Iron Sky in Australia – Working Down Under
“So, we are filming half of Iron Sky in Australia.”
“Oh, it’s confirmed then?”
“Yeah. A bunch of us are going to Australia in two weeks.”
“Will I be going?”
“Yes. You’ll be in Australia for two weeks with us.”
“Oh. Cool!”
…and that is part of why I like my current job as the publicist and making of guy of Iron Sky. During our trip to Cannes Film Festival this year we confirmed our deal with an Australian production company called New Holland Pictures, and in the beginning of June we took a trip to the other side of the planet to handle big bunch of practical matters. They included a ton of budget talk, checking out some studios and shooting locations, doing some casting, meeting special effects and stunts experts, and of course contacting our fans.
HALFWAY AROUND THE PLANET
Looking from Finland, Australia is pretty much on the other side of the world. If I’d want to get further away from home, the only better choices would be New Zealand or Antarctica, or maybe some small islet in Southern Ocean. In any case, our trip took around 34 hours from Helsinki to Brisbane. It included a six hour layover in Hong Kong, where we could have been able to go out and visit the city if we had realized it. The weirdest thing in the airport were the health department officials, who were sitting in a small pen wearing face masks and measuring the temperatures of travelers remotely with IR cameras. Our production manager Tarja was feverish, but managed to slip past their scrutiny.
(Check out more photos in the Flickr photoset)
Sunrise over Australian coast.
The Pacific Rim from Hong Kong to Australia looked like it was one big thunderstorm. Over Manila chain lightning reached from horizon to horizon and the clouds flashed bright almost every other second. When I woke up from a surprisingly good night of sleep over Australia, there were still some anvil clouds sizzling and crackling with small angry lightning. Then it was just a matter of getting through Australia’s horribly draconian immigration and customs. Maybe they are still sore about some rabbits a century and a half ago, I don’t know, but even having travelled both to Russia and US, the severity of the scrutiny managed to still surprise me.
In Cannes with the Moon Nazis
In the beginning of the year I mentioned that I got a job as the publicist of the Finnish-German-Australian scifi movie Iron Sky. I was involved in Star Wreck as Fukov/Festerbester and I’ve been interested in taking part in Iron Sky for years. This year was the first time the combination of schedules, finances and other everyday logistics made it possible for me to actually start to work for the movie.
Iron Sky is not a very traditional movie project, though, and a big part of the people behind it come from a completely different background than the traditional movie business. In a nutshell, in our production company we have our stone cold movie professionals from the more traditional side of the business, and then we have us geeks from the Star Wreck side of things who have a good handle on how the online world works. In the end it seems to me is that the project has managed to combine the best of both worlds.
The Cannes beach.
This month my job took me to the Cannes Film Festival, where filmmakers go to promote their movies to both sellers and distributors – and in our case strongly to the fans also. The traditional way to do this is to meet face to face with people in the innumerable cocktail parties all around the city and to lure people into your office, which you set up in an apartment or a hotel room for the duration of the festival.
Timo wrote an excellent recap of our Cannes escapades in the Iron Sky blog, so I’m not going to repeat everything in here – this is more about my vibes of the trip.
THE GLAMOROUS WORK DAYS
Our accommodation was a large apartment with a large living room, a yard with a pool and several bedrooms. Most of the rooms had double beds, so rather unglamorously me and Pekka, who is an another member of our social media team, had to share one.
Our apartment had a pool in the yard, but because Cannes was colder than a polar bear's buttplug, the only one that braved the waters was Timo.
My work day consisted mainly of waking up before nine, grabbing some instant coffee and toasts while trying to get the crappy wifi in our apartment to work (two things the French can’t seem to accomplish: a working wifi and halfway sensible locks on doors), and then heading off to the office. It was a nice 15 minute walk down to the seaside and the Grand Hotel where the Iron Sky Lobby was. If I wasn’t in a hurry and on the road alone, I often stopped to grab a tastier coffee on the way from one of the innumerable bakeries.
This is where I mainly sat at, handling our online publicity and showing visitors the new teaser on the TV that is on the right.
For me there weren’t that many cocktail parties, and this was by choice. For me they didn’t feel like the place and the method to get the word out in the way and volume I wanted to, so I stuck into what I knew and wanted to do. I spent most of my days sitting in our office and hammering out press releases and keeping up with what’s going on in the net with my laptop. I kept joking that the Cannes trip wasn’t in any way different from my ordinary work week, except that there were palm trees instead outside of my window instead of a brick wall.
People kept pouring in wanting to see our new teaser or to talk to the producer and the director about the movie. Most of them were buyers or distributors, but I did my best to rope in journalists also. One day Terry Gilliam dropped by unannounced, but unfortunately not to check on Iron Sky. I don’t go into a fanboy mode that easily, but Gilliam is definitely one of the filmmakers I really respect – Brazil is pure genius.
We had a huge banner on our office balcony to draw in people.
THE PAYLOAD
We had a figurative fuckton of stuff going on and big things to publicize. First of all, we released our second teaser, which was a pleasure to show around: you know you are in a good position when you are selling a product that you think is so cool it makes cold shivers go down your back even after seeing it forty times already.
There was also a big merchandising deal with EMI, we publicly announced that Laibach will be making the movie score, opened the movie for fan investments that really took off (220 000€ is the latest figure I heard, this in a bit over a week) and of course announced that we’ll be going to Australia to do the studio shootings.
Working with all this stuff was hugely satisfactory. My time was spent tracking who was writing about it and what, fishing out new contacts and sites where to promote the materials, trying to reach new journalists and other interested parties who haven’t heard about Iron Sky, and so on. Seeing the information percolate through the net and the world from the Western world to Africa, China and Russia was hugely impressive. When you know what you are doing, internet is one motherfucker of an information hose.
