Hello from VFX land!

Hi there everyone in Iron Sky FanLand!

My name is Kelly “Kat” Myers and I just wanted to stop in quickly here and let you know that the LightWave3D VFX team working on Iron Sky behind the scenes (computer screens really) really appreciate all of the fan support and to be able to work with such a great team here in Tampere.

I have been blogging about our experience thus far over the last 30 days or so of being here in Finland. You can find out more at www.liberty3d.com and I will be doing regular blog posts here as well.

Stay tuned for more details!

Kelly “Kat” Myers
LightWave3D VFX Team CG Supervisor
Iron Sky | Energia Productions

A quick update and Director’s Diary

Hi there sexy people.

I thought it’d be a time for a brief update. I know we were a bit silent during Cannes, I was hoping to push out daily Director’s Diaries, but the rush was unbelievable out there, and internet connection was so annoying that no matter what I did, I couldn’t update episodes. But now that I’m back in Finland, here’s a new one, but no more from boring Cannes – really, what’s there to see – but from the work place of the real men - Energia Offices, Tampere. I love visiting this joint. It may not look like much, but when you enter and walk through the main hallway, everywhere around you small bits and pieces of the movie are coming together and a lot of extremely focused faces working on programs I have no idea what they do… It has a very specific vibe. So it’s good to be back in Finland.

Coming up in the following months: Laibach has just started to work on the music for Iron Sky. I’m excited to see how that process goes, and will be visiting Slovenia next month to get the first feel and vibe of the things to come. Who is Laibach, some of you may ask? Well, let me tell you – Laibach is a legendary Slovenian band that has done a lot of very interesting music ever since 80′s, and they will be doing the score for Iron Sky, with Ben Watkins – also known as the man behind Juno Reactor. So we are in great… no, awesome hands, I might say so.

This is Laibach:

On another front, we’ve finished the first round of editing of the film. There’s a lot to be done, and that’s what Energia is doing now – creating the CGI, filling those black screens and creating backgrounds for the green ones. It takes an office full of really devoted artists to accomplish this, and by devotion I mean that some folk even sleep here at Energia office when things get really rough and deadlines are creeping in.

Cannes went very very very well. We had some very interesting discussions regarding the release of the film, and our sales company Stealth was working hard getting the film out there to respond to the Demand for Iron Sky. Also Udo Kier and Julia Dietze came by our office, and it’s always nice to see them. One could listen to Udo’s stories for hours, and Julia – being a force of nature more than a human being – always brightens the day. It was also interesting to see how strong was Cannes’ reaction to Lars von Trier‘s not-so-good-try-at-irony that fell very much flat in the press conference. Udo was – being an important actor and also playing a part in Melancholia – interviewed regarding Lars’ Nazi talks, and he remembered to mention Iron Sky quite prominently in the talks. So some free press for us :)

I’ve been sitting here at Energia for the last 3 days. We’ve been going through the film shot-by-shot, determining in great detail on what kind of special effects we will add. Whether it’s just something small for background, or a big full-cgi shot. Now that the film has been edited (at least for now), it’s easier to see what we need. And at the same time, easy to see what we could lose.

We’ll be working hard on the film, and I’ll be reporting back to you as soon as possible!

Stay sexy, lunatics!

Moon Nazi Zeppelin Wallpaper? Here You Go!

Hello everybody, and thank you for your support and enthusiasm over our third teaser and the release date – thanks to you, our new teaser is spreading like wildfire and right now as I’m writing this, there is a tweet, blog post or other mention of Iron Sky online every ten seconds – literally.

Many of you have been asking if there’s a desktop wallpaper version of the space Zeppelin picture we have as a background on the entry page. The least we can do to thank you for your help is to give you exactly that – here you go!

