Author: Timo Vuorensola

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.

You know, sometimes filmmaking can be quite a damn dumb. At least, it can look like it. Like, yesterday. We have a person standing on a rotating platform, wearing an astronaut’s uniform, surrounded by huge led screens that play a completely nutcase video material. At one point, we start rotating the platform and run around her like little insects with our cameras. It looks more like some weird modern art exhibition than filmmaking, but in the end, it’ll all make sense.

Well, at least I hope so…

Some days just drag on, some goes flying past. Yesterday, it was the draggy one. We had only relatively easy stuff to accomplish, but as we started to do those scenes, they kept on expanding and expanding, taking more and more time to accomplish, and since the scene was one of the key moments in the movie, we just couldn’t find a quick way to go about them: they needed to be covered in every possible angle, every possible way, every possible performance. My actors started to get really pissed off at one point, Vivienne was already barking at me: “Timo, what more do you need from me?” …just this one more angle.

The callsheet was bursting with studio changes and scenes to be shot, but by the time we finally finished whatever it was we had in mind for the one scene, it was already around midnight, so hopes of doing anything relevant had evaporated. There was only the techincal move to another studio, and one more shot just to keep the production happy, and we decided to wrap it around 2 am.

While shooting here, the Finland shoot has started to lift its’ head. The production has decided to shoot one scene – that’s two shooting days – in Finland, Turku, more specifically. The reason for this is that we need European setting and faces, and in China it’s always a trick to find good Western extras.

So while the shoot here is going on, my mailbox is getting flooded with Finland side of preparations.

Ah, well, but the nice thing is really to have Annika around. She comes over to the set in the evening when she wakes up, and basically just hangs around at the green room reading books and relaxing. Although I don’t really see her that much during the day, it’s still a delight when she either wanders to the set, or when I run back at the green room for something and get a nice kiss in between the day.

I also made a decision: this is the last movie I’ll do which takes place on the Moon. I’m really fed up with the wires and the moon dust that sticks everywhere.

No more Moon for me.

It’s very quiet right now. She is sleeping next to me, only her silent, deep breaths fill the air. Outside, the waves wash smoothly to the beach as the sun creeps slowly just below the horizon. The last four shooting days here in China are here, and funnily, the melancholia of leaving is starting to get me.

Since August, when I came over to China, I have been missing home so much, but at the same time, I’ve created – slowly, but surely – a bond with all the people in the film crew, ones who have been around me every day since we started to shoot, some even longer. And now, as the time grows near for me to depart here, and most likely never to see many of these people again, I’m starting to realize how much they’ve meant to me.

Every morning, walking to the set I greet everyone I meet before I reach the monitors. Of course, first person is David, who always waddles from the car with a happy smile on his face to hand me the callsheet and give me the Chinese good morning – zaoshang hao. Then, as I sit in the car, my driver whom I call mr. OK (because it’s the only thing he can say in English – Mika’s driver is called mr. Go, because that’s the only thing he can say in English – if they’d form a band together, it’d be called Ok Go!) who is the happiest, best driver I’ve ever met. He greets me with another zaoshang hao and usually adds the word which sounds like guomer – meaning ‘bro’.

At the studios, I greet as many crew members whose names I mostly don’t know, but am aware they work at either grip or camera department. They usually find it funny when a Westerner tries to say something in Chinese, and answer with their best knowledge of English. There’s usually Jonathan walking past, then Ma Kun from the casting with her big round glasses, and then I arrive to the monitors, where our DITs prepare the image.

Then, walking over to the set I see Mika somewhere working with Hao the gaffer on the lights – that’s a “hyvää huomenta” for him, and a zaoshang hao to Hao, and finally Lei with his white mask over his face comes around from somewhere, happy and joyful as always, greeting me with both “good morning” and “zaoshang hao” – and then, we’re ready to start the day’s work. Well, not before David hands me the big metal canister full of freshly brewed coffee, that is.

The morning greetings ritual is one of the things I will miss in the production. Of course, it’s going to be a huge change to suddenly not live off the callsheet anymore, to go back home and having to go to the convenience store, to wash my own clothes, to figure out my own travel, schedule, money, everything. But that’s all OK, since I’m back around my family. But meeting so many happy faces every morning, you don’t get that in Finland. Suddenly, the bubble I’ve been living in will be blown away, and I’m exposed to the normal world again, and that’s slightly scary, to be honest.

