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Was when Darth Vader stepped on stage to conduct the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra playing the Imperial March - with a lightsabre.

The reason for this sight was that the Tampere Philharmonics had a concert with the theme “Space Adventure 2008″. They played themes from classic scifi movies and space themed classical music.

I have to admit that Darth Vader on stage was one thing I’d never thought I’d witness in my life. Even though considering the size of the fanbase seeing the orchestra playing the theme from Star Trek: The Next Generation with the conductor dressed in a starfleet uniform might have been even more impropable.

I have to admit I loved every second of the concert, with these kind of performances being rather rare here in Finland. One might complain a bit about it being aimed at the whole family with some, um, “funny” speeches in between chronicling the voyages of the Galaxy class starship Tampere Philharmonic. But I cant, I’ve seen the frigging Darth Vader conduct an orchestra. I’m a happy nerd.

Hotness, humidity and awesome food dominated my trip to Singapore, from where I arrived back to Finland just few hours ago. The Singapore Digital Media Festival 2008 gathered together a bunch of interesting, influental and/or impressive speakers who all dug deeper into the world of Web 2.0 - or, as the seminar’s focus this year was, Television 2.0. Not surprisingly, I was there again as the oddball guest, not quite fitting into the world of serious web entepreneurs, but not quite representing the serious filmmakers either. This time, though, I wasn’t alone - another freak of the both businesses, Hugh Hancock, the guy who directed the Machinima classic BloodSpell and actually originally invented the word Machinima - threw an awesome performance fill’d with energy and great points about why and how filmmakers do films on the Internet nowadays, and why do they distribute that stuff for free. He actually gave a very good description of the business model everybody has been trying to explain on “how to make money with something you are giving away for free”, that freaked most business-minded people out of their heads and frustrated the rest - but that’s just the way it goes. If you do something carefully and lovingly, and then put it out there for free, without any clear earning model, the money will just mysteriously show up. I kinda added to it that it’s the only way you don’t reek like dollar-thirsty businessman for miles away, and that’s the reason people love you.

Timo Vuorensola, Iolo Jones and Hugh Hancock at Blogger’s meeting. Photo from The Young Upstarts blog.

Yes, it just mysteriously materializes virtually out of thin air. Wether it’s you suddenly becoming a big time seminar speaker charging thousands of dollars an hour, wether it’s you being hired as a consultant, or people buying your self-made DVDs like hell, or you selling a website with a cool name dot com, or just get enough supporters to pay you or whatever… The money will just mysteriously shows up.

Is it sustainable? Yes. Is it scaleable? More or less. Is it predictable? Not quite. Can you convince VCs with the model? Hell, no.

There’s two requirements why this is mostly not very widely exploited model:

1) You need to spend at least five to ten years to get there, and even then the income isn’t anything phenomenal.
2) You need to create something with your own risk, out of thin air, and it needs to be awesome.

And, of course, thirdly - there’s nobody who you are able to explain the model and they’ll believe it. But what the hell, that’s the reason it’s so fun!

Hugh Hancock onstage.

Here’s a short interview posted to Seesmic video discussion service from the festival.

Timo Vuorensola - Introduction and the Role of Community in film making

I returned from my London-Stockholm-London -trip back to Finland in Saturday, and right away took a cab to Kaapelitehdas in Helsinki, to Alternative Party 2008, where the other guys from Energia were already waiting. We had been preparing to do what we called the “Hakenkreutzierungmachineworkshop”, a small workshop where we asked our people - the Iron Sky community - to help us out with a certain prop we needed for the film.

The prop, called indeed the “Hakenkreuzierungmachine”, (e. “The Swastika Machine”, f. “Hakaristeytyskone”), had been a tricky item for us for a pretty long time already. It had been written to the script, and it plays sort of a big role at least at some point of the film, but we had been debating for as long as the script has existed on how the thing would actually work, what it would look like, and how it would be operated.

Story requires that it is supposed to be sort of an “audioweapon” built by the Nazi scientist in their great wisdom during the 70 plus years they’ve been hiding in the far side of the Moon. In it, they have compressed all the speeches of Adolf Hitler and Josef Göbbels in a soundburst of one second, which is transmitted in various different wavelenghts, that are thought to affect the human brain subliminally, to the audience. See, dr. Reinhardt Richter, the developer of this awesome device, has found out that average non-Aryan human being actively only uses 10% of his or her’s brain capacity, but is capable of far more complex processing if treated the right way. Dr. Richter believes that the device will make all those that are under the influence of the soundburst to understand all the relevant messages of the National Socialism in just few seconds, thus becoming Nazificated. Obviously, he has been unable to test the theory and the machine, given the fact that all the Nazis in the Far Side of the Moon are already Nazificated.

We gathered two small groups of Iron Sky -enthusiastics, told them the above and then gave them some instructions on how to work. Basically, we wanted them to design us the Hakenkreuzierunmachine, a portable model of it.

And off they went. One hour of tight collaboration, the two groups came up with awesome results, both of them very funny, well-thought and right to the point. We had a hard time to decide which of the designs was better, but finally settled with design by the group number one.

Here’s the result, and the description:

HAKENKREUZIERUNGMACHINE

The HK Machine consists of a main unit with numerous gauges, dials and switches, two separately adjustable loudspeakers, and a fuel tank which accepts a torpedo-shaped cartridge of crystallised Helium-3. The backpack-sized contraption is so heavy it needs one person just to carry it around, who must wear a protective suit because of the heat (and noise) generated. A separate operator then prepares and activates the device. The procedure goes like this:

1. The carrier dons the protective suit and straps on the device.

2. The operator inserts a fuel cartridge and secures the tank lid.

3. The operator makes sure all the switches are in the “Off” position; checks the H3 pressure; sets the desired range; and adjusts the loudspeakers for either a wide or narrow area of effect.

4. The carrier assumes firing position. Proper bracing is important. The operator slams down the firing lever. A tape begins playing, saying “Bitte hören, bitte hören” (“hear ye, hear ye”). Studies have shown that a polite request like this improves the device’s effectiveness. The operator supports the carrier and counts aloud: “Drei… zwei… eins… feuer!” The sound blast is released. A tremendous recoil knocks the carrier back.

5. The lever is returned to the up position and a 20-second cool-down period begun (because the sonic vibration heats up the device). The fuel cartridge is good for about four blasts, after which it must be replaced. A fit, Aryan operator can carry about half a dozen cartridges.

It was very delightful to find out that the people – a totally random groups of folks – were able to pool their creativity, engineering skills and minds together and created something we desperately needed for, and the result was much better than we had ever hoped for.

In addition of providing us the crucial plans of the design of HK-machine for Iron Sky, I’m delighted to find out again how collaboration with the audience can be very effective, fun and turn into something much better than what filmmakers could’ve come up just by themselves.

This is also the whole core idea of WreckAMovie, just in analog form. We are hoping to build a forum, a gathering place for people from all different fields of life, pool their resources and enthusiasm together, and serve it for the use of filmmakers around the world.

Energia Productions would like to thank everyone who participated the workshop, as well as the organisers of he Alternative Party this year! And to the filmmakers around the world – don’t be afraid to work with your audience – your community. There’s an ocean of possibilities out there just waiting for you to use them.

The Swastika Machine Architects In Action: Juho Hartikainen, Eevi Korhonen, Lare Lekman, Joonas Mäkinen, Matti Pajunen, Jalmari Raippalinna and Osma Suominen (in no particular order) sweating their asses off to create the greatest invention in Nazi Science!

On the last day of the Power to the Pixel seminar in London we, the Internet filmmaking community, gathered together into a closed round table discussion about the future of what we are doing.

The main question was: what can we do to make what we are doing an acknowledged way to make films for the filmmakers, for those who fund filmmaking, and for the audiences out there. Also, we were there to share experiences, thoughts and beliefs on how should we, who already are “in there”, could proceed with what we are doing and maybe even join forces to help the something big take place.

I was expecting a bit more general discussion that would answer the basic questions every filmmaker has: how to do it and how to make money with it. The discussion kinda jumped around the topic a bit, but a bit surprisingly quite soon settled into an in-depth discussion on metadata.

For those who are unaware on what I’m talking about, metadata means information that’s inside a file, tied to it, giving you more information on the actual file. In Mp3 this means file info on the artist, name of the song, what year it was published – some metadata goes actually very deep, naming individual players, where it was recorded and by who etc. In film, there would be requirement for much, much more metadata, that could be filled in with WIKI apparatus to make it a community-embedded metadata.

