While we are here, we have been nailing down our plans about the exact schedule of what we are going to shoot and where. Right now it looks like this:

First, we go over to Frankfurt for about four weeks, and shoot almost all of the location scenes. That means that we’ll double Frankfurt as New York (that’s where part of the story happens), for both exteriors and interiors. It’s quite a good place for that, being the banking city with a high-rise skyline and nice indoor locations all over.

Then, we move to Brisbane, Australia, and shoot another four weeks. Altogether that adds up to 40 shooting days, give or take few. Here we will go to Warner Roadshow studios in Gold Coast, and shoot all of the studio sets – mostly the Nazi Fortress interiors and spaceship bridges and so on. There are some locations to shoot in here too, and one part of our trip to here was to go check them out.

Our Monday was spent doing auditions for one major and several smaller roles in the movie. Basically we had people coming in from ten in the morning to six in the evening and doing their lines in front of the camera. We had some really talented and hilarious people show up, and fittingly for the project, the last audition was interrupted by a smallish grease fire and a curious opossum.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, we did a bit of recceing around Brisbane to see some of the locations we found extremely hard to come by in Frankfurt. One very complicated one has been a farmhouse – Frankfurt is not a huge farming area, and most of the farms are very “European” style. So we thought about it and gave it a kick over here in Brisbane.

"Maybe a little bit too dilapidated?" "Yeah, maybe a little bit."

And boy did we find an awesome farm! An old, shabby nice farm, exactly the kind we had been looking for, with all kind of old rusty cars and scrap metal all over the yard, just screaming our name!

After a good day of recceing, we went back to Brisie for a mini-fan-meeting. We met a couple of local Iron Sky fans, all great people. We flashed them a bit of some exclusive never-before-seen material and had a few beers with ‘em – if you’re reading this, very nice to meet you, hope to get to possibly even work with you, and definitely to catch up with you when we come back here.

We stumbled into old movie sets - this one was used for Scooby Doo.

Next up, there’s only a bit of recceing left to be done, and then we’re off to Sydney and start preparing for Supanova. But before that – and of this I’m extremely excited about – we’re going to meet a strong contestant to be one of our main actors.

But more on that later.

Try not to hurt yourself, and to all of you Sydneysiders out there, check out our Sydney come over and say “hi” to us in Supanova where we have our booth right next to the entrance to the signing area! Also, there’s a fan / investor meeting on Saturday at 7:30pm in Steel Bar & Grill, a stylish brasserie in downtown Sydney.

Oh – and we’re about to explore a bit through the city, so if there’s any cool shite to do over in Sydney – or, even better, any cool parties we should attend to – just give us a holler.

The electricity addicts are littering the corners of the airports, scrounging for juice for their disgusting habit for mobile computing.

This trip of us has been pretty far from a holiday, since all of our days here have been packed with work from dawn ’till dusk. This hasn’t left us much time to recuperate from the massive jet lag, so in the evenings (and sometimes in the afternoons) Sandman has used a mallet instead of sand. Our Australian producers suggested that we might want to take the Sunday off, and this we did.

I had planned on going to dive, but the logistics were too much of a hassle for that. My backup plan was to join the others to go see some plants and hug some koalas.

Timo and I started the morning by listening some music and chilling out, followed by going to Brisbane downtown to do a bit of shopping. From where we are staying we have to take a river boat to cross the creatively named Brisbane River to the downtown. We’ve really grown to like the place. People in here seem to be generally laid off but efficient at the same time. It’s a mentality that works for us Finns pretty well, I think. Generally the service in the shops and restaurants seems to be like the top-20% service in Finland: friendly but no-nonsense.

After Timo had his shopping done we headed off for the Brisbane City Botanic Gardens to wind down. Botanic gardens are great places to go to when you want to just let your mind grind to rest. The one in Brisbane had plenty of palm trees and bamboo, very noisy birds and a stretch of mangrove in the riverside.

After the gardens it was koala hugging time. We hopped into a bus that took us into Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary in the outskirts of Brisbane. In spite of the net it’s not just koalas, but a nice zoo featuring a lot of Australia’s indigenous species, such as kangaroos, platypuses (platypi?), dingos, wombats and several kinds of birds. We also happened to run into our production manager Tarja and production designer Ulrika in the zoo, where they also had ended up visiting.

There was also a chance to hold koalas and have your photo taken, and how could I miss a chance like that. I mean, I’m one of those people who like to touch animals, which of course is a rather bad idea in Australia where anything that’s not poisonous is downright venomous, or bites your nads off. Everybody had told me that koalas stank to high heaven and they were basically stoned and able to rip out a man’s jugular, but the little bear I was handed was far from that. It even smelled nice, like some weird old cough drops.

In addition to koalas there was also a field full of kangaroos, who were pretty blasé about all the tourists walking around them, shoving cameras in their faces and scratching them – perhaps because you could also feed them. We didn’t think of buying any kangaroo snacks, so we just kept photographing and scratching them.

"Hello, Mr. Kangaroo!" "Erm... do I know you?"

We got out of the zoo at the closing time when the staff started to gently nudge us out of the door, although I could have spend a couple of hours more with all the fun animals. After that we grabbed a taxi to downtown, ate a very nice dinner and headed off to the hotel.

This was definitely a good day for recharging our batteries, which was sorely needed. Timo dropped to the bed like a sack of potatoes and is snoring hard enough to make the window panes rattle and now it’s off to the bed for me again. Tomorrow, a full day of casting and meetings, meetings, meetings!

(Check out our Flickr set for more photos from our trip)