Author: Timo Vuorensola

Well, the fact is that while everyone else is enjoying the warmth of their families around the world, we keep on shooting. On the Christmas eve, we continued the scene we had started the yesterday, and went on to shoot until over 6 pm. Then, we had to wrap, because the production had planned a big banquet for the whole film crew, which was a great little Christmas gift from them. We hadn’t had the halfway-through -party because it’s really not a tradition in Finland, but this time the production decided they wanted to have a chance to thank the hard-working crew and invited everyone for a beautiful dinner held at the La Meridien hotel, just across the street from ours.

Chinese parties are different from the Western ones, I’ve learned. Where as the halfway parties in Europe are mostly about getting wasted and having a bit of food, staying up late and doing things you regret the rest of the production, the Chinese style is much more civilized: everyone gathers into a big room, there’s food, there’s drink, there’s speeches, people go between tables thanking everyone for the work they’ve had and then they go home. It was not even 10pm when we Finn found out we were the last ones in the room still filling up our glasses and having a laugh.

But it was so nice to have a chance to see the crew in a merry non-work-related situation, and great to have a chance to talk with many people I didn’t know too well at all, and to thank so many important people who easily get forgotten amidst all the chaos of a shooting day. We shared so many glasses of white wine with many great people and had a great time, and then, well, back to the hotel (they did suggest we should go to a KTV, but I decided against it, I wanted to have a rest).

We had few more drinks with Mika and Iiris at their hotel room, which Iiris had set up beautifully with lights and Christmas music. But the truth was, I was missing Annika, my son, my sister and my parents more than any other day before. Being thousands of kilometers away on such a great family holiday felt like a sting, and even calling them to say Christmas greetings was hard. It made it so clear that I was here all alone while everyone else gets to be with their families. I always thought I’m not much of a Christmas person, but the further away you are from your loved ones, the more important the day starts to feel.

Well, Lin Feng and Da Fei are gone – for now. On Saturday, we finished off the work with these two talented, young actors who joined the production very early on and made a terrific job creating two unique roles, best friends on screen and hopefully off-screen as well! There’s very little to say after such an adventure that wouldn’t feel somewhat inadequate, and handing them the flowers from the production and sending them off their merry ways felt sad but of course, very positive at the same time. It means we’re getting closer to the actual wrap, but at the same time, there’s still a lot of very challenging days ahead of us. Also, they are actually not really wrapped yet, we will call them back for one more day of reshoots – but the principal photography for them is done!

Changing to a new set takes always a long time, and after wrapping the two guys we went to the next studio and started prepping that one. It took forever to get started, the moonbase set was complicated, very technical with loads of green screen, complicated wireworks on the roof, opening and closing electronic doors and whatnot, but the set is beautiful. A big rotunda and separate, very scifi-like high-tech rooms just make a great set for us to use. The set department led by mr. Wang had been working hard on every set, but this was their masterpiece.

We did manage to get everything together as the evening grew older, and shot some nice opening shots for the scene. Shooting stuff in such a fantastic location does lift the story to the air, and finally everything starts to fit together. One thing for sure with this film is that there’s quite a lot to look at in it.

Also, today was the day before the Christmas eve, so the atmosphere was giddy. All in all, a fun shooting day! Oh, and Iiris arrived to the city, so there’s one more Finn in town now!

There’s no place like home! Even if it’s someone else’s home, and especially home of a character in a movie! Friday, our journey took us to the other side of the town, to a small studio we had been shooting before a hospital scene, and now came back for few scenes taking place in the home of our main character, Fang Qing, played by Vivienne Tien.

The scene included preparing dumplings, and it was actually very tightly devised in conjunction with mr. Duan Yihong, actor of Fang Mingtao, the father of Fang Qing. He had been very insistent on the importance of the preparation of dumplings through all of our discussions, and I had always been wondering why are they so important; but as I saw him playing the character preparing dumplings – the most everyday thing to do – in his home for his daughter, I understood what he meant. Through dumpling cooking, he was able to bring many layers to the characters, their relationships with other characters and make the scenes alive and feel real.

