Tonight on Twitter: The Oscars.

The Oscars are upon us – as is Energia’s live tweet. And Timo will be on tv on Nelonen’s Oscar studio after 3AM (Finnish time).

In case you don’t use Twitter yet, below are Widgets of all the tweets from me (@energia) and Timo (@leonblank) and the Finnish Oscar discussion. They should update with the latest tweets. But we’ll see how Twitter copes with the huge amount of people sure to be Tweeting tonight.

And the Finnish Oscar discussions, in Finnish, most probably. Vaihdan #hashtagiksi sen jolla on eniten juttua.

Iron Sky Signal #8 – Fan Meeting in Berlin

A big chunk of the Iron Sky team is attending this year’s Berlinale film festival. These festivals are about watching films, but also about doing business. From a filmmakers perspective a festival like this is a chance to meet and find funders, distributors, sponsors and so on. Everybody’s clamoring to be noticed and the days are full of meetings with people, who could help with the movie project one way or another. Then, of course, there’s the side that’s more fun: premieres, parties and generally meeting cool people, like movie makers from other countries.

For the Iron Sky team this has been a working trip. In addition to the business side we have done some casting, worked on the script, discussed about the budget and so on, but luckily there has been a bit of time for other stuff as well.

This time we didn’t do any crazy marketing stunts, but got instead a last minute idea about doing a fan meeting. We got the idea on Monday and decided to have the meeting on Saturday – never mind that we didn’t have an idea how to contact our Berlin fans or what would be a good venue to this. Enter the internet and the social media: using our Demand to see Iron Sky -system and the Wreckamovie.com we got in touch with our Berlin fans and found a simply incredible place for the meeting, a club called c-base. In the end about 40-50 fans showed up, which was really great especially on such a short notice!

How did it go? Come join us in the fan meeting in the latest episode of Iron Sky Signal!

Intrigued about c-base? Here’s their own video about the place.

All in all, so far it has been both a very fun and very productive Berlinale for us. We got to meet a nice bunch of our local fans, a lot of grass roots level work for the movie project got done, we were featured in The Hollywood Reporter and the Zombies got to meet cool people and see some quality cinema.

Still a couple of days to go!

Iron Sky Signal #7 – Demand to See Iron Sky

In this episode of Iron Sky Signal Timo spills the beans on our shooting schedule. And tells you how you can help get Iron Sky in to the theater near you!

Hint: Demand to See Iron Sky: http://www.ironsky.net/demand/

Iron Sky is back on Facebook!

The Iron Sky fan page is back on Facebook! Just a little while ago I received the following email from “The Facebook Team”:

Hi Jarmo,
This problem should now be resolved. Sorry for any inconvenience, and enjoy the site. If you have any further questions, please visit our Help Center at the following address:

That’s pretty much all, well apart from the url and a signature at the bottom. So there isn’t any explanation why the page was originally removed. Hopefully this won’t happen again.

However, I doubt we’d be seeing our page anytime soon if it wasn’t for you! Almost a thousand of you joined the group demanding Iron Sky back in just a few hours! So a huge thank you from us is in order to all of our fans who spread the word!

Iron Sky Goes Germany: Costumes & Casting

The third and last part of our trip to Germany took us back to Berlin, which for some of us meant sitting in an endless stream of meetings about the budget, the details of props and costumes, the CGI and so forth – both in Berlin and in Potsdam. There was also a preliminary costume fitting for the main characters, as well as casting some roles that hadn’t been filled yet.

On weekend we had one of our very rare free days, which for some of us meant attending to just one meeting. Timo, Samuli and I even managed to find time for a short bar crawl around the Prenzlauerberg area. We also had a wonderful movie moment when we stepped into this small lo-fi bar around three in the morning. Everybody in the bar turned around to stare at us and the music just happened to pause at the same time. Nobody drew out a Colt, though.

On Monday Julia Dietze, Götz Otto and Tilo Prückner came in for some costume work. We had our costume designer Jake Collier and his assistant Heli Karhunen come to Berlin with some early samples of costumes which the actors could try on. There wasn’t still a whole lot to see on that front and the costume fitting was more about taking measurements and planning the future. Julia and Götz stayed to hang around in the office to chat with the crew and go over some details with Timo, both of them being very fun and charismatic people.

