blog.starwreck.com

Energidiots seem to have had a rather silly day at the office while I was away, and the latest Energia Dailies reflected that pretty well, I think. So, it’s good to hear somebody talk something important for a change. So here’s Joi Ito talking about various things - Star Wreck, for example. Take it away, Joi! (From Loic Le Meur’s blog).

From YouTube comes a video creatively mixing Star Trek 4, Star Wars and In the Pirkinning:

This kind of re-edits are fun, so if you spot some let us know. I’ve been collecting the ones I’ve found to a YouTube playlist if you want to check them out.

…they’d come up with the design of Kalinka. Well, at least our fan from Helsinki, avaruus-apina (Finnish for “spacemonkey”), also known from our forum as Joutilas, and by his real name, Petri Liuhto, did. He’s been drawing/painting cool stuff from Star Wreck and also some fan art for Iron Sky. Here’s his latest work, C.P.P. Kalinka

Go check out his gallery at deviantart!

Ps. My kindness towards my wife got awarded by Lynch’s Twin Peaks golden box and INLAND EMPIRE, of which the latter I’m about to watch very soon! So remember, be kind to your loved ones and you might get Lynched as well!

…and thanks to the modern, snowless Decembers here in Finland, I’ll keep on dreaming. Meanwhile, some other good things of Christmas remain. Them being: food and presents. And although we cannot blog any food directly to you, we’ve prepared a little present on Energia’s behalf. The idea was ignited by one of our fans, who was asking about the speeches of Sherrypie from Star Wreck on our forum. We realized that we haven’t released the script of Star Wreck, although we didn’t have any reason to hold it back.

So, as this year’s Christmas present, Energia releases the script of Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning in it’s latest and most complete form. Since the script was never officially ‘finished’, and kept on changing until the very last months of production, the version I put together is different from the film itself, but the clearest one we had. Hope you enjoy!

As the film is in Finnish, so is the script too - sorry for our international audience. But fear not, we have a little something for you as well! I dug out the remaining storyboards that had survived through the years, scanned them and pushed them online.

Ps. Easiest way to view the script is to either print it or view it as flashpaper (two buttons on the right corner of the Scribd screen), but you can also download the .pdf versions from here: script and storyboards.

Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning - Script

Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning - Storyboards

The whole Energia team would like to wish you a peaceful and merry Christmas. Keep on Wrecking in the free world!

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 :)

German fandubbers Crash Dub Studios have made a German version of the In the Pirkinning trailer. We showed this in Assembly, but now it’s on YouTube as well. Currently it’s only the trailer, but maybe some day the entire film can be enjoyed in German.

Check it out.

Oh and there’s also the professional Italian dub that was shown on Canal Jimmy, check out the clips on Revver.

Konnichiwa!

The success story of Star Wreck is definitely not over! I’m happy and proud to announce you that as of this week, Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning - Imperial Edition is available also in Japan.

Released by AMG and Medallion Media, this wonderful package has it’s own sleeve design artwork, wonderful poster/liner notes - and as a cherry on top, a full, high-quality Japanese dub! This is definitively something we didn’t see coming when we released the film back in 2005, but this is again a proof that releasing a film for free doesn’t mean it’s worthless after that - more like the other way around!

Take a look at the front cover, and check out and excerpt of the film in Japanese! And I have a mission for you people - spread the word for your Japanese friends about this extraordinarily epic release! You can purchase a copy of Japanese SW:IE for example from here.

During my trip to Japan I also met the people from AMG and Medallion Media, and we had some pretty unforgettable time in the nightlife of Japan. They had invited me to the dinner, where I was introduced to sake, ebisu beer and potato-vodka, as well as traditional Japanese cuisine - a lot of sushi and items I had never eaten, nor never got to know what they exactly were, were brought to our table in an unending stream. We had a lot of interesting conversations about the film - they really knew what Star Wreck was about and loved it, and dropped some very good questions I was happy to answer about production and the story as well. As the evening grew darker we also visited a small Shinto temple and walked around the small streets of Tokyo, and I have to say I’m pretty amazed of the Japanese culture and state of mind.

First thing I learned that Tokyo, being one of the most populated areas in the world, is also one of the safest cities to visit. I was told that I could leave my laptop and wallet in the most crowded trainstation, and nobody would steal them. Actually, my friend Hector told me that his friend had forgotten a laptop to a tram during rush hour, and when he called the tram central, they had fould the laptop and had it delivered to his apartment in less than 20 minutes. The same guy, few months later, travelled to Europe, and the first thing that happened in Danish airport was when he was buying a bus ticket, turned away for a few seconds from his luggages, and the same laptop was stolen in just a few seconds.

In general, I have to say I’m very proud of this release, and so is everybody at Energia as well. When we released our film for the first time, we were just happy if many people would download it and like it. But when these new releases keep on popping here and there, it’s way beyond what we ever could have expected. I also hope that our story encourages many filmmakers working on their first productions to see the positive sides of releasing the film also for free. This way the film is right away available for viewing all over the world, and if the film is good, it’s value in other distribution medias is boosted drastically. Had we released Star Wreck just on a DVD, we wouldn’t be standing here at all, and we’d be cursing how the evil pirates steal our income. Today, we can happily give our film for free for everybody we want, the “piracy” doesn’t affect us at all (actually we are pretty darn proud of our Chinese and Russian pirate versions of SW:ITP :), and still can trust that those who really love it, also get the DVD.

Having said that, I would also like to point out that none of this would’ve been possible had we not had you, our dear community. Some of you have helped us in producing this film, and even more of you have helped us in getting the word spread around the internet, and still keep doing that. Energia team would like to collectively take our hats off and take a deep bow for every one of you that have made Star Wreck the thing it’s today! Arigato!

- Timo, Samuli, Jarmo, Atte, Antti and all the other weirdoes down at the Energia office in Tampere, Finland.

Update:
Here’s the Japanese trailer, it’s made by the distributor. It’s certainly different that our trailers. Download the trailer here (.wmv).

Back when we were making the Legacy DVD we excluded Star Wreck 4½: Weak Performance in a sudden moment of self-criticism. Since then it has been missed by many people, far more than we would have ever guessed! So, now it’s time for Star Wreck 4½ to come to a DVD player near you, and make your Legacy collection complete.

We’ve set up a BitTorrent download for an .iso file that you can burn to a DVD and enjoy the film. For instructions on burning a .iso file check out this site. If you don’t have a BitTorrent client installed, we recommend µTorrent.

Go and Download the .torrent!

You can also watch the film online, without downloading anything!