The last shooting week in China dawned upon us through a thick cloud of pollution. The beach outside had a slim snow veil covering it, although it disappeared as the sun warmed the air up. I woke up feeling well rested, despite the reminders of last night’s Vedett’s still in the back of my head. Annika wasn’t feeling that good, back home she’s stayed on a healthy diet and hasn’t had the same amount of dinners with white wine and Tsingtao beers as I have over here, but we managed to chomp down some breakfast before the pickup came for me.

The shooting day was truly a jigsaw puzzle of scheduling. We started at studio 3, and the B-unit started at studio 24. The plan was that by the time we finish on studio 3, B-unit rolls to another studio, while the A-unit moves to 24. Luckily, though, we started to move pretty quickly, everyone was much more relaxed after a day off, and the whole shoot was smooth sailing all through the day. We did go a bit over, and didn’t really finish everything, but we did quite damn well considering.

I also finally got around starting to do the list of pickups we are still missing from the film. They tend to pile up by the end of the shoot and since we only have one week to go, we really have to start grabbing those. Also, the editor had her list of requirements, although I must admit I didn’t quite understand why she needed certain shots, but it made sense. She seems to be a good editor, but I do recognize some differences in Western/Chinese storytelling, which might prove to be a bigger obstacle in the future, but hopefully not!

Annika came over to the set in the afternoon and we ordered some Pizza Hut, since we both really craved for something simple and very Western. The pizza hit the spot, although it also made me feel like 20 years older and fatter westerner, after having eaten so much Chinese food lately. Whatever Chinese food is, it at least has very little wheat in it, and very little salt, so although you eat a lot of it, you never feel sick like after eating too much pizza.

At least that’s my observation.

Having the wife over has few unquestionable advances to it. One of them is the best sleep I’ve had in weeks. We had a day off the next day, and I slept good 13 hours, catching up some of the sleep debt I had been gathering during my insomnia phase. Apparently, my brain was just waiting for her to come around and refused to sleep before she did, and is now in peace.

So that was it, we woke up around 3 pm and jumped in the car and headed to Qingdao center to do some last minute shopping before we head back home. The place we went to was a big electronics store. Now, “electronic stores” I’m used to are usually these huge complexes of beautifully displayed pieces of amazing electronic gadgets, floor after floor, row after row, a bit like Verkkokauppa.com in Finland or Target, but here in Qingdao it means a bit different thing.

The building is a multi-storey department store, but it’s actually a collection of small booths all selling different set of random electronics the owner of that booth has managed to gather. There’s no central theme or system anywhere, every booth is its’ own entity, the only structure is that on first floor there are more phones, second floor is more about cameras etc.

After understanding the chaotic nature of the place we started to look for the items we came in for. I wanted to buy a drone to my child and went looking for something like that. There was only one booth selling consumer drones, and this guy was quite a salesman. He couldn’t give two shits if we wanted to buy something off of him, he just stood there looking annoyed that we wanted to hear more about the drones, and mostly just WeChatted with his friend over the phone rather than try to sell us anything.

One thing the Chinese don’t do is haggle. In the end, we managed to get the price of the drone I bought down some 30 yuan, which is …umm, 3€, and that’s all. But having said that, the price was already pretty good, so I didn’t have problems to go with that.

I also ended up buying a pair of Bose Quiet Comforts and a pair of Sennheisers for my wife, and then we headed back home.

The evening was reserved for mr. Duan, whom we officially wrapped the day before. We took him out for a great dinner, where we gathered with some of the people from the production and myself and my wife, and discussed the last months. We ate a great hot pot dinner, and then sent him on his way with sad farewells.

Rhydian and me and Annika were all feeling like one more drink, so we hopped on a cab and went to a small bar close by. The place was terrific, a little side street away from anything, and served a great selection of beers. We ordered a shisha pipe, spoke about Rhydian’s upcoming scenes and then discussed more in detail acting and the life of actors, having a great talk. Then, it was time to head back home since it was going to be an early pickup the next day, so we called in in day!

The Long Separation is finally over. Annika came over to China, and we will leave back home from here together. Somehow, we survived this five month separation almost without scratches, but I wouldn’t suggest you try it. Relationships are fragile little constructs that can easily be toppled over, and if you like yours, five months apart from each other is quite a harsh ride to find out if it will last.

Saturday was a horrible day. We had a horror of a callsheet staring at us at 8:30 am pickup, but the first shot we shot at 2:15pm. Means, we effectively spent six hours on the set doing nothing but staring at our cellphones and empty screens, while the actors were being prepared for the shoot. Even the production manager wandered to the few times asking what are we doing, since we’re not shooting. He suggested we should apply for the Guinness Book of Records for the longest start of a shooting day. Grinding my teeth, I understood what he meant, but I wasn’t able to do anything.

The scene we were about to shoot was a hugely important one. It was the last shooting day for mr. Duan, and the last scene with him was his most emotional one. Now, having worked with him, I’ve come to learn him as a very closed actor, one who keeps the emotions in check through the role, but now I knew he had to give me something. Also, it was a key scene for Vivienne, who had to break through whatever walls her character had built around herself and encounter the other character very bare and very honestly. Like mr. Duan, she also keeps her emotions in check, and I was quite interested to find out if they could open up on the screen on this moment.

Before we started to shoot, though, we had a shouting match with our screenwriter on the content of the scene. He was suggesting some sudden changes to the scene, while I had also devised a rather different approach to the scene, and our views clashed big time. Before this production, I’ve never had this kind of an issue; screenwriter has had their job done before we shoot, and on the set, we’ve changed the script the way we wanted to, to get a better scene out of something that we find not working on the set.

This time, the order is a bit different, since one of the writers is the producers, and the main language is Chinese. This means that all the changes I want to have on the script on the set, I have to run through the production, and the screenwriter needs to approve them. In the beginning, this didn’t matter, but for some reason, the screenwriter has started to be more strict on the lines he wrote and sometimes they just don’t work with the situation. And since there’s no common language, the discussions with him can turn into forever long debates, and then the actors join in and suddenly we all are in quite a mess all pushing and pulling different directions.

Eventually we did find a solution, but already at that time we had all exhausted ourselves to the point of walking out of the set right there and then.

So, when we actually got to shoot, it had really been six hours of practically nothing happening, and I was sure it would turn into a catastrophe. I felt we’ll never get anything done on this day.

Lei called in the first shot, cameras were rolling and then, well, something magical unfolded. I had instructed Vivienne, who was concerned on how to play the scene, to try to empty her mind and focus on mr. Duan, an actor whom I knew would deliver a tearsqueezer of a performance. Mr. Duan had told the same to her, just look at my eyes, and you’ll get there. But the force of emotions she brought up in this moment stunned us all. It felt not only strong, but also very personal. The moment, in all its’ science fiction crazyness, became a beautiful moment between a father and a daughter, something real transpired right there. And I feel Vivienne herself unlocked something new inside of her. The moment was that strong.

The shoot did take its’ time, and we went through everything multiple times, but finally, the time came to call it a wrap, and wrap mr. Duan. This itself was a huge thing, mr. Duan himself was a person who pondered long to join the production, but eventually decided to do so, because he felt there’s a story worth telling there. But as an actor, he brought so much more to the film than just his face and voice, he challenged the whole father-daughter -relationship from the beginning, brought up beautiful little and big nuances to create a believable scientist / father character, and taught us a lot on how to create a character. In the end, that’s what boils down the very essence of filmmaking: actors making it real. Script is just words on a paper, directing is just giving suggestions,  cinematography is just chasing light and shadow, but it’s the actors who make the story alive.

It was close to midnight as I finally arrived back to the hotel. She was already in the bed, waiting. Closing into her warm embrace was the most beautiful reward one can have after such a day.

For the first time in a long time, I felt properly alive.

Woke up after yet another refreshing four hours of sleep in the middle of the night and spent the wee morning hours watching as the sky turned gray over the cold Qingdao seaside landscape, writing this blog, reading Gösta Sundqvist’s biography, playing Hearthstone and contemplating life.

One strange thing they do here in Qingdao is shouting to the sunrise on the beach. I have no idea what kind of a tradition it is, but every morning around sunrise time I hear people shouting on the beach, and so did some others living in the hotel as well, and even witnessed them en masse on the beach doing some kind of a strange ritual. It’s not really something that penetrates the sleep, so if I’m sleeping I won’t wake up, but these insomniac mornings I observe this interesting thing and find it somewhat refreshing.

