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Pheow…

I just got back here to the hotel after wandering in the latin suburbs of Austin for few hours. This morning I woke up, gathered my gear, had some skype meetings and then went of to Austin Convention Center to meet a great guy called Mark who works for O’Reilly. We had a good chat over Wreckamovie, I showed it to him a bit, gave him a copy of Star Wreck, and then left to find some software and electronics to buy. Right now it’s an awesome time to buy stuff, € being so strong when compared to $, and electronics and software being so cheap in the States compared to Europe.

Ínstead of hailing a cab and travelling to the mall that way, I wanted to save some bucks and decided to use the bus. It’s way cheaper than taxis around here - with $1 you can travel as much as you want. It’s also a transportation method for the lower middle-class folk, so no rich-ass white beings in bus, only me with my mohawk and laptop. But by bus, you get to see around, and see how the people actually live here in Austin.

As all my friends and the guys at Energia know, I’ve been blessed with an infallible sense of direction and +35 Skill Rank Bonus to Map Reading and Urban Survival Skills - that means: I never get lost.

NOOOOT!

So I suck at that. But still, I never admit it to myself. Just like Ryoga from Ranma ½, only that I don’t know kung-fu…

Somehow, after being lost in the downtown for a while, I ended up into AT&T store, and the nice people there gave me very clear directions on how to find a Target store in a shopping mall some 10 miles away from the downtown, and what bus to take. It was a sunny day, I was listening to Disco Ensemble and feeling very alive when hopping on a bus and travelling through the city to a huge shopping center somewhere in the city borders. At Target store I shopped some iPods and Cars stuff for my kid, and then decided to go out and find a WalMart or some place where I could get couple of Adobe Creative Suites.

Without thinking, I just went across the massive highways, almost got hit by a car and finally ended up on a small forgotten bus-stand, where I for some reason thought a bus to the WalMart would go. Well, it didn’t. Actually, after stepping on the bus and driving some stops, I asked the bus driver if there was a WalMar somewhere close, and he said that yes there is, but you are going the wrong way, you need to step out and go to the other side of the road and pick a bus from there. So that’s what I did, got off the bus somewhere in the suburbs.

And then, instead of going to the bus stop on the opposite side of the road, for some reason I had a brainfart of a thought and decided to go out and find a computer store somewhere in the suburbs. Don’t really know what I was thinking. And it was getting late, sun was casting it’s last rays and I had changed to Deftones in my earphones, feeling still great and self-confident on my infinite urban skills.

Not a big surprise, I didn’t find anything. Just some huge shops with strange objects, a restaurant called Twin Peaks and a interstate highway which I tried to get across but found luckily soon enough it was impossible. So when the sun finally got behind the horizon and the darkness fell, I went to a bus stop to wait for a bus. And I waited and waited and waited… Nothing came, just cars and cars and cars.

Finally, the bus came. It was already pitch black, and I drove few stops forward, then decided to jump out in a streetcorner where I thought another bus would come soon, a bus that would take me close to my hotel.

But it didn’t. I waited like fourty minutes, sitting in total darkness in a small bu sstop, with my laptop, a big Toys’R'Us bag full of iPods and toys, and my white face and mohawk screaming “come and mug me”. All the time huge pickups stacked with latino thughs you see in movies were passing by, and people looking me like I was mad. I was really starting to feel like Bruce Willis in the beginning of Die Hard 3… But I knew that I was no Bruce Willis, had it come to that.

No bus was coming, that was quite sure. I was in the middle of nowhere, with *no* idea on where to go, how to get back or anything, and feeling every minute more that soon I would get killed. So I chickened out, and went to a small 7-11 shining in darkness, explained to a Mexican who knew just enough English to understand me, that I’m from Finland, and I’m totally lost. The shopkeepers laughed, but were very nice and called a cab for me.

So that’s my story. Nothing dramatic, but ultimate bracks were shat, as they say on the Internets.

And I didn’t get my Creative Suites, so I need to get on the same bus tomorrow, and hope for the best to find a CompUSA or Best Buy or something like that… And get the hell out of the suburbs before the nightfall.

Unlike in most film festivals I’ve visited, in SXSW I’ve actually had time and opportunity to visit and see some of the films they are showing here. Around the center of Austin there are several film theaters with films for the festivals, and to get in you need to line up about 30 minutes prior to the beginning of the film to get in with the pass.