Surprisingly, it turned out the day was also in China the national Dumpling-Eating Day, something to do with the coming of the winter and eating the dumplings, so what better scene to shoot then! The whole day was very low-key, character-oriented and actor-driven, so it was relatively relaxing experience. It also was the last day of our wonderful steadycam guy Ants, who went back home in Estonia after the shoot. For the martini shot for him, we decided to do the last scene of the day with one single steadycam shot, and it was beautiful – and very complicated. Follow the character as she enters through the door, go to her side, the lower down on the level of the table to find the bowl of dumplings and message from the dad on a ipad, pick up the pad, the camera rises on an over-the-shoulder-shot, we read the message, then travel around the character to get her face on the shot, the back up to let her walk few steps and make a phone call. All in one shot, very dynamic, very film-like. A great sendoff for the man!

Poor mr. Duan, though: he had to eat at least five to six huge plates of dumplings for us to get the scene, so by the time we were almost done he informed he can’t physically fit one more dumpling in him – his side of the action was done. That was all fine for me, so we moved on.

And yeah, for dinner we had some dumplings.

We’ve been lucky to not to have had any serious accidents on the set, but on Thursday it was very close to get someone really hurt. The set – a spaceship interior – was built in a way that it had the roof that was almost like a cap on top of a kettle. This cap was easily removable to get our cameras in, and something we could then either take out or put back on whenever needed.

Me and Lei were talking with mr. Duan in his trailer, discussing the scene of the day, while rest of the guys were were working on the set. As we arrived to the set, I saw there was something wrong: the whole roof structure had snapped off from the ropes that hung it in the air, and it had crashed down on the set, while there were eight people in. Somehow luckily everyone had managed to duck down and nobody got hurt, but that was something of a major accident if someone had been there sitting in the chairs… It was pretty scary.

All in all, the day was plagued with problems after problems. After finishing the scenes upstairs with one of our actors, Jang Yi, whom we also wrapped, it was time for the spacesuits again. Now we learned that yeah, one can’t wear the helmet and breath at the same time. We tried running the scene whatever way we could, but always when it was time to go for the closeups, the faces were all foggy and nobody could see anything.

I was frustrated. I told the costume team that next time they come up with a special costume, they need to test it in practice; and I had warned about the issues beforehand, since I’ve had my share of working with spacesuits of different kind on film before, but guess you have to learn it again and again… Anyway, we really didn’t finis the day; not even close. At one point, I decided it’s time to stop this stupid game and decided to call the shoot off for the day. No reason to put the actors through these troubles, better find another time to come back and do the scene with costumes that are actually working…

Sometimes, it can be like that. Nothing goes as planned, and no matter how hard you bang your head against the brick wall, you’ll never get through, so better luck next time.

Spacesuits are every scifi filmmaker’s headache. The first truth is that real spacesuits are hard to come by, just because they cost so much (around twelve million dollars for a proper, working flight suit) and nobody really likes renting them out. The other reason is that they are always quite old ones: the ones we are used to see astronauts, the ones in our collective understanding of the word “astronaut” are actually from the 80’s. Nowadays spacesuits are of course vastly different, and even harder to come by. So it’s not a surprise you end up creating your own spacesuits instead.

But the trick is, when you create a suit of your own, you’ll end up in quite a ditch. In first Iron Sky, we made a spacesuit, but to be honest, it wasn’t that amazing. It was made out of foam and some specifically designed parts, but the whole thing looks just a bit funny. We also had another spacesuit for Washington, which was closer to “modern” spacesuit design – at least proposed design, but that, too was quite hard to operate: stiff and clumsy.

For Iron Sky 2, we didn’t luckily need a spacesuit, and for one advertisement I did we made a spacesuit out of kind of paper cloth, which turned out to look quite passable. But for Iron Sky: The Ark, I wanted to have a proper, real spacesuit instead. So that’s what we ordered from a special factory.

The plans were already in motion few months ago, and I already saw the first, rough version of the spacesuit before we started to shoot in Beijing, but only on Wednesday they finally managed to finish the actual spacesuits. And yeah, they were beautiful, but also, very complicated to shoot with.

