As the shoot of Iron Sky: The Ark starts to wind down towards the end, the hardest days are still ahead. The last few days we would spend between few studios, but mainly in the dusty Moon Surface set. The set itself has a huge chunk of crater rim built on a dusty ground with big moon rocks littering the gray sufrace.
On this set, we have been already shooting for few extremely uncomfortable days: first, riding around with our Moon Buggy and the bigger Prober, then wiring up our actors and making them bounce around in low gravity. The last few bits would still require them to crawl on the Moon surface, with dust filling their eyes and ears, and the team suffering from nosebleeds, constant dry skin and couging and sneezing black goo… Even I started to wear the mask, which I haven’t done since I really hate the fact that my exhaling fogs my glasses weirdly…
Not only that, also the clothes and shoes are ruined after few days on the set. I chose to wear my set shoes out and then toss them to trashbin, trying to clean them after the whole experience would be just impossible.
Friday was the last actual shooting day of the film, excluding the two reshoot days, and the Finnish shoot. We filmed the very opening scene of the movie, featuring two astronauts on the Moon, and completed a very confusing and uncomfortable shoot with weird plate shots and complicated wirework, and since neither of the actors had ever practiced the Moon Walk, it took forever to get us anywhere, and by the time we were done with it, we were totaled. The shooting day turned out to be the longest we had in the shoot: we finished at 4am, after what I think was either 16 or 17 hour shoot.
Without the hard-working never-complaining Chinese crew, these crazy days would’ve been completely impossible, but our guys and girls soldiered through them and went home still smiling, yet all covered in Moon Dust.
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