What I really love about the theaters is that they act as a very discreet restaurants at the same time. Between each row of seats there are aisels where the waitresses can walk around, and you can order food and drinks during the shows. That’s really a thing I would love to see in Finland, and propably would boost up people visiting film theaters as well, as you can really build an experience around watching films.

Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie

The first film I went to see was called NOT YOUR TYPICAL BIGFOOT MOVIE, a documentary on two guys who really strongly believe they are tracking bigfoot in the forests nearby. It’s a heartwarmingly saddish story on these two elderly gentlemen who have a very special relationship between each others, and who really see what they want to see - bigfoot in every pixel of crap-quality pictures they’ve been taking from the woods. The synopsis says:

NOT YOUR TYPICAL BIGFOOT MOVIE provides a look at the trials and triumphs of life Appalachian foot hills. Through the experiences of Dallas and Wayne, two amateur bigfoot researchers in southern Ohio, we see how the power of dreams can bring two men together in friendship, and provide hope and meaning that transcend the harsh realities of life in a dying steel town.

The film is slow-paced, with slow guitar music in the background, and floats through the lives of Dallas and Wayne slowly. It’s funny in a sad way, and at one point you start feeling bad laughing at these two men chasing their dreams, really believing and wanting to believe into something in the woods, that doesn’t exist. I think I might say I liked the film, but I have to admit that after spending 20+ hours in an airplane and airports, I dozed off few times, and didn’t get to see the big picture very well to actually rate the movie in any way. I blame the super-comfortable soft seats in the theater… This is not a film to see when jetlagged, the slow pace really get you.

Dance Of The Dead

The next day we went to see the midnight show at Alamo theater called DANCE OF THE DEAD. It was a pretty risky shot, since we had to stop partying and go out to a film theater to see a zombie movie I had never heard of, but it turned out to be a good decision. Dance of the Dead is a story about a zombie infection that turns loose during a high school prom. In the best possible American way, of course, the ones who save the day are nerds, and a cute girl, while the high school athleths and staff get killed and turned into zombies. So in many ways, Dance of the Dead is nothing new. What I loved about the film was that the director was really able to pump enough adrenalin to every part of the film - actors did a good job, cinematography was excellent and even the makeup and special effects worked. Obviously, Dance of the Dead is not a big-budget zombie movie, but it pretty much succeeds in keeping up with enough production value and good-enough cast and script to make it stand out among most of the zombie flicks out there.

Woodpecker

WOODPECKER was a film that many people were talking a lot about in the festival, so I had my hopes up when entering the theater of seeing a really worthwhile film. Instead of trying to explain, I let the synopsis speak for itself:

Fanatical birdwatchers have descended upon a small town in the Arkansas bayou in hopes of finding the celebrated Ivory Billed Woodpecker. Declared extinct in the 1940’s, the bird has apparently been spotted by numerous experts. Enter amateur birder and poet Johnny Neander, who has convinced his taciturn sidekick that he will be the one to find the elusive woodpecker. The ensuing chaos divides the small town between believers and non-believers, rabid environmentalists and opportunistic entrepreneurs. Much like the bird itself, Woodpecker explores the intersection of fact and fiction, manipulating our notions of documentary and narrative techniques within a tragic comedy about hope, perception, and some very very strange birds.

From the first moments on this film reminded me of Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie. It was shot in a document format, and had some real documentary elements on it, the camerawork was very simple, handheld and not very high quality, and the two main actors, Johnny and Wan, were improvising most of the lines. The story started to unfold a bit slowly, and it took me a while to understand why I should be interested in Ivory Billed Woodpeckers that should have been extinct for several centuries, but pretty soon I started to understand about the characters in the film, and see this more like a tragic comedy of people chasing their dreams. There’s that subject again… Americans seem to love people chasing their dreams.

At one point, there film was so great I wished for it to never end, watching the main character Johnny slowly losing his grip to the reality as problems started to pile up and the bird was nowhere to be found, but then the film was Kummelized, the joke was over-streched, and some unbelieveable elements were introduced, newsflashes and fake environmentalists and that sort of things, that took off the edge from the story of slowly drowning into insanity and alcoholism. Without knowing what parts of the story have actually happened and what have been scripted in I can’t judge on how strong the script actually was when compared to real events, but eventually I felt the film to be a bit too long, but overall a very good experience, that’s gonna win a lot of awards in smaller festivals around the world.