Basically, it would mean we would have all the cast & crew info, filming locations, dates, websites, subtitles and all that embedded and easilly viewable by anyone watching the video. But what would make it more interesting are the two-sided functionalities of it: embedding a “pay”-button to the film, embedding a “buy a license for this film” -ability to it, and in general, embedding all the copyright information to each clip. With these functionalities, we would see propably much more commercially succesful films distributed via BitTorrent and other filesharing systems, when a viewer would have the possibility to download a film and pay for it if he likes it.

Arin Crumley

But metadata won’t answer to the problem of how to get filmmakers around the world start doing their films much closer to the Internet – how to make them understand than in order to survive in the coming changes, filmmakers need to start to understand what the Internet actually is – a huge community of communities – and how to find your community from there, and eventually, what good does it do to your film.

The last hour of the think tank was much more about trying to find answers to these questions. Even more, we were trying to find out how we, who already know what to do, could work together to educate filmmakers, film funders, distributors and government entities that they would be more willing to look at the alternative production and distribution options out there.

Personally, I think this is a very important question, because I believe that the only way the change will happen the way we want is working with both filmmakers and those with “soft money” for culture - government money, that is. If that happens, the distributors will follow, because they are dependant on content, and if content is going different way they are going, they’ll soon be out of business. Because, in the end, and even more nowadays, distributors are the ones who are clients of film productions, not the other way around. They are no more needed in order to get film distributed to millions of viewers around the world, and even less in the future – we can do that, we have YouTube and BitTorrent. The reason we want to use distributors still is that they are the ones who know how to get the film out there, people watching it and paying for it so that we would eventually get money for our next films. And if it seems – and it seems like that even more nowadays, when you are looking at how many distributors coping with “piracy”, that they have no clue anymore. The question remains, where do we need them? If that question strengthens too much, and too many filmmakers do “Radioheads” and find it more profitable than working with them, they are in deep shit.

So, they’d need to actually really hop onboard the wagon that’s already rolling onwards, try to regain the trust of the filmmakers and even more the trust of the new filmmakers – and, what’s even more trickier, because in the future it’s not just a filmmaker, but a filmmaker and his or her’s community of thousands of active people – and start to work the way they want.

The question a distributors and big studio heads need to ask in the future is certainly not “how to stop piracy”, but “how to make them want to pay”. (A tip to those pondering this: ass-rape is not a very good way to seduce.) They need to get over the fact that whatever they do, the films are out there, for free, and there’s nothing they can do about it. If you can’t beat them, join them, right?

Well, back to the Power to the Pixel. It was an awesome seminar that had gathered all the filmmakers with really good, fresh and brilliant ideas together, got them talking about their experiences to other people in the industry or outside the industry, maybe planting some new ideas there, and eventually got them talking together to help to find the better future.

I think that’s pretty much. An achievement not to be belittled. There’s a lot of work to do out there, but Power to the Pixel is

Power to the Pixel is a part of London Film Festival held in - surprise, surprise - London. It’s a technology-minded part, a bit separate from the festival itself, and it humours the subject of filmmaking and -distribution online. This year, they had a nice lineup of people flown over from the States and some from the Europe - the online filmmakers family get-together, more or less.

Again, the topics were the same I’m quite used to: everyone can make films, nowadays everything is cross-platform, utilize your community, don’t work with the old media industry, piracy is good, copyright is bad - maybe not so original, but hopefully for somebody it was inspiring. I think somebody said it well: “Nowadays, there’s no more “audience”. Today, it’s the community. So act accordingly.”

And eventually everyone was asking and trying to answer the question: how to make money with your film that’s released for free. And, as usual, nobody was able to answer to it. Why? Because there’s not one idiot-proof model to it. It’s stream of revenues that combined make the profit. One thing is for sure, at least: nobody has made a million with it. And on the Internet, you only count in millions. But then again, in the ideal world, every filmmaker would be happy to make a decent living and enough revenue to do the next film. But I don’t think that most important issue is the money, it’s the way of working, the philosophy of working with your audience, your community. If it’s sustainable, it will turn to dollars. If it’s not, it would’ve died already - so guess it’s on the good route, let’s just stick to it.