(Check out the Flickr photoset!)

There is one interesting thing about the costumes and filming Iron Sky in general in Germany, something Jake luckily thought about in the last minute before packing up the costumes and jumping into the airplane: importing any kind of Nazi insignia or regalia in to Germany is illegal, as well as possessing them. If the German customs had caught him and Heli with Nazi uniforms, they may have been faced with legal action, as in fined, jailed or possibly deported. This meant that all the Nazi symbols had to be removed from the costumes before the trip. Also, while eventually shooting the movie, we have to apply for a special permit to use those symbols and be careful that none of them are visible to the general public during the shooting.

CASTING

Timo spent most of Monday with our casting agent Uwe Bünker, choosing actors for some of the roles that still hadn’t been filled, and I joined him on Tuesday with my cameras. Casting is a very interesting process and Iron Sky has attracted the attention of surprising amount of actors that are well known in Germany and in some cases abroad too.

What happened in practice was that Uwe had chosen a bunch of actors that fit the requirements of the roles in question. The actors had been given a short part of the script, Timo briefed them about their characters and the scene, and they acted it in front of a camera helped by our placeholder actor Marian Meder, who did all the other roles. There were several variations of the scene, like doing it so that the character was really strict, really friendly, totally stoned etc. All of these were recorded for Timo and the rest of the team to go through and make the final choice.

We were casting for several roles, and without going too far into specifics one of them was a slightly comical Nazi trooper, one was a rather tragic older woman role, the third one was an old Nazi general and the fourth one was actually a combination of six roles, a room full of arguing heads of state. I’ve of course read the script and many of its different iterations, but this was the first time I saw the characters come to life.

Unfortunately because of various reasons we couldn’t really film or photograph the auditions for you, the least not being that we don’t want to spoil some of the essential moments and laughs of the movie.  In any case, the hardest thing during the casting was not to laugh out aloud during the recording, since some of the performances were truly hilarious. For example one of the actors managed to completely demolish a chair by sitting on it while just acting like he was fat.

The casting more or less concludes our trip to Germany. We got a whole lot done and as I said earlier, people switched into a completely new gear. Things are going forward, decisions get nailed down and the actual start of the shootings doesn’t feel like a faraway prospect, but a concrete thing that’s getting closer and closer.

Now the three of us are going to hit the Berlin nightlife with Heli, Jake and the others and wind down a bit, before heading for home. Stay tuned for more nifty stuff in the blog, including video diaries from these trips!

Iron Sky Goes Germany: Location Reconnaissance in Frankfurt

As the previous blog post revealed to you, the Energia team is currently in Germany to meet the local (wo)manpower and handle various things having to do with the movie project. After finding out what the art department had been up to we headed off to Frankfurt to spend the next few days checking out the future shooting locations, ie. doing recce.

So, this is how things more or less works with us: the German art department checked out the storyboards and the concept art of the film, came up with their ideas about the sets and checked the demands our illustrious director Timo and director or photography Mika had for the locations. After that they hired a location scout, whose task it was to find the actual physical locations that matched the demands as well as possible.

(Flickr photoset from the trip)

What we did from Wednesday to Saturday was to go around the locations our scout Regina Kaczmarek had found, after which Timo and Mika checked them out together with our production designer Ulrika. Timo made sure that the look and the feel was correct for the scene he had envisioned and Mika was there to determine how the scene could be filmed in the real life, where the camera would go, which locations required chroma (a fancy word for a green screen) and so on.

This part of the trip was sort of surreal, but very enjoyable for me as a whole. The surreal thing was that we basically spent 12 hours on the road, sitting in a car and occasionally jumping out to visit some really weird or cool place. A good example was our first stop, a very interesting communal antroposophic biofarm called Dottenfelderhof. It was basically a collective of several families, who were into hardcore farming, cheesemaking, baking, animal husbandry and things like that.