Also, yours truly managed to make it to the Mark Kermode blog about Iron Sky, and got in an Älymystö shirt too:
THE TIME OFF
One of the weird things about going to the movie festivals to work is that you don’t end up seeing any movies. I didn’t even get accredited, ie. get that pass that gives at least a chance to get into some of the screenings and other events. The only moment when I regretted that was when I found out that Lemmy the Movie was showing in Cannes. Turns out, though, that even if I would have had the accreditation, I wouldn’t have probably got in since I’m not a buyer or a distributor – even journalists had hard time getting in through the doors.
A park on our way to our apartment was a beautiful light show at nights.
I ended up going out to town only a couple of times, once when we arranged a happy hour in Iron Sky lounge, and the other time in the last evening before heading over back to Finland. On the first night I found out that rich people are suckers: the 15 euro gin & tonics they sell to people in the bigger beachside hotels don’t taste any better than the four euro ones. The only perk of the price seemed to be that when my credit card didn’t work and I started cursing in Finnish, in stepped this guy who had been standing in a corner eyeing everybody, and he just made the card work, really fast and hassle free. Had a great time talking with colleagues, our potential fan investors and all kinds of other people you run into in happenings like this – and very much needed zeroing out the brain after days and days of staring at the screen.
In the final evening, or rather morning, I had one of those enjoyable timeless moments – everybody else had gone to bed already, but I spent a while sitting in our balcony, listening to the night birds and Fever Ray, and watching the Cannes sky turn from black to deep indigo and break towards blue.
In the other days I was surprisingly happy to work through the day, then walk home, grab a bit of kebab to eat on the way and then just relax with New Model Army or Civilization IV which I got off of the brand new Steam for Mac. It had the added bonus of getting a bit of peace and quiet after a day at the office, where it often got quite hectic: at times there where three different sales or budget meetings going on at the same time, with more people pouring in through the door wanting to see or discuss one film or another. Iron Sky wasn’t the only film we were promoting and we were also sharing the office with another production company, so things didn’t get lonely there either.
So, this is what I do for a living nowadays. The work is satisfying, life is full of adventures and things are looking all around so great that I’m almost getting suspicious.
Our apartment yard.
The morning sky in our balcony.
End of an Era
So, this is the first time I’m unemployed since 1997. This time it’s just two days, though, since on Monday I’ll be starting on a completely new job. For me this is the end of an era. On the year 2000 I started writing game reviews and other stuff for a big computer magazine on a part time basis and on one fateful day in 2001 I set off to be a full time freelance writer, which lead into me founding my own one man company for the job a couple of years later. So, for the better part of a decade I’ve been working in media full time, quite often 150% of the time since I’ve had a dayjob and done journalism on the side. 18 hour work days haven’t been that uncommon, while at the same time handling all kind of other assorted crap life has thrown my way.
This spring I decided that enough is enough. I’m pretty sure that during these years I’ve pretty much seen what gaming, computer and technology media has to offer in Finland. I’ve also reached the conclusion that I can’t recommend working as a full time freelance journalist for anybody. At least nobody who’s as diligent a workaholic as I am.
Leaving the Media
So, what does this change mean in practice? Earlier in the spring I stopped accepting assignments from my clients and started handing them over to other freelancers and winding down the company. Now the company is shelved and I’m just waiting for my MacPro leasing to run out on July, after which I can officially close down the whole thing. No more dealing with the company taxes, paperwork & bureaucracy, stressing over deadlines, shuttling test hardware back and forth, keeping up with 4-6 high volume e-mail accounts daily or pestering people who really don’t seem to want to get interviewed.
Yesterday was also my last day working for the gaming TV program I’ve been producing for two years. A lot of that time was very interesting, although very hectic, high pressure and high responsibility stuff. I can’t say that as a working place it would have been even remotely ideal, but it was a nice gig to do for a while. It was fun to travel around the world in press events arranged by the game companies, learning how to film and to edit video and sound was both interesting and useful, and generally it felt good to get to use my strengths – ie. organizational ability, social skills and stress tolerance – right up to the max.
But enough is enough. So, I’m out of the media field, probably for good (Oh my good, it’s like the whining of a million obnoxious nerds and fanboys had suddenly been silenced in my inbox!). Never say never and all that, but I don’t think I’ll find such a well paying client that I’ll get back on the horse and start hammering out hardware tests or other technical stuff for a good, good while.
The Future
What next? Well, when I made the decision, I sent several applications here and there, the main aim being the post of an associate producer in a Finnish game company Remedy. I made it to the last stage of the process, where it was only me and one other guy left. In the last moment he got chosen over me because he had previous experience in game production. Considering that I really don’t, I can’t say that the end result was that bad.
My other choice, where I’ll be starting on Monday, is something completely different. The next half a year I’ll be spending in the Finnish National library, where I’ll be working on the master database that links to most other library databases in Finland. I have this weird feeling that the pace of the work and the stress levels will be rather different compared to what I’ve got used to, plus I’m really looking forward to a straightforward coding work with academic flavour. It’s much like the stuff which I did at the turn of the millennium when I was a project researcher in the department of linguistics. The project will probably end by the end of the year, and after that… well, there’s something completely different in my sights.
So, this is an end of an era for me. The amount of free time I’m looking at is staggering, compared to what it used to be. I predict a lot of gaming, diving, geocaching, meeting friends and other assorted fun for the summer. Now I’ll just have to get rid of this goddamn flu, which has kept me indoors through most of the week and especially this very beautiful and sunny Saturday.
Right, I’m off to see if some old school Sam & Max will help with the recovery enough for a barbeque trip tomorrow!