Before the model starts to work, or - God forbid - to make money, we need to sort out the biggest problem of the whole new industry. Why so few filmmakers make films online - there would definitively be a huge market for it, and when thinking further on the Long Tail theory, if that applies to film, there should be hudreds of thousands of new, aspiring filmmakers utilizing the Internet in the future. But there is not. It’s almost impossible to find good case examples from the Europe (Star Wreck is one of the very, very few), and in the States it’s mainly the same guys they wheel to festivals all the time - Four-Eyed Monsters, We Are The Strange and Steal This Film. So what’s the problem? Everything is out there, why don’t people make more Internet films, but stick to the old, supposedly non-working models and industry that they voluntarely let assrape them over and over again? The fragmentation of the whole field (of Internet filmmaking) is the biggest problem. Nobody would know where to start out with - there are dozen of community funding possibilities, tens of tools to collaborate on the film, and hudreds of ways to self-distribute it on the Internet and make some cash out of it. But there’s nobody that’s gonna take you by the hand and show how to use the Internet for filmmaking.

One of the problems is the platformisation of the working model, versus the requirement for the filmmakers to be independent. There, I am quite aware, also WAM has things to develope. The problem is that nobody wants to be “just another production in a platform”, so they’d rather create an own platform to it (if they are ambitious enough to start with, and if they are not, prolly they never finish the film anyway) instead of setting their films to a heap of other films fighting for the lebensraum. Instead of everyone flipping out their platform plans, the independent internet filmmakers should focus on trying to find ways to make the process as clear as possible, as understandable as possible, and have some good references of successful executions to back up the message.

There are few that try to do this - From Here to Awesome and Workbook Project, also IndieGoGo has some good guidelines on the Internet. But I’m looking forward into even more clearer system that would answer the few main questions *every* filmmaker has to ask:

1. Where to start?
2. What then?
3. Will I get paid?
4. Who have succeeded on it before, and how well?

When these questions are answered, filmmakers are more willing to approach this model. And eventually, it’s the filmmakers that need to be assured, definitively not the distributors and other middlemen. If somebody answers the four questions there in a convincing and clear way, it’s the middlemen that lose their jobs. But fear not, there’s always room for middlemen in whatever kind of industry future, and eventually it will be as always - the middlemen make the money. But maybe in the future the filmmakers would be more free to express themselves?

Right now I’m in a SAS plane flying over from London to Stocholm, where tomorrow morning we have a Nordic Cultural Commens Conference , with a discussion about “how to make money by giving away stuff for free”. I’m not expecting any groundbreaking revelations to pop up, but this is the only way - the clearer the concept gets, the clearer people identify the problems and needs of the people on both sides of the community, the closer to the surface the best answers travel.

So let’s just hope next time this industry - no, this form of art, storytelling and entertainment - makes the rules, it’s the filmmakers, not the middlemen, who set them.

M dot Strange talking about his experiences in creating a community around We are the Strange, and distributing the film on the Internet.

(This one is in Finnish, and it’s about the film Sauna’s premiere, that’s the first feature to come out of WreckAMovie.Com!)

Tämä on avoin kirje kaikille Wreckereille Suomessa:

Suomi on kusessa. Auttakaa, hyvät ihmiset.

Teattereihin valuu kirjailija-, muusikko- tai kansanpellefilmatisointeja, talvi-, jatko- tai kansalaissodan jeesusteluja, romanttisia komedioita tai keskinkertaisia lasten- ja koko perheen elokuvia, jotka napsivat pääosan katsojista.

Elämme kuitenkin jännittäviä aikoja: myös vähän poikkeuksellisia pätkiä on alkanut näkyä: kukapa olisi muutama vuosi sitten vielä uskonut, että vuoden näyttävimmin mainostettuja elokuvia olisi kauhuelokuva Lordi-monstereista, tai että teattereihin odotettaisiin suomalaista zombieleffa?! Tai että Elokuvasäätiö lähtisi tukemaan, herra paratkoon, kuunatseista kertovaa scifikomediaa? Tai että suomalainen kauhuelokuva keräisi ylistystä “elokuvana, joka kuuluu Solariksen ja Ringun kanssa”, pitkin festareita ympäri maailman? Eipä juuri kukaan. Ja kylmältä näyttää tulevaisuus: Lordi floppasi, Stone’s War seisoo jossain edittiluolassa tuottajien riitakapulana ja Iron Sky:tä päästään ihastelemaan vasta parin vuoden päästä.

