I wanted to take a moment and tell you about an interesting experiment I’ve embarked on with my girlfriend Essi. It’s called Trekathon, and the its basic idea is to find out what happens to two film nerds who decide to consume the full franchise of Star Trek in just one year time.

Yesterday was the 100th day of Trekathon, and I wanted to share our results with you, the Iron Sky and Star Wreck people. As some of you might know, I’ve directed a small film called Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning some years ago. As the name would suggest, it’s a Star Trek film.

Now the funny thing was that when working on the film, I hadn’t seen practically any episodes of Star Trek. Ever.

Finally this year, I decided to fix this. I even lured my filmnerd-of-a-girlfriend Essi to join me – make her give up her obsession on films and focus completely on Star Trek for the next 365 days.
So that’s what we’ve been doing for the last 100 days. Watching Star Trek.

And to make things even more interesting, I decided to combine my long-time dream to run a marathon. So, in addition to watching all of the Star Trek movies and episodes in the next year, I’ve promised to buy a Star Trek fan shirt and wear it proudly when crossing the finishing line of Helsinki City Marathon in 2010.

Here’s where we’re standing now with Trekathon:

So far, we’ve seen 194 episodes of Star Trek, starting from the unaired pilot (“The Cage”), then moving on to The Original Series, The Animated Series and we’re just about to finish the fourth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In addition to that, we’ve seen five Star Trek movies.

To finish our great undertaking, we have 530 episodes and 6 movies left – and 265 days to go. This means we need to watch approximately 2 episodes every day for the next 265 days.

So, what do we like Star Trek so far?

It’s awesome.

It’s better than we had ever expected.

It’s even better than that.

It’s … Grand. (Yes, I did say that in Patrick Stewart’s voice.)

We’ve set up a blog that follows our progress daily – check it out here. In addition to that, you can follow us on Twitter, and even wear a Twibbon to show your support.

Alright, friends – Live Long and Prosper!

Timo.

This is what the jury had to say about the Star Wreck project:

“Their commitment and sedulous work have been an inspiration for the whole of northern Europe in the sphere of fan production, and they also put Finland and Scandinavia on the science fiction map, once and for all. With great humour, they have set a good example for many of us.”

On behalf of the Star Wreck team – thank you very much, we are honoured to receive this award!

…also, the saga of Star Wreck is not at an end, by any means. Although we are currently hard at work on Iron Sky, the first drafts of the story for the next Star Wreck movie have been done and the script is currently being written. And yeah, it’s even more crazy and irreverent than In The Pirkinning.

Here is the award announcement on Star Trek Databas site, and here is the conversation (in Swedish).

Two of a kind: Norwegian Spiral UFO & Fukov's Maggot Hole

Yesterday morning a glowing, rotating spiral appeared in the skies above Norway. End of the world conspiracy theorists suspect a black hole caused by the LHC in Switzerland (Norway is “close enough” they say), new age conspiracy theorists think it was a spaceship from the galactic Federation of Light. In the scientific circles (and even more literally on betting sites) the money is on it being a failed Russian missile experiment.

At the time of the press we were unable to reach commander Treholt of the Norwegian Ninja Force for a comment.

All we know is, it looks just like the maggot hole Fukov discovered in Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning.

Samuli doing what Captain Pirk does best.

Linda Whitmore of LA Times’ Hero Complex did a very thorough interview about Samuli couple of weeks back. Now the results of that interview have been published witht he title “Star Wreck, from Finland, with love“.

I rarely blog about things that are written about us, but this is an exeption, mostly because a) It’s a very good interview, as Kris from our forum put it “Anyone at all who likes Wreck should read that interview” and b) because the Finnish press thought it was newsworthy, with one of our two biggest tabloids, Ilta-Sanomat, writing an article about the interview… Sometimes journalists work in mysterious ways.

What would happen if the Starship Enterprise and “Airplane” crashed into the Babylon 5 space station somewhere in the skies above Finland?

The loopy result would be “Star Wreck (The Imperial Edition),” the Starfleet parody from a Finnish writer-actor-producer named Samuli Torssonen and his crew of amateur moviemakers. Seven years in the making, the farce opens on the bridge of the USS Kickstart with the not-so-cosmic sound of a toilet flushing – the men’s room, it seems, is conveniently located right next to the vessel’s command center.

There’s also an interesting notion from Samuli:

The team of five people formed by accident. The director, Timo Vuorensola, was not a “Star Trek” fan at all — which ultimately was a very good thing. Usually, fan-film directors know too much about the subject, and the film doesn’t make any sense to non-fans.

That pretty much sums up five years of critique towards fan films. People making them just know too much. And it seems the problem is kind of creeping to mainstream cinema (and TV), with some re-boots spending far too much time making knowing references to the original to become interesting films in themselves.

Head over to Hero Complex to read Samuli’s interview.

Oh, one other thing. If you’ve seen Star Wreck we would really appreciate it if you took the time to write an review on Amazon and let others know what you thought.

The US version of Star Wreck has been released today. See the US trailer above and their website at starwreckmovie.com.

You can buy the DVD from Amazon, or rent it from Netflix.

So how does it feel?

Timo directing lt. Swagger back in the days of ancient Rome.

Honestly, back in 2005 we would have laughed at the idea of the film being released in the US. The whole idea of a Finnish film being sold there seemed far-fetched. But times change, Star Wreck isn’t even the only Finnish film released this month! The origins-of-Santa-Claus-film Christmas Story came out couple of days ago. Also low-budget horror Skeleton Crew from our friends from Ylöjärvi came out last month.

It seems that after Star Wreck and Jade Warrior the whole film industry has loosened their tie and opened couple of buttons from the well-starched shirt. And suddenly this more relaxed Finnish film has made sone new friends. And the best is yet to come, there are interesting projects going on, including a film adaptation of 80’s cult superhero comic Peräsmies that will absolutely destroy Hancock.