Heavy Metal In Baghdad

‘Till now, the last film I saw was called HEAVY METAL IN BAGHDAD, and so far it has been the greatest film I’ve seen here, and one of the best documentaries about war, and about heavy metal, I’ve seen ever. The story starts when a reporter for MTV went to Iraq to do a story on the only heavy metal band in Iraq, Acrassicauda (“Black Scorpio”). Later on, after USA invasion, they came back to see if the band is still alive, and filmed footage on their last show in Iraq, while car bombs were blasting around the city, AK-47 -fire banging endlessly and mortar explosions ringing al over. That is true heavy metal.

The documentary follows the guys of Acrassicauda and their struggle to survive in a total chaos, but it also describes very well on how the civil war in Iraq actually is. It’s rude to see the pictures of an middle-eastern city bathing in beautiful sunlight, cars passing by, people walking along, and in the background people talking about that if they stop here they will most definitively be killed.

For a person living in Iraq, Baghdad, the everyday life is really hard, since it’s totally impossible to know when a sniper kills you, a car bomb takes you out or your family out or whatever - but for a metalhead singing “americanized” music “for satan”, as local people think of that, it’s totally impossible. Wearing a Slipknot t-shirt can really get you killed. But the guys, one of them being a father of a young child, just keep on pushing. They’ve managed to organize 5 gigs in 6 years, and every time it has been a full house of Iraq metalheads pogoing around, but the death keeps on lurking outside.

One example of how just normal things can be hard in a country that’s in a total state of chaos is headbanging: it resembles the jewish praying in some ways (they keep on bowing their heads when praying), and people don’t dare to do that because if Iraq police would see that, they would put you in a prison for the rest of your life. Just for headbanging. And not to mention growing a long hair, that’s just totally out of the question.

As the director said in Q&A after the show, the bands in the west are getting it very easy. Yeah, it can be hard to organize a gig or two now and then, or find money to go to a studio, but it’s nothing compared to the fact that every day you go to your training joint, you have to carry openly a gun for not being killed.

You need to really check out the website of the film, there’s a lot of more information on Acrassicauda and a possibility to donate them to help them further, and be sure to check out their blog, it’s an interesting read. They managed to raise enough money through the Internet after Toronto film festival screening that they were able to travel to Syria, then Turkey, and they are right now in Istanbul, but are having a very hard time over there as well.

All in all, this film was a great piece of documentary, be sure to check it out when it’s available. Here’s the trailer:

Ok, that’s it for now. Today I’m heading again to the festival, although now the Film-part of SXSW is starting to be over, there are screenings still but no other programme, and everything is Music. I’m gonna go and see some bands, and spread the good word of Iron Sky!

As an European filmmaker I don’t, surprisingly, know anybody from the states. Coming to a festival in Austin, Texas is pretty much like moving to a totally new city, where you don’t know anybody, and trying to find interesting people is really a shot in the dark, total random. So I was a bit afraid that I’d waste all my time in Austin just by walking around and trying to find people.

But what I did eventually was that I went and checked out the profiles of interesting panelists, and dropped an email where I asked to meet them. First person to answer was Brian Chirls, a filmmaker and a distribution/sales manager for a film called Four Eyed Monsters, that was a huge Internet hit in 2005 as well.

So after few mails he asked to meet me at a party called From Here to Awesome, where I ended up. And there was *everyone* I wanted to meet - all the independent Internet-minded filmmakers, people from Opensourcecinema, TubeMogul and IndieGoGo, plus a lot more. And Brian, being the great guy he is, took as his personal responsibility to introduce me and my films to everybody - and suddenly I was no stranger to SXSW anymore. So I really owe him a lot! Thanks, Brian, if you happen to read this!

For the last two days I’ve been mainly meeting different interesting people, going to panels and in the evening to different parties, and I’ve also managed to see some films. The most interesting panel was absolutely about communities and filmmaking, and speaking there were a lot of people with an open mind to Internet and a great understanding on Internet communities. What I’ve found out is that we’re totally not the only soldiers with Wreck A Movie who are trying to make the collaborative, open-source based filmmaking, funding and distribution as a de facto for indie films.

A problem I see is that everybody is doing their own stuff in their own way. It’s a bit problematic when trying to introduce the idea of Internet-minded filmmaking to independent filmmakers struggling to get their films made - there are tons of services where you can do smalls parts of it, and everybody is focusing on different areas. What I would love to see is to find some sort of a way to work together with these great services and people, and build a really strong pipeline for independent filmmakers to really take the best out of the Internet - and not see all these services ending up competing with each other.

