studios, are having a conference speech at iCommons about Star Wreck and collaborative filmmaking, and officially announcing the the beginning of Star Wreck Studios - a platform that has been evolving in our brains for the last two years under a working title ‘Raven’s Nest’ - and a site where you can sign up to be a beta tester once the platform is launched hopefully later this year.
Most of you are not present there, but fear not, the speech will be streamed also on Second Life (in real time) - so if you are a resident in Second Life, just go to slurl.com/secondlife/Annenberg Island/187/67/40 to be the first one to know, what’s going on. For those still new to Second Life, visit www.secondlife.com and register yourself as a resident there.

We will also release more info after the event about Star Wreck Studios, the team behind it, and the stuff we are working on here in blog and in forums, as well as in our newsletter, so you’ll know more if you are not able to join the event at Second Life.
Rumour has, that even Pirk might have taken some time off of his busy schedule conquering the world, and might pop by to say few words to his minions.

More info about the event here and here.
Ps. We are also working on to build a Second Life equivalent of Star Wreck Store in Second Life - just search for Star Wreck and you’ll get there! (It’s still under heavy construction, but you know, we’ll get there some day!)

Pps. At the same time, Dwarf, Sherrypie and Fukov are joining forces and heading for Provinssirock to cause some major damage… You may follow our adventures at Star Wreck photoblog - and come say ‘hi’ if you are around!