We Come In Peace – The Wallpaper (JPEG, 1980 x 1080, 456 KB)

We are currently in Cannes Film Festival where we are searching for distributors for the remaining countries and regions. So far we’ve sold the Iron Sky to Australia & New Zealand, Benelux, China, Czech Republic & Slovakia, Former Yugoslavia, Finland, German speaking Europe, Norway, Poland, Romania, Taiwan and Thailand, but there’s still a lot of globe to cover – and we want the Iron Sky release to be truly global!

A really big thanks to all of you who have Demanded Iron Sky, those red dots really help us to find distributors! Keep the demands coming and soon we have taken over the whole world!

Iron Sky Teaser 3 – We Come in Peace!

Here is the third teaser for Iron Sky, titled “We Come in Peace!”. Several blogs have been quick to point out, that in addition to peace the space nazis come in gigantic airships full of flying saucers. Which they seem to think is rather suspicious…

There’s is also another surprise in store for the future: We have a release date and it’s 4.4.2012! So it’ll be 11 long months and Iron Sky will finally see the silver screen. I can’t wait.

Welcome to our new server!

Thanks to our partners at Nebula the Iron Sky site is now running on a new and faster web server. You shouldn’t notice any difference, except a faster site. However, server change tends to be complicates, so let us know if you run into any gremlins. Also, stay tuned for news from Cannes…

Let’s invade the Museums of Modern Art

Helsinki Art Museum contacted us because they want to reinvent the whole museum experience and what would be the better way to do that than building Iron Sky exhibition in collaboration with the fans of Iron Sky!

What should we do except showing concept art and movie props or costumes? The show needs to be epic and together we can achieve it!

If we succeed, the Iron Sky exhibition will see the light of day in 2012. Our common goal should be an exhibition that shakes the art world and starts a life on it’s own.

Dive into Wreckamovie.com and be creative!

 

Nothing Says “I Love You Mom” Like A Moon-Nazi T-Shirt!

You have been asking us to add some women’s T-shirts on our web store, and now we deliver – kick things off with a discount campaign! Check out the women’s model of our new Walkür shirt on our web store.

Many countries in the world celebrate Mother’s Day on 8th of May, and what would be a better way to say “I Love You Mom” than some Moon Nazi merchandize. If you order a women’s model T-shirt before 8th of May, you will get a discount! And if you are wondering what to do with the money saved, we can help you: Go and buy some roses for your mommy and include them in your greatest Mother’s Day present ever.

 

 

 

 

The Race for Three Hundred Thousand – Week 1 report!

The first week of The Race for 300000€ is now over, and it’s time to take a look at what has happened during the first week, what has been the reaction to our campaign, and what are the results, mistakes and successes we’ve had so far.

Just to recap what I did – I set up Iron Sky on 9 different crowd funding platforms out there, and begun the journey to raise 300000€ – a gap in our budget due to bad weather conditions – by using the services available. But more interestingly, I started to do a comparative research on the platforms, attempting to define the ultimate crowd funding platform out there, and share my experiences with filmmakers around the world.

Here’s where we are at the moment:
IndieGoGo:$1790 (1278,24€)
Interactor: $805 (574,85€)
StartNext:391,50€
Verkami:: 275€
Sponsume:£135 (158,42€)
RocketHub: $25 (17,85€)
Flattr: 1,85€

Pending:
Kickstarter

Account suspended:
Pozible

2697,71€

And as a rabbit in the race, our own means (excluding investments), through which we made 2111€ during the same time.

It was clear from the very beginning that setting up the project on multiple platforms isn’t going to be the most effective strategy. It was also quite obvious that 300000€ in 60 days is quite a challenge. But in order to be able to compare services out there, the multiplatform strategy with high goals was the best way to go.

We chose the services through suggestions from our Facebook and Twitter fan pages, and narrowed them down to 10. Unfortunately, one of the services (FansNextDoor) refused to set up Iron Sky to their service, and Kickstarter is using Amazon Payments for their reimbursements, and since we’re not a US company, we were unable to set that up (we have a workaround in plans for that, but we’ll see if that happens…).