One of the interesting people I’ve met was M Dot Strange, a filmmakers who did a feature called We Are The Strange. I’ve been having a lot of great talks with him about Nazi UFOs, a subject he’s more or less passionate about. Obviously he loved the idea of Iron Sky, and gave some good tips on that! I also had a great chat with the people who made a documentary called Nerdcore Rising, and I’m looking forward going to see the film on Friday.

Tonight there’s a very interesting-sounding party in the woods close to this place called Enchanted Forest or something like that. I understand it’s an outside party and an art exhibit, and it sounds pretty interesting. Karl, a friend of Brians told that just by visiting that event for five minutes is gonna be worth my flight tickets back and forth from Finland. That’s a big promise, but then again, who knows!

Timo signing off, I’ll write more tomorrow! And try really hard to get some pictures.

Timos‘ in the States but seems he’s always present here, ending up in YouTube - because of a party of course. M dot Strange, director of We Are the Strange talks with Timo about Nazi ufos and such.

I’ve always thought that when flying east the airports get shittier by both service- and condition standards, but I think I must’ve been wrong… Heathrow was my first stop, and boy that was in a bad shape, but little did I know until I entered here in Chicago O’Hare. Talk about big-ass airport! And ugly, and some sort of a creative chaos everywhere, totally uncomprehensible gate calls ringing out constantly, a lot of fat yanks thumping around…

Well, however, so I haven’t even reached South by Southwest yet, and I’m already complaining. The 8-hour flight from Heathrow to O’Hare was dull, I watched loads of Dr. Who until my battery of both iPod Touch & my laptop ran out, then I dug out Lauren Weisburg’s The Devil Wears Prada, and jumped into the world of high fashion. I’ve always thought that the book must be pretty crappy, but since Janos (Honkonen, mr. Fukov) suggested for me to read it, I decided to give it a try, and I have to say it seems to be pretty good one!

So, here I am, in front of gate H16, logged to Boingo’s crappy and expensive WiFi-access and try to find something to do, try to stay awake so that I don’t miss my flight…

Anyhow, my idea is to blog about what I see, who I meet and what I learn while in SXSW, hopefully next entry has more substance than just me complaining :)

Timo is flying to Austin, Texas on Sunday, to attend the prestigious South by Southwest film (and music, and other things besides) festival. Below is a little something found on the Interwebs to prepare him for his arrival in the homeland of liberty. Be sure to check out the group’s sweet logo on their Myspace page and remember: TSA means Takin’ Suckers’ Assets.

Third morning in Berlin Film Festivals. I’m sitting in the hotel room of Villa Amadeus, in third floor. Sun is shining brightly outside, birds are twittering in the trees and life seems nice. Only one thing has changed: yesterday I met Christopher Lee.

The story goes like this: we were in one hotel in a smoking room, enjoying a cigarette and chatting idly, when AJ (Annila, director of Sauna, which is going to be the greatest horror film ever) spotted a tall guy smoking a fat cigar in the corner. He notified us that there’s a guy who looks exactly like Dracula. We were looking over our backs and realized that oh-shit. That’s him. Mr. Christopher Lee himself. I was totally starstruck, but Ukko (Kaarto, of Bronson Club) went on chatting with him, and led us there. I had to run for another meeting, but had a chance to introduce myself to him, and told him Iron Sky’s logline (”In 1945 the Nazis went to the Moon. In 2018 they are coming back”) and gave him a leaflet we had created. He laughed and said he liked the idea.

And then I had to go. But Ukko and AJ stayed there, sat down with him and what do you know, Christopher actually knew Finland pretty well, because during the World War II, he was fighting in Finland as a volunteer. So, naturally, they had a lot to talk about, and later found themselves singing Finlandia in Berlin with mr. Christopher Lee. Isn’t that just as cool as it can get?

Meeting Lee was my high point here, but I’ve had great time in addition to that a lot. We’ve been going around Berlin from an event to an event, spreading the Iron Sky word and meeting with a lot of people. This year for Finns, Berlin has two important films. First, of course, Black Ice (”Musta jää”), the film that’s competing in the Berlin festival competition. They had a wonderful party in embassy on day 1, a party that lasted to about 6 in the morning. Then there’s Lordi. Dark Floors, I mean.