Some of the other locations couldn’t have been further away from the first one. We visited really hardcore iron railway bridges, got on top of skyscrapers to see the massive view all around Frankfurt, skulked around an abandoned paper factory, drew long stares from guards in rather luxurious lobbies of large office buildings, screwed around in the news studio of a regional German television station and went for a trip to old and abandoned military tunnels that apparently stretched kilometers inside the Earth. One of my hobbies is urban exploration, so especially the tunnels and the abandoned factories made me want to call for a break, so I could spend a hour or two just inspecting them.

The last location of the trip was in many ways the most interesting of all: our potential new studio. It will be the place where the larger sets will be built in and where we will do all the difficult shots that require lots of green screen, constructed sets and controlled environments. What we got was three enormous hangars for the sets, a couple of smaller (relatively) halls which will be the set builders’ workshops, plus a big bunch of offices and such.

If all this sounds really glorious, you haven’t thought about the basics, which boils to this: we spent 12 hours in a day in the same car with the same people, who in this case happened to include Timo and Samuli. Then consider that one of Samuli’s maxims for humour is that “up in the ass of Timo” has to be incorporated in as many jokes as possible. Or situations. Or just repeated out aloud. So yeah, the humor in the car started of as loud, drifted off into hysteria and plunged into murky depths of retardedness. I’m honestly surprised our German hosts didn’t just strangle us and leave us at the roadside, but maybe we were saved by the language gap.

All right, next we’ll be returning back to Berlin to see some of our actors try out their costumes, and for several full days of casting new faces for the movie! Stay tuned to more blog posts on the road, don’t forget to check our Flickr for more photos and if you want to see links to new posts right in your Facebook feed, join as a reader of Beyond the Iron Sky in Networkedblogs!

Twitter competition: The Race to a Million Views.

The Iron Sky teaser you see above will reach 1,000,000 views on YouTube during the weekend! If you add the HD version of the teaser, the one on our homepage and other uploads from around the world, the teaser has gotten more than 3 million views! But the main bragging rights are awarded to the one with the biggest number on YouTube, right?

If the number of views stays constant the one million barrier should break sometime during Saturday. However, YouTube only updates the visible views every few hours, so it might take a while to update.

Twitter competition

To celebrate we thought we’d throw a little competition to our Twitter followers. Here’s how it works:

1. Take a screencap when you see 1,000,000 (or more) views on the YouTube page.
2. Post the picture to twitpic (etc.) and send the link to @energia.
3. The first to send us a pic will get an envelope with Iron Sky swag.
4. ????
5. Profit!

Edit: If you’re not on Twitter you can send the pic link on Facebook as well. Whichever you prefer.

WIN! Anssi was the first to send us a picture with 1,000,047 views! That was actually faster than I expected! Thank you everyone for playing.

Merry Christmas and some good news!

It’s a Christmas morning, and I’m sitting in a small red cottage in the middle of vast fields of snow in eastern Finland, close to the city of Kotka. I’ve just slept almost 10 hours, which is exactly 5 hours more that I’ve slept on a nightly basis for the last two months – so I feel strangely rested, peaceful and clear-headed.

I thought about writing briefly about few new things going on right now – and then eat myself unconscious!

First and foremost, we’ve just updated the Iron Sky website. Jarmo Puskala, scriptwriter/webmaster, did a great job fighting against loads of vile and vicious viruses on all of our sites (the problem’s now fixed, thanks J!), and smashing together the new layout for the website. At first look, it might not seem that different from what it used to be, but the functionalities are much better and the site works better to what we believe web sites are used today. Our philosophy in the web design is to feed stuff from many sources to the front page, and activate our users to join our community in whatever way they feel the best.

Because of this, on the frontpage we’re feeding our Flickr feed, YouTube feed, Wreckamovie feed and our blog in the form of News from the Front and Blog. From the Press page you’ll find latest Iron Sky -related articles and can read all of the earlier articles through our Delicious feed
From the Community page you’ll find the main community sites we’re active with, and best ways you can jump in and become one with the Iron Sky.

The Support page encourages you to blog and tweet about Iron Sky to help us spread the word around the word – remember, we have basically a marketing budget of zero, so we need *all* the help we can get from the community!

Most interestingly, a new feature we’ve been testing for some time now, and activated to full burn after the site re-design is the Demand Iron Sky. The idea here is pretty simple: you tell us which city you live in, and let us know you’d like to see the film on theaters in your city. The more people we have from your city signing up, the easier it’s for us to get a theatrical distribution there. So be active, and get your friends to Demand Iron Sky, too!