We Finns tend to compare ourselves to our neighboring countries, expecially Sweden that has always been more popular in foreign countries. And going down that road,w ell we still have a long way to go before Finland produces a game changing film like Let the Right One In. But it’s good to remember that before letting the right one in the best known Swedish vampire film was Frostbitten that was bit of a mess, even though it included a nazi vampire scientist.

Let’s hope that four years from now things have changed for the better once again.

Edit: Turns out November has seen a real Finnish invasion of the land of the free. Another DVD released yesterday was L.A Without a Map, from Finnish director Mika Kaurismäki who almost always casts Kari Väänänen – L.A Without a Map being one of the few exeptions. But Väänänen plays the Russian president in Star Wreck and Iisakki in Christmas Story.
Edit2: Turns out AJ Annila’s awesome horror film Sauna was also released just last month.

In case you don’t believe me I asked British filmmakers Martin Lejeune to do a guest blog about the shootings. You can read his recollections below and if you’re into apocalyptic comedies you might want to check out his short film Untitled Dystopia.

So, here I am running on about three hours sleep, holding a microphone below a man who is painted like a chocolate bar in a heavy metal wig as he barks orders at a battle fleet which is presumably somewhere behind the green screen we’re in front of.

Hang on. Let’s back up. After a day of travel, I’ve been sleeping on a sofa at the offices of Energia productions in Tampere, Finland. Not very much – mind you – due to the two hour time difference. Everyone’s been setting up equipment like it’s nine in the morning, but I could swear it was still closer to seven.

Something which is not helped by the fact I’d arrived late the night before and been handed a bottle of rum by someone determined to make a case for Fin’s being the most welcoming culture in the world.

It’s as cold as a fridge outside so to wake myself up I go for a walk and grab some breakfast. So I head out to take my first daylight glimpse of Tampere.

Accidentally, I manage to make brief eye contact with a group of old men sitting on a bench, which I soon find out is a massive taboo here as one stands up and starts getting irate with me in Finnish. I ignore him until he goes away. It is later explained to me that in Finland the most interesting thing to do is stare at is your feet. Always.

Upon my return to the office to discover a pair of scantily clad women throwing themselves from imaginary computer terminals and falling out of chairs.

We are shooting Star Wreck 2pi the Swiss-Norwegian-Finnish spin off to 2005’s “Star Wreck: In The Pirkining” and this is just the kind of thing that is to be expected.

Most of the forty minute film has been shot in the Swiss town of Basel with a new set of characters, but the production team has come here to shoot some important crossover scenes with the original cast to tie both films together.

The Energia team has been a fantastic host. Whilst various extras were being shot to be placed in the background I had a chat with Jarmo Puskala and Antti Hukkanen, two of the guys who make Energia tick. We tried to work out what made British and Finnish comedy so similar; The Fast Show still plays on national TV out here and the self depreciative nature of both cultures provide a lot of the fodder for their respective senses of humour.

In the afternoon Star Wreck’s lead actor Samuli Torssonen arrived to reprise his role as Emperor Pirk. With the help of a crack team of interpreters the script was translated from German to English to Finnish; for the jokes work in all three languages it’s got to be good.

Timo Vuorensola was also on set for an hour to do his scenes as Lt Dwarf. Although he didn’t have his full “Plingon” ridges he quickly got into character and gave a very loud performance in a very short space of time.

The second day of the shoot it was my turn to be made up. I was to be wounded facially. Luckily I’d brought Ena with me to do just that kind of thing. So she started covering me in blood and scars.

I was promptly instructed to throw myself around as if on a ship taking hits from torpedoes. It took a couple of takes for everyone to throw themselves in the right direction. Then to disguise myself I put on a heavy metal wig and shot more sequences of being blown up, injured, running and generally swearing; in German of course.

The production team took advantage of the ‘Wreckamovie’ platform a website for making films collaboratively. This is how they have found people from all over Europe to work on the project. After putting the project online last November forty seven people have joined up to offer advice, help or to work on the film, from concept art through to helping with the post production workflow.

Unfortunately with my time on set at an end, I was shown around the annual fish market where we enjoyed some local fried herring and other delicacies, but as I dig in, I am especially cautious not to make any unexpected eye contact…

Martin Lejeune is an Exeter based filmmaker and Effects Artist, He also enjoys wandering the world as a digital vagabond.

Here’s the Revolevr’s U.S. Release trailer. It was nice to see how they made this seem almost like a serious film.

Finnorbit from Star Wreck forum started to do his own versions. Here’s the Arthouse trailer…

…and adults only…

How about you? Anybody out there to do us a remake on Star Wreck trailer, as if it was an American Indie Love Movie? Or Tarantino film? Hell, I’d loved to see Star Wreck as a Bollywood trailer!

They seem to have quite an ambitious hull breach scene!

Good news everyone!

The UK edition of Star Wreck has been released today! The disc includes the movie as well as all most extra goodies seen in the nordic Imperial Edition release. In addition there is the new 5.1 sound mix, a new commentary track in English and a couple of new interviews.

Star Wreck is available from all good DVD retailers and net stores. So go and get your copy from Amazon.co.uk or Play.com.

I obiously have a bad hair day, maybe even a bad face day, but Martin made good job on making it look like my rants actually make sense :D

What’s kind of interesting is that the interview is from Jyske Bank TV, the web tv channel of a big Danish bank. It might seem strange for a bank to have a webtv site, but in the end it’s not any stranger than all the customer magazines banks traditionally print. Also it kills far less trees.

Also, if you’re in Copenhagen try the restaurant NIMB in Tivoli and their peer poached in ale with liquorice ice cream, it’s suprisingly good.