Hugo-peikkoa lainatakseni: nyt on tosi kyseessä! Jos kaikki tästä “suomalaisen elokuvan uudesta aallosta” jäävät vaille katsojia teattereissa, voidaan olla varmoja, että levittäjät, tuottajat, tuotantoyhtiöt ja säätiö palaavat takaisin romkom-epookki-suurmies -linjalle, ja saadaan odottaa taas seuraavat 15 vuotta ennen kuin joku rohkenee yrittää samaa. Siksipä vetoan nyt Wreckereihin: jos tänä vuonna aiotte maksaa *yhdestä* suomalaisesta elokuvasta teatterissa, pistäkää rahanne Saunaan, joka tulee perjantaina ensi-iltaan teattereihin ympäri maata.

Pari hyvää syytä:

- Tulette näkemään parhaan kotimaisen elokuvan tänä vuonna. Guaranteed!
- Annatte äänenne suomalaisen elokuvan uudelle aallolle. Saunan onnistuminen teattereissa on viesti, että täällä jotakuta ihan oikeasti kiinnostaa.
- Sauna on ensimmäinen WreckAMovie.Com -palvelua käyttänyt, julkaistu elokuva! Myös se on hyvä syy tukea!

Ja vaikka ette teatteriin jaksaisi raahautuakaan, vaan odottelisittekin torrentien rantautumista piraattilahteen, ostamalla leffalipun Saunaan pistätte pari euroa kohti vähän parempaa elokuvailmastoa tässäkin maassa. Syystä tai toisesta mulla on semmoinen fiilis, että vähän kun puserretaan, Suomesta voi tulla seuraava Espanja - maa, josta kansainvälisesti odotetaan laadukasta genreleffaa!

Ai niin mikä Sauna? Tsekatkaa vielä traileri alta, ja käykää pelaamassa HUIKEAA Sauna-tekstiseikkailua jonka mainiot Energialaiset Antti ja Jarmo suuressa viisaudessaan tekivät!

Ps. koska allekirjoittanut on sairaalloisen kiinnostunut teidän mielipiteistänne, jos olette nähneet Saunan, käykääpäs pudottamassa parin sanan arvostelu Energia-boardille, aihetta varten avattuun threadiin, tai kommenttina tähän blogaukseen.

So, we had a crazy idea yesterday! We have been asked to come over to the Alternative Party in Helsinki, a computer/music/anything-cool -event that’s taking over the Kaapelitehdas from October 24th to 26th - next weekend, that is. We were asked to throw some kind of a workshop there, but didn’t actually have any idea - until yesterday! Why not make a workshop that would actually provide us with something we could actually use in the film!

Thus, let me present you: HAKENKREUZIERUNGMACHINEWORKSHOP!

The ALT PARTY people got so excited that they wanted to give a little discount to the Iron Sky community - so if you are coming over to the party, instead of paying 30€ for the tickets, you’ll get them through us at the price 22€ (unless you’ve already bought the tickets). Just click the picture above, and you’ll be directed to the info page!

Here’s the pitch (in Finnish):

–

IRON SKY JUGEND esittää:

WORKSHOP: Tehdään yhdessä HAKARISTEYTYSKONE!

Tule suunnittelemaan Iron Sky -elokuvaan tärkeää proppia: Hakaristeytyskonetta (”Hakenkreuzierungmachine”)! Mikä se on? Millainen se on? Miten se toimii?

Nyt kaikkien steampunkkareiden päät pöhisemään, kaikkien aikojen huikein suomalaisleffa tarvitsee teidän apuanne!

LAUANTAINA 25.10., ALTERNATIVE PARTY -tapahtumassa Helsingin Kaapelitehtaalla Energian tiimi järjestää klo 19:00 hakaristeytyskoneworkshopin!

Herzlich willkommen!

–

Having said some nice things about the Max Payne trailer before I went to see the movie on thursday with cautious optimism.

No need to beat around the bush: it just wasn’t very good.

It was kind of a celluloid vampire; it looked good (and resembled something that once was good and god fearing), wore black and went trough all the motions. But in the end it had no soul and existed only to suck your blood.

As somebody said on Facebook, it’s been a while since I’ve played Max Payne, but I remember how the game made me feel and this movie didn’t feel anything like it. The film looked amazingly like I remember the game looking, but the feeling wasn’t there. The plot, while it took the basics from the game, was 3/4 cliche and 1/4 incredibly stupid. But I did love the Valkyries (not the look, the idea).

Personally, I think that a film about Max Payne should have been uncompromised homage to film noir. This wasn’t.