In other news, we’re happy to announce that we’ve secured more funding from Europe: both The Nordisk Film & TV Fond and Eurimages have granted us production support for Iron Sky, a sum totaling up to about 800000€! So merry christmas to us! :)

Oh, if you want to give us a christmas present, here’s our wishlist:

1. Demand Iron Sky. If you’ve already demanded, get someone you know demand for it. Muchos gracias!

2. Watch Iron Sky teaser on YouTube. I know you’ve already seen it, but we’d like to get above 1 million views before the end of the year, so re-watch it and share it on Facebook and Twitter!

Oh, and if you feel extremely generous, buy War Bond, and help us make the film look as good as it should – every dollar counts, trust me!

Thanks, everyone!

Alright, I think that’s about it. The rice porridge is being carried on the table as we speak, and the sauna is heating up. So it’s time for me – on behalf of the whole Iron Sky team in Finland, Germany and Canada – to wish you all a Merry Christmas.

British Stealth joins the fight against Space Nazis.

We’ve got some good news!

The British Stealth Media Group will be handling the world sales of Iron Sky and fund the film with up to 1 million euro. This means they will be in charge of selling it to distributors around the world and we here at Energia and Blind Spot can concentrate on actually making the film. Stealth will begin marketing Iron Sky this week at the American Film Market.

Currently we have distribution deals in place for Finland (Walt Disney), UK (Revolver), Norway (Euforia) and Poland (Kino Swiat).

The actual sum of Stealth’s investment will be between 500,000 and 1 million euro depending on how negotiations go with other potential investors. The final budget for Iron Sky will be at least 5 million euro. However what’s important is that we know now that we can stay on track with the timetable and start shooting early next year.

What we’ve done lately is a lot of planning. Starting from concrete things like schedules and renting locations (most of wich will be in and around Frankfurt, Germany) to creating storyboards and animatics. Set design is also going ahead, with set building starting a month or two before the shooting.

For the last couple of months Timo and Iron Sky writer Johanna Sinisalo have also been working with screenwriter Michael Kalesniko (best known for Howard Stern’s Private Parts and currently working on a comedy with David Fincher) on polishing the English language dialogue.

Iron Sky: Operation Highjump gets its game on.

It’s time for the makers of the Iron Sky game, the Jyväskylä, Finland based IGIOS, to step out of the proverbial closet. They have released the community pages for the game, titled Iron Sky: Operation Highjump on Wreckamovie, Facebook and Twitter.

You might have heard that someone was already making a game based on Iron Sky – that’s us.

We are looking forward to working together with the WreckAMovie community on a game that will mirror the enthusiasm and creativity seen in Star Wreck and Iron Sky -movies. We, the people behind the production, are fans of the movies as well as gamers, and we have no intention of making another half-assed movie-based game that limits itself to retelling the plot of the movie. Rather, we want to tell a story of our own: one that is related to the one told in the movie, but can also stand on it’s own.

The first task is already up, and so are our brand new pages in Twitter and Facebook (links attached). Welcome aboard, based on the quality of shots in we’ve already seen here in WreckAMovie, we believe that the community here can provide us some great insights and help us make an even better game.

- Matti Delahay, IGIOS

Operation Highjump will be a real time 3rd person action adventure game set in the WWII era. A standalone story in the world of Iron Sky, the plot revolves around a secret underground Nazi base in the Antarctic. Rather than plain vanilla technical and graphic splendour, we aim for good playability, immersive plot content, strong dialogue and atmospheric environments. (Yes, that’s what they all say. But we mean it.) Add a nice big cup of strong, black humour, and you’ve got a general idea of what we’re shooting for.

You can read more about the real-world Operation Highjump at Wikipedia. Also known as “The United States Navy Antarctic Developments Program, 1946-47″, it was a massive naval operation where a taskforce consisting of 4,700 men, 13 ships, and several aircraft sailed to the Antarctic. Officially it was supposed to be a training mission, but conspiracy theories suggest it was a full-blown military operation to wipe out the secret Nazi base in the Antarctic.

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