I’ve been following the discussions around Lordi the film, and would like to hear your opinions, dear readers, if you’ve seen the film. I myself don’t believe a word of the reviews, because what I know is that Finnish film reviewers don’t know jack shit about horror films. I believe much better those who actually know the genre, and one of my very favourite film reviewers, whose opinions I’ve learned to trust (also, I met with him in a dinner on wednesday) is Todd from Twitch Film, and he said it was awful lot of fun. Todd writes:

Now, Dark Floors is clearly not a perfect movie. The script shows signs of being written outside of the author’s native language - which it was - in some unsteady dialog and spotty character moments. There are also a couple of obvious plot holes - more logic problems, really - that the film asks you to accept. But perfect or not it is an awful lot of fun. The logic issues are nothing beyond what you see in any number of films, the major ones basically coming down to cooked up obstructions to force the characters to stop on each floor rather than descending directly, and the dialog issues are more than overcome by an immensely likable cast.

I have the feeling that Todd sums it up well, but then again, I haven’t seen the film yet, and I’m planning to go with Energia posse back in Tampere to go and watch it.

Well, I’m signing off now, I need to run to the main festival building to meet a distributor. You people have fun, I try to write more as I have some time. Also, I will upload some pictures as soon as I get them off my phone!

Swimming pool, sauna, a table literally filled up with alcohol and food, 4chan, guitar hero and around 50 people was the name of the game for this weekend, when Energia team threw a pikkujoulut-party here in Tampere, the center of the world. The main reason for the party was actually our collective birthday - the Energia office team 140 years birthday. Me, Samuli, Antti, Jarmo and Laku all have b-days pretty close to each others, and since last year we learned that it’s pretty stupid to buy together gifts to each one of us each week, so we just decided that we’ll invite our friends and have a party.

Samuli, Atte and Monto are enjoying the pool. Sorry about shitty picture quality, if I find somebody with better pictures, I’ll try to throw a better one here.

The place we rented was this cool joint with sauna, enough space and as a super bonus - a pretty large swimming pool (the place is called Kotilosauna - it’s reasonably priced, so if you wanna have a good party in Tampere, get that place - end of commercial break!). We had asked everybody to bring along some alcohol and something to eat, and pretty soon there was around nine thousand (maybe a little over) bottles of vodka, beer, koskenkorva and wine to keep us entertained.

I’ve never been a huge fan of company parties actually, since in most cases they have two major flaws: a) somebody has organised a shitload of stupid little ‘games’ to entertain guests, and b) the people would rather be somewhere else than spending time with the same boring faces they barely manage not to kill at workplace during weeks. And usually it gets pretty dirty in the end, somebody says something to somebody, somebody fucks wrong person or something like that… you know the drill.

With Energia, it’s a bit different. Although Antti might disagree, we actually enjoy spending time with each other and our closest business associates - and on top of it all, we are so cool and hypersexy it’s just an aura of awesomeness that nothing else is required! We also decided not to organize any specific program - my experience is, that if you have enough alcohol and the critical mass of good people is reached, nothing else is required.

Only speciality for the evening we had planned - which I would like to suggest also to everybody thinking of something funny in party - was that we looped a slideshow of pictures I had been collecting from 4chan for the last couple of months during the whole party. It’s not intrusive, doesn’t require music to be turned out for example and people sitting silently, and the pictures can just flip in the background, but if somebody wants to have a good 10 minutes of laughter after few drinks, nothing could be better. Me and Antti were literally rolling on the floor with our eyes wet when we just had a little break from sauna and watched some slides.

My personal opinion is that Guitar Hero is the cancer that’s killing good parties. I’ve been to couple of GH-ridden parties and just hate to stand and watch people playing like shit some tunes I would actually like to listen. But regardless of what I had specifically asked for, Laku brought X-box and Guitar Hero… But I have to say it was a good thing. The place was big enough for us to listen to *real* music in the pool room, and the GH-freaks really had a good time playing the game in the adjacent room. So, I think what we learned from this was that Guitar Hero fits to parties ONLY if there’s another same-size room with a stereo playing real music and people are not forced to listen/watch GH.

So, eventually everything went well. It was unbelieveable, but having invited around 50 people there, there was not a single asshole around (a pool full of dicks, though…), not a single passing-out-in-a-toilet-situation, no fights or arguments, only damn good party and nice pikkujoulu. Afterwards we headed - as it seems to be our habit - to YO-talo, where the things kept going on to early morning hours.

Same time next year, I guess!

Ps. as an eye-opening experience, Johanna, our scriptwriteress, brought some cheese and mustard from I think Denmark along, and although at first combining them together seemed like blasphemy to me, they went together very well! Just try, buy Koti Sinappi for example and some Mustaleima, and try them together, it’s great!