Unfortunately, one of the services (Pozible, from Australia), kicked us out of the system because we were not using solely them for crowd funding. This was quite an unexpected move, and does annoy us quite a lot, since we had already raised close to A$700, and had quite big plans for our Australian crowd funding campaign.

Other than these setbacks, all the services have been most helpful. IndieGoGo chose us to be one of the Projects of the Month, Interactor were in close discussions with us planning the strategy, Verkami has been most helpful and even sent out press releases of our involvement to reach Spanish media and StartNext from Germany’s been actively promoting Iron Sky. The collaboration with the platforms has been crucial, in both understanding the possibilities each unique platform offers, and the techniques that making a project interesting on the platform takes. I’ve also realized that multi-platform crowd funding is probably the way to go – but one needs to pick carefully the platforms. Each of them has to offer unique qualities for the supporter, and it seems that locality has a lot of advantages.

Reactions & Things To Come

The reaction from the Iron Sky fans and followers around the world has been positive. People are interested to hear the results and see how the campaign progresses. It’s good to know that no matter if we succeed in our goal or not, the main point for me is to research the platforms and hopefully write an article and publish it after we’re done with our campaign, so that filmmakers out there know what services are out there, and how they can take advantage of them.

The Race continues. We’re hoping to get things rolling faster as we move forward. I hope you’ll stick around, and if there’s something you’d be interested to hear, or would like us to look into, or just wish to comment the whole process, do let me know – drop an email to timo at ironsky dot net, or a comment down here.

Next update coming next Monday. Until then, take it easy and see you around!

The Race for Three Hundred Thousand Euros begins

Crowdfunding is a hot topic nowadays. I’m about to embark on a journey to find out just how deep a succesful crowdfunding campaign can go, using available crowdfunding platforms. I’ve launched Iron Sky on 9 different crowdfunding platforms, and my goal is to race them to 50000€ each! Timeframe is tight – I’m giving 60 days (until 31.5.) to reach the goal, and in the end we can all see which of the platforms has raised the most money.

And as a rabbit in the race, we’re simultaneously benchmarking the results with Iron Sky’s own crowdfunding sources – the Store, the War Bonds, the Sneak Peek and the Investments – in the same timeframe.

THE RACE
The reason for launching The 300k Race is very simple: we need to fill a gap in our funding, I’m really interested on crowdfunding. I’ve been following with constant amazement how the topic – which I was very dismissive at first – is growing bigger and bigger. The first completely crowd-financed film is already out, and it’s only a matter of time when crowdfunding becomes one of the de facto tools for funding independent films.

Because of this, I’m eager to write a comparative article about crowd funding, combining our succesful experiences with our community (we’ve managed to raise about 500000€ through our community, through various different sources), and the lessons I learn leading The Race. The idea is to make the first-ever first hand experience -based article available, using a project that’s very “crowdfundable” – already community-minded, already succesful in crowd funding and quite well-known around the world.

As said, we also do need the money to fill the gap. The problem is that we went over budget during the shoot because of weather conditions – we were struck down for two shooting days in Frankfurt because of a huge snowstorm, and the floods and cyclones in Queensland affected our shoot so that we were forced to move several locations indoors and build expensive studio sets because we couldn’t shoot things on location. The problem with exceeding the budget is that we need to be able to prove our financiers by the end of May that we’ve come up with the money. We’re of course working on it on our fronts, but we really need your help to really succeed in this. The biggest fear is that the missing money will be chopped from our post production, which is a big blow to our CGI team, music and sound and … all that that makes the film as cool as it really should be.

TIMELINE
The Race begins on 1.4. and ends on 31.5., giving it two full months of time to succeed. It’s an extremely tight schedule for raising 300000€, but we’re certain that with the help of our community – that means you – we will succeed!

SERVICES
I gathered a good bunch of almost 20 services through our Facebook page, and narrowed it down to 10 services, out of which one dropped out – leaving us with top 9 crowd funding platforms we will use. The platforms are:

Flattr is quite different from any other services, but I deliberately wanted to put it up here; it’s more like a Digg/Reddit, where you can “flatter” articles and items on the Web, and you’ll get a small sum of money for every flattering you’ll get. The best way to support Iron Sky is to click the Flattr button on items we release – blog posts, videos and so on. Flattr built by Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay fame. Flattr doesn’t have perks of any kind attached to it.The biggest amounts of Flatterings, 2014, so far has been received by Firefox tool NoScript. Click here to find my profile on Flattr to see what are the submissions to Flattr by Iron Sky team.

IndieGoGo is one of the biggest crowdfunding platforms; they’ve succesfully funded numerous projects, and they’ve been very tightly developing their service ever since 2008, when Slava Rubin, Danae Ringelmann and Eric Schell set up the platform. So far, the most succesful campaign has been the one of a film called Happy New Year, where the filmmakers managed to raise $26380. IndieGoGo operates in US Dollars. IndieGoGo operates on the perks, meaning that for each contribution, you’ll get something cool – thank you in Iron Sky Signal, or a War Bond, or even an Associate Producer title, if you happen to have extra $13000 in your back pocket. IndieGoGo operates on Keep-It-All -basis, meaning all the money pledged to the production goes to the production, no matter if the production reaches it’s goal. Click here to find Iron Sky on IndieGoGo.

Crowdfunding from down under! Pozible is a nice Australian crowdfunding platform, not only for films, but for anyone from amateur photographers to journalists, musicians and so on. Pozible operates in Australian Dollars, in the all-or-nothing -basis, where if we don’t reach the goal by the given schedule, all of the money already pledged will be returned to the supporters. The biggest success in Pozible is New Matilda Relaunch, which raised A$175838 (A$ is quite close to $) of it’s goal of A$175000. Perks included. Click here to find Iron Sky on Pozible!

Rockethub is an US-based crowdfunding platform that looks quite nice, and has a bit more focus on music than film itself, but is still completely feasible on film as well. They have also an interesting possibility for submitting projects and receive Launchpad Opportunities, which are special opportunities for promising projects – say, a Gibson Music Retreat in New York and so on. It’s a nice and professional crowd funding plaform. The biggest success so far has been Bobby Belfry & The David Budway Trio album One Lucky Day, which received $10296, which was over 250% of the goal they were aiming for! The system works on All & More -basis, meaning the creatives get to keep the money pledged for them, and if they reach the goals they’ve set, they also get additional perks. Perks included. Click here to find Iron Sky on Rockethub!

A German crowdfunding platform, focusing on creative projects like films and music, and also things like products and inventions. The site is in German, which is great because I believe that local is the new global in the Internet. Startnext has perks like other services, and it uses a new system called FidorPay for support. FidorPay is sort of like PayPal, but German, and apparently a bit easier and more flexible to use. It’s great to have Iron Sky localized on a German platform. Really happy about this, and looking forward how well it goes down here! Biggest success on Startnext is a 50s-style detective radio drama Richard Diamond Private Detective, which raised 6254.60€ of its’ goal of 5000€! Click here to find Iron Sky on Startnext!

Verkami is one of the most delightful crowd funding platforms I’ve come across. It’s a private initiative born in Mataró (Barcelona) from a father and his two sons: Joan, Adrià and Jonàs Sala, a biologist, an art historian and a physicist. The platform operates tight schedule, which is an excellent thing in crowdfunding – the time limit is exactly 40 days, and if during that time one doesn’t reach the goal, the submissions are cancelled. Because of tighter limit, we’ve pimped up the perks for Verkami – everyone supporting Iron Sky via Verkami will get a frame from the film in digital format, and those who put up a bit bigger support take part in a draw for an ORIGINAL MOON NAZI HELMET & GAS MASK (as seen here), a costume part you’ll be able to get from nowhere else! Click here to find Iron Sky on Verkami!

Sponsume is a UK-based crowd funding platform. It operates on the Keep-It-All -basis, and has perks, too. So far, the biggest success of Sponsume is 4915 UK Pounds for Il Maestro, a ten minut dark comedy about competetiveness of calssical musicians. There’s a lot of great things in Sponsume, and the variety of projects there is great! They’ve also released a nice article – the Seven Deadly Sins of Crowdfunding. Based on this, I’m going to be burning in crowdfunding hell! Click here to find Iron Sky on Sponsume!

Interactor is a rather new site with only two projects, but a very nice interface, very clear and very film-oriented platform for crowd financing. Created by filmmakers working on a film called Errors of the Human Body – directed by Xavier Gens (Frontiere(s), Hitman and The Divide). The service is not officially open for other film submissions so far, but will be later on – Iron Sky got a special treatment and got added thanks to awesome folk at Interactor. Perks included. Click here to find Iron Sky on Interactor!

COMING SOON:
There’s a bunch of services we’re about to use, but it takes a while to set things up there. The services are:

The big Kickstarter is probably the best known crowd funding platform out there. It’s not focused solely on films, but there’s a lot of different kind of things it’s supporting – music, products and so on. Kickstarter is US-based, and uses Amazon Payments for the reimbursements – which makes it impossible for companies and projects outside of US to register. But there are ways around it, and I’m working currently on a way to get Iron Sky also up on Kickstarter! Hope we’ll succeed, it’d be great to be there, too! The most succesful project on Kickstarter so far is TikTok+LunaTik Multi-Touch Watch Kits, basically a wristwatch with Apple iPod Nano attached to it. They’ve raised $941,718, which was more than 6000% more of which they originally set a goal for! Kickstarter operates on the basis of all-or-nothing, meaning if you don’t reach the goal by the end of the time, all the money is returned back to the supporters. Perks included.

RESULTS:
You’ll be able to follow the whole race, from start to finish, on our website, in a specifically designed area for The Race. I’ll be blogging every week about the progress to our blog. And most importantly, I’m simultaneously gathering information to write a comprehensive study on crowd financing using the Internet communities and available platforms, which I will publish later this year for all the filmmakers out there interested on crowdfunding to read!

I’m also interested in your experiences. If you decide to support Iron Sky using one (or many) of these platforms, I’d be happy to hear about how the process went from your point of view. Feel free to drop me an email on your experiences at timo ironsky net.

WHAT CAN I DO?
Of course, best thing to do is to support us, using one or many of the platforms – whichever you prefer the most. But in addition to that, spread the word – to your friends on Twitter, Facebook and wherever you’re in contact with them. And of course, all ideas, thoughts and comments are more than welcome.

So let’s rock! Enjoy the race!

Preview the Iron Sky Promotional Trailer on Sneak Peek

If you’ve been following us making Iron Sky you know we have a tendency to be a bit perfectionists. That means we want to make sure everything is just right before we release something. This time we decided to try something different and release a work-in-progress version of the promotional trailer of Iron Sky. Of course we can’t completely let go of our perfectionism, so the trailer will only be available to members of Iron Sky Sneak Peek.

Oh, and we published a new episode of Iron Sky Signal, which you can see below!

The video created as a promo for buyers at the Berlinale film festival to give a glimpse of what the live action in the film will look like. It’s missing about 50% of the material that will be in the final trailer – most notably the CGI. We’d love to hear your comments on Sneak Peek how to make it even more awesome. The finished version of the promo trailer will be released at this year’s Cannes International Film Festival.

Originally we promised that Sneak Peek is the place to see the first five minutes of the film as soon as they’re complete. Meanwhile we’ve posted exclusive making of material, but we decided to expanding the service into an experimentation laboratory. We will release other pieces of ‘work in progress’ material in addition to the trailer, and ask for your feedback.

So head over to Iron Sky Sneak Peek at http://www.ironsky.net/sneakpeek/ and get an eyeful of our new promotional trailer!

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