We had a relatively fun shooting day, which was nice for a while. I must admit I haven’t been enjoying the shoot the last week too much; it just has felt like shoveling shots out from the script so we get to finish the movie, but I’ve lacked the passion for these scenes. It doesn’t mean they’ve turned bad or anything, the actors make the whole thing work, but I have felt like I’m merely executing a script than really putting my heart and passion on it.

Mind you, it hasn’t been like this during the production at all: I’ve had heated discussions and burned midnight oil to get the story in the can, but last week I had a bit of a clash with the writer, mr. Yu, and afterwards found it hard to find the right attitude to directing. It’ll get back to me, but I’ve had this stroke of insomnia which is also grinding my creativity at the moment so everything feels a bit harder and more complicated.

The team is really badly undermanned at the moment. We lost Cheng to the sickness yesterday, and since many of the people from the AD department are sick, and especially it seems every English-speaking member of the crew, we are left with half-functioning machine. Especially with a split unit, it’s starting to feel: every scene takes a long time to get set up and resets feel like ages. The callsheet keeps on piling up, while the shooting days are getting less. We will get everything in the can by the time we finish, but it’s going to require some work.

One of the things I don’t like about shooting six days a week is that you just don’t have the time to prepare for what’s to come. Six days means only one day off, which you need to fully rest, but there’s no time or energy to plan the week ahead. It leads to the situations we experienced many times on the set: the only place to do any creative thinking is between shots, while setting up the cameras, while your mind is on a totally different scene. Same goes with Mika, he has no chance to really plan ahead anything, and the little rest we have during the shooting day we have to use to get a bit of rest.

Shooting on the dusty Moon surface continued yesterday. Wireworks dominated the morning hours and the evening was a bit more about action. The split team was doing their action piece in the other studio simultaneously. I was actually happy with the results of the day, although I really hate the Moon set as a shooting environment (I can’t wear the mask so my lungs are full of the damn dust constantly).

Back in Finland, Annika dropped Topi to his father and headed to the airport, flying overnight towards here. Another reason to feel slightly more excited. Also, tomorrow we have the last shooting day for mr. Duan Yihong, and then a day off. So a lot of things moving toward the end: last shooting week dawns on Tuesday. We’re getting there.

We’re getting there.

Even more people are dropping in sick: now my assistant David and our 3rd ad Barron both checked out for recovery. This made the day especially complicated, since not only did we have two teams shooting, but both of them had main cast in them, so I had to run back and forth between two studios directing two teams. Having slept some four hours the night before, it was a complete brainfry for me.

First, we started on the Moon Surface set, which turned out to be a slow one. After we shot one shot there, we moved two cast members to the other studio to do some fight action, while the other team stayed to do some driving action in the other studio. One actor we sent back to the hotel, to be summoned back after we had finished with the car stuff.

The car stuff took longer than expected (those pieces of shit had their tires falling off constantly) and the set proved to be way too small for anything we really needed it to be for. In the other studio, wire stunts took their time and we started to debate the script issues, and just as we were to shoot, I heard the other studio had one of the actors cranky for waiting and I needed to rush there.

We shot (a pretty nice!) scene there with him, and wrapped him for the day, and then I stumbled back to the Moon Base studio to work more on the action. We took some closeups after some big falls and hits, and then wrapped that set, and then I stumbled back to the other studio to shoot more car drivings.

By the time we wrapped the endless day at the other studio my throat was burning for the moon dust, since I really can’t use a face mask (every breath blows my glasses into a mist) I had to suck in the dust by gallons. I really hate that set. It’s problematic, unhealthy and too small. It looks good, but I hate shooting there. It does remind me of the Streets of Agharta -set in Iron Sky The Coming Race, one which had the yellow dust everywhere.

So, a wish list for my next movie:

• No exterior shoots, unless it’s day and summer.
• No location which could potentially have dust of any kind in it
• No gravity effects
• No big machinery, animals or children

That’d made me a very happy daoyan.

This chaos is killing me.

Shooting simultaneously in two studios is a clusterfuck if I’ve ever seen one. Add complicated wire stunts and constantly breaking down special props vehicles to the game, and sugarcoat it with a hefty puff of “moon dust”, an extremely fine-grained gray dust which finds its’ way everywhere. And of course, the crew being slightly not feeling well, we really have quite a horrific week going on.