In order to make it wearable for a human, there needs to be an elaborate ventilation system inside the suit. Dressing up takes around half an hour, and the first thing they showed me about the spacesuits was that they were completely clean, spanking new, without any patina on it. Although the suits are supposed to be new for the astronauts, having an unpatinated clothes on screen just looks wrong.

So in addition to the half-an-hour dressing up, I asked them to make it look good on the screen, and that took another three four hours. Luckily Mika was ahead of his game, grabbed the camera an instead of us sitting there with thumbs up our asses, we went to another studio to shoot some missing pickups, small splinter scenes and so forth, so by the time the suits were finally made and finished and ready to wear, we actually had shot quite a lot of our required stuff of the latter part of the day. The team was a bit confused when we were running with cameras between studios, grabbing a shot here, another there, but finally as we were able to set up the scene, we were really happy with the end result. The suit looks great. The only problem is, you can’t wear the helmet. There is a small air ventilator on it, but truth is, you put it on and start breathing, the visor gets foggy in minutes. Taking it off and cleaning it takes forever.

So, the only solution is to go CGI. That means, every shot with the actor wearing the helmet, we need to do a CGI visor for it. It’s going to be quite a big job I can tell you that much…

Once we started shooting the main scene of the day, things did roll quite nicely. We fished some beautiful shots, good moments with our actors and finished the day as a winner, after all the hardships. The costume troubles wouldn’t be over, but at least we got that one scene done!

My brother died a year ago, on 19th of December in 2016.

The day was the worst of my life. We were driving with Annika and Pekka to a ski center in Helsinki. The mood was giddy, we were listening to some 90’s snowboard punk, I was rather nervous because it was to be my first time snowboarding, but Annika and Pekka promised me I’d learn to love the sport. (Later on, it turned out, they were wrong.)

The phonecall was just a regular one, my dad. He sounded slightly distant, but I couldn’t read between the lines that something had happened. I answered my typical way, happy to hear of him.

Then: “I have bad news. Ville has died.”

The feeling was strange: a dark cloud engulfed my head in mere seconds. Everything outside faded into darkness and it was just myself, and my father on the other end, and the knowledge that one of the most loved persons in our lives would be no more.

And the worst was, he had died thousands of kilometers away from home, in Nigeria, where he had gone to meet his children. He had been expecting the trip so much, but from the beginning I had the feeling something wasn’t right with the trip. Starting with the way he got his flight tickets was dubious to say the least: the father of the mother of his children had purchased the tickets to ask him to help them with the house, but as soon as they got there, the family had ended up in some kind of a row and they had to move out. A lot of strange things were going on around that time and I was afraid there would be some bigger troubles lined up, but I didn’t expect this. Nobody did.

After my father’s phonecall, all hell broke loose. I had no time to even realize what had happened – and I didn’t know, all I knew was that he was dead – before I had to start dealing with the Nigerian hospital staff, discussing things like autopsy, how much the hospital bill would be and how to transport the body to Finland. My family around me was breaking apart and I was thousands of kilometers away from anywhere where I could be of any help, talking in phone with people I had no idea who they were asking me thousands of dollars immediately, talking with an English accent I just couldn’t understand (the Nigerians have a very peculiar way to speak English).

I still have only a faint understanding of what transpired on the evening and night of my brother’s death, but the bottom line is that he had been complaining about being slightly sick – and then, even more sick – to his friends in Finland. I know he didn’t tell about this to us because he didn’t want us to worry, the ones who worried about him anyway quite a lot. I bet he didn’t have any idea how ill he actually was.

He had no idea he would not wake up the next morning.

It’s interesting to see how many strings and nerve ends we create around ourselves. We may find ourselves in a place where we think we’re very alone, but in reality, we are hubs emanating memories, history, future, expectations, stories, longing and love, nerve connections that pulsate through the whole society constantly. If a hub gets cut out, it hurts so many people. The closer and the more connections, the harder it hurts, but the ripples can be felt far away. We are never alone.

We still don’t know for sure what took him.

