The new director’s diary is out – this time it’s about stealing internet and cooking breakfast.

Most of Saturday went to talking with our stunts and special effects co-ordinators. Yes, at this stage 90% of filmmaking is sitting in meetings. Handling stunts in a correct way is very important, though. Back in the fuzzy Ozploitation days in the 70’s, the life of an actor on set was hanging by a thread. During that time, many filmmakers got injured and even died because of neglected safety instructions. So, not surprisingly, the regulations are nowadays much more strict. This reflects especially to the actors and stunts – basically, an actor can’t do anything that could be even potentially harmful on the set. Meaning: fake-punch in the face – stunt. Falling down on the floor on your ass – stunt. Running in the forest – stunt.

But it does make sense; if anything was to happen, even something as small as spraining an ankle, there’d be nobody to shoot then during that day. Or the whole week. And that’s when it starts to get really expensive…

A meeting with our stunts and special effects co-ordinators in our Australian producers' beautiful house slash home office.

But this is all small stuff, because then there are the real stunt maneuvers, which we have plenty in the film. We have some quite complicated action sequences, and we’re playing around with the gravity quite a lot; surface of the Moon has 1/6th gravity, and space, of course, zero. There’s anti-gravity generators being turned on and off, people floating around and so on.

We had a very interesting meeting with our Australian stunt coordinator (who, by the way, looks *exactly* like Sean Penn…) where we were planning quite a lot of these effects. Most of the Nazi troopers can be played by stunt people, since they have their masks on, as you’ve seen in the teasers, so we don’t have to spend too much time training them how harnesses and wiring works: and yeah, jumping several meters while dangling on harnesses takes some skill and practice.

Floor plans of the Nazi moon base, or at least a part of it.

Actually, here’s something you can be helpful with – I need a good reference library of films that have zero-G or Moon gravity effects. If something pops to your mind, share it with me – I need to get hold of those films and start doing a bit of research. I’m especially interested to see how hair is done in films in zero-G. Our main character, Renate, has a long blonde hair, and we would need to understand how that works in a zero gravity environment, and how to fake that.

Other than discussing the stunts, we re-visited the studios. It was nice to walk in the huge halls, around the massive set pieces of the new Narnia film that was shot there, and imagine that in few months the sets of my film will be populating the lot. I also learned that we’re shooting Iron Sky most probably during the same time as one of my all-time favorite directors is shooting in the studio across the yard… More on that later.

These studios are big. The joke is that we'll need at least two. Now you may start to see where all those 6.5 million euros are going to go.

(You can find more photos in our Flickr)

I’m starting to like it here in the Down Under. A funny moment I found myself yesterday evening in was that I was sitting by a very traditional Finnish wooden table, just fresh out of Sauna, sipping coffee from a Moomin mug, listening to Irwin Goodman and discussing the differences between Turku and Tampere… And all this in Australia. Bunch of our producer Tero’s friends live here in Brisbane and we visited them. It’s good to know there’s also a Finnish sanctuary available whenever one gets too homesick here on the other side of the world.

I’ve been sleeping very badly lately. I managed to completely wreck my rhythm with the jetlag, and I’m basically falling to sleep around two in the morning, but jumping up at five not being able to sleep anymore. So most of the day goes by in a strange, fuzzy numbness, until in the evening I finally perk up…

I need to do something about this jetlag. Any suggestions?

I find it extremely complicated to determine what time it is. I know exactly where I am right now, though. I’m flying 11887 m high, with the speed of 879 km/h over the Philippine Sea, approaching Australia slowly – far too slowly.

Already I’ve travelled halfway around the world – starting from Helsinki to London, from there to Hong Kong where we endured a five-hour pit stop, and now we’re about to do one more stop at Cairns, then Brisbane. All together, that makes around 30 hours of travelling, which is quite enough for one man.

Luckily, we’re going to stay in Australia for about two weeks, so we get to adjust a little bit…

I decided to write you daily about our trip to this huge plot of land almost exactly the other side of the world from where I live – so bear with me, Director’s Diary is going Down Under, without any idea what are we going to find from there. The thing is: things are heating up as the shootings come closer, and as Australia is a completely new card in the deck, we need to be very efficient checking it out as carefully as possible.

I’ve been enjoying myself on this flight, it’s almost like I was travelling business class. First, the Cathay Pacific has a nice little feature in every seat: a power socket. This means I can work through every flight without a problem. In addition to that, being a tall guy I am, I managed to get the front row seat with the foldable baby care tables which I’ve been using as my desk for my books and my laptop.

The trip didn’t start very well – my laptop broke just few days before the flight was about to leave, and I was devastated. But as so many times before, HP came to help me, sending a brand new EliteBook for me… For the first time in my life, I feel I’ve finally found a computer I really like. It has power, but what impresses me most are the small details, like mobile connection (you can stick a SIM directly to the machine), an integral web cam (yeah, no big news, but to me it is) and stuff like that.

So that’s what I’ve been doing most of my flight – setting up the computer, watching Star Trek (I’m doing my Trekathon thing – to those who don’t know anything about it, check out more info here http://trekathon.posterous.com), and sipping beer. Unfortunately, not sleeping. It seems I’ve failed my evasive actions concering the jetlag, and it’s going to be hell, I promise.

The schedule dictates that for the first week we’re going to be around in Brisbane and Gold Coast, checking studios, meeting stunt people, casting, scouting, discussing budget, working with the art department and so on. Then, we’re flying over to Sydney for the last week, where there’s more casting, scouting and the last three days we’re spending with the Australian geek community at the Supanova event!

So, quite a lot of exciting stuff coming at you. My intention would be to blog and vlog and twit as much as possible, so keep reading this blog and my Twitter account @LeonBlank.