Yesterday we moved to a new studio, which is always a pain in the ass; new conditions require constant readjustments, and in addition to this, the production had misunderstood two different locations as one, and suddenly we had to reschedule basically everything to make the schedule work. It’s the last week of Duan Yihong, which means we’re focusing hard on his character to get the rest of his bits done, and while it’s not that much, it’s the most hardest parts of the role for him we are working on.

So, while we’re shooting stuff with this broken-ass moon rover on Studio 24, the action team is working in the studio 12 doing wire stunts, and I scoot between the two studios to direct actors in both, with no idea where I should be, and when. It’s already quite a challenge to keep the whole puzzle together in one’s head, but when you shoot two scenes simultaneously, that’s when it all becomes real fun indeed.

The sleep hasn’t gotten any better, to be honest. I manage to doze off restlessly for three-four hours a night, and then take two 30 minute naps at the green room while on lunch and dinner breaks. I have no idea what we are supposed to shoot in the morning as I shinny in the car, and gather my thoughts in the fifteen minutes ride, reading hastily the script and trying to remember the storyboards and the plans we’ve made for everything. It’s not really ideal filmmaking, and while the art of filmmaking actually happens on the set with the actors involved, it’s still not ideal to shoot six days a week; in five-days -shoot you rest one day and prepare for the coming week one day, now the preparation has to give.

But we’re already so far with the production, so in that way, it doesn’t really matter. We know the drill already, we know the characters, we know what kind of issues to expect and what probably will go easy. Although I wouldn’t call us a well-greased engine of an Alfa Romeo speeding down the highway, I’d say we are like a Massey-Ferguson 135 riding a Perkins AD3.152 diesel; a slow but sturdy thing that plows on, no matter what crashes in our way.

The flu came down hard on our crew. Lei, the 1st AD, dropped out of the game for a day, and we had to run the set with our 3rd AD Barron in the lead. Many others in the crew were coughing, complaining about sore throat (me included) and all that, so we felt like half-manned the whole day.

Our stunt coordinator – I’ve spoken about him a few times on this blog – is an intense guy. He has a bit of an personality on the set, which transpires in a way that sometimes it’s hard to get a good conversation going on with him, as he likes to run things his own way. But he’s lightning fast in devising new plans based on changes we make on set, and tireless with his crew, and while everything including wires takes a lot of time to accomplish, he is never sitting still.

Yesterday was all about that: wire stunts after wire stunts, trying to find the correct 1/6th gravity feel to the set. In many ways, trying to replicate a completely zero-gee effect would be easier – one-sixth has its’ challenges because things need to seem both low gravity at the same time, but also natural. But there’s nothing natural in low gee, but since it’s not completely zero-gee the movements usually land in somewhere in the uncanny valley which looks both realistic and fake the same time. There’s no real guide on how to get the effect working perfectly, you can only look at the camera and see if it is what you want or if it feels off. Usually, the “off-feeling” begins with legs: while being hanged from the ceiling with wires the low-weight effect on the body can be relatively easily faked, but since you can’t wire the legs separately, which form often a different body separated in two from the hip, they become the telltale feature which you need to control weirdly separately. Thus, all kind of crashes, trips and falls to the ground are extremely tricky, since while the body can be controlled by the wires, the legs need to be controlled by the actor themselves. If you are a really physical actor with a lot of martial arts training for example, this is not a problem, but since most of the actors are – well, versatile actors, no martial artists, finding the right tone is really hard.

I also found out the production will not grant another day off anymore before the end of the shoot, which means there’s ten more shooting days to go without a break ahead, and all of them are really, really demanding ones. And since the schedules for the Finnish shoot are so tight, we have to leave instantly the first thing after we finish the shoot here in China, so there’s no real time to even go shopping for souvenirs anymore, which is a bummer since I had come up with a perfect gift for my son here but hadn’t acquired it yet. Now I’ll have to figure out a way to get it somehow…

Anyway, I better try to keep my mind and body as clear as possible for the last 10 days, since it’s going to be very rough ride ahead, in order for us to finish the film. It’s not helping that I can sleep barely four hours a night for whatever reason… But, what can you do.

Good thing is that Annika will jump on the plane in no less than two days time, and we’ll be finally reunited for good, since she’ll travel back to Finland with me and then I’ll never move five feet further away from her for the rest of my life.

It’ll be a bit tricky promise to achieve but hey, if there is a will, there is a way.