First, it was suspected to be malaria, but just few weeks ago as I got the autopsy reports, it turned out it was something else: an unindentified hemorragic fever. These fevers are rather rare, but can be transferred to a human by something as small as a mosquito bite.

So, just bad luck.

Nevertheless, he’s gone. There’s one fewer of us, the sons and daughters of Juurikatu. He is missed not only by his family, but also his friends in Tampere and all over the world. He was known as Pee-Pee in the Finnish rap circles, he recorded an EP few years back. His plan was to write new music while in Nigeria. He had two kids – twins.

He was not without flaws, but the most important thing about him was that he had a kind, loving heart and crooked sense of humour. We shared with him a very specific kind of dry comedic view on life. He was a fighter, and although life wasn’t too kind for him, he soldiered through it. I consider he died a happy man: he was where he wanted to be, with his kids, in a country he loved, with a bright future ahead of him. Sadly, he never got there. I miss him daily.

His death left a gaping hole in me. It’s now been a year, and I still feel the cloud of grief washing over me when I look at his photos, listen to his Whatsapp messages. He was only person whom I had known for all of his life. The older we get, the more important these kind of long-running connections are. Friends fade in and out, family stays; now, there’s one fewer of us. All the things he missed, seeing his children grow, all the people he would meet… It kills me to think of all this.

Annika was there for me, when it all went down, and she was there through it all. She saw me on my darkest moments, she saw our family going through a tragedy of such magnitude. She held my hand, wept with me, sat next to me at the small, simple chapel where he lied in a simple casket. She walked with me through the icy graveyard, just as the sun crept out from behind the clouds to greet him on his final journey, as I carried his urn of ashes down to his final resting place. The last time I held him. Thank you for that, Annika.

And thank you, Ville. So much was lost when you left us, but that’s because you brought so much more into our lives.

Rest in peace, brother.

This here is a personal account on things I wanted to put in writing to my diary, which has helped me through the loneliness in China and I would’ve neglected my brother’s memory if I hadn’t spoke about him here. Nevertheless, I sincerely ask no entity quotes it, writes articles based on it or attempts to create a story out of it.  

Working with a bilingual script has it’s perils. Sometimes things that seem completely negligible might turn around to be the huge problems. This week, we’ve had our share of translation issues that have required us to reshoot quite some bits indeed.

On Monday, after the day off we came back to work and started to put together a new scene. Getting things in shape was quite complicated, since we had shot the first part of the scene the earlier week with Andy, and then on Friday we had a stunt unit shooting one specific shot for the scene, as we were on location elsewhere working with the main cast, and now we would come back to finish the scene.

The scene itself had a direct connection to another scene which would take place some 40 scenes later, that’s around 30 minutes on the final film, and the translation problem which affected the current scene started actually there, in a scene which would take place much later in the movie, but one we had already shot.

See, shooting a film very rarely happens chronologically. It would be ideal for the actors, and also for continuity and directing, as well, but in reality, there are many other things that are playing a big part there: cast availability, location / set availability, set building restrictions and plain old scheduling and money. Thus, the schedule needs to be broken down into days that are easiest to achieve, and that means the days get all messed up. I personally hate to shoot the last scenes on the beginning of the shoot, because then the characters are not quite there yet, but sometimes there’s nothing you can do about it.

Nevertheless, the said scene had one sentence in English which suggested something else than the Chinese original version, but since I don’t really speak Chinese, I relied on the English translation, and shot the scene the wrong way, in a way that wouldn’t make sense for the scene that would happen earlier in the movie. Yeah, complicated. And add few broken phones in between and you get into a real mess indeed.

The continuity issue was spotted by our youngest actor Ling Yi, and as we looked into it, it started to snowball bigger and bigger until we had quite a conundrum to solve indeed. Solving things on the set of this scale is usually quite chaotic, and when the producer heard of this he started calling Lei and things got even more desperate. The only solution we could do at this point was to reschedule a reshoot for the scene we had already shot – which, given our ridiculously tight schedule – is already nearly impossible.

After solving the issue, we had the next issue in our hands: four pages of script to shoot, plus a full-fletched action scene whom nobody had choreographed. So, 45 minