Iron Sky Goes Germany: Visiting the Art Department

Hello everybody! This is my first blog post here in Iron Sky website, so a small introduction is in order. I’m Janos Honkonen and you might remember me as Fukov / Festerbester from Star Wreck. In the beginning of the year I started as the publicist and the making of -producer of Iron Sky. The production went to warp speed in the beginning of the year and the shootings are already looming in the near future, so this is a really interesting time to hop aboard.

For me the work started off with a bang. Timo and I returned last Sunday evening from our band’s album publication tour and we had barely time to repack our bags and catch a couple of hours of sleep before we were back on the road. Timo, Samuli, our director of photography Mika Orasmaa, concept artist Jussi Lehtiniemi, production manager Tarja Jakunaho and I were off to Germany to see what the local art department had come up with set- and locationwise, to check out some filming locations and to see some of the actors try on their costumes for the first time.

The first leg of our trip took us to Berlin to visit the local production company 27 Films and the art department  put together by our production designer Ulrika von Vegesack. The art department is responsible for finding our shooting locations in Germany as well as planning and building the sets for the film. The walls of their office were covered with mood shots and set plans, and there even were miniature versions of the sets made out of cardboard.

What made this trip really interesting for everybody was that up to this point all contact and co-operation has taken part over the net and this was the first time the Finnish and German teams knocked heads in person. So far the different teams had been working in a relative isolation. Doing your daily grind in your own office gives you a creeping feeling that nothing much is happening, but seeing the amount of work other people had done on the project and being able to bounce ideas with them made people see that things are rolling forward with quite the momentum.

For the first time our concept artist saw his vision of the look and feel of the film fleshed out, and the models and blueprints of the sets gave Timo, Samuli and Mika concrete ideas on where to place cameras, which parts of the sets were visible at which point, what should be done in CGI, what has to be constructed, and so on.

We were supposed to end the first work day in a reasonable hour, but surprise surprise, people were so engrossed in comparing their notes and coming up with new ideas that we ended up back in the hotel rather late. Timo, Samuli and I gathered up enough energy to go and do a bit of clothes and electronics shopping near Alexanderplatz. The local Media Markt, a four floor electronic apartment store, made us go into gadget geek shock: an enormous amount of consumer electronics with prices lower than in Finland. Luckily there is no such thing in Helsinki or we’d never see our paycheck.

So, that was the first leg of our trip. What will follow is a few days going over some of the shooting locations our location scout has found, but that is a story for the next blog post.

Anyway, now that things get really interesting with our production, we’ll be keeping you informed about what’s happening behind the scenes, so stay tuned for more blog posts, video reports and other nifty stuff! You can start by checking out more photos from our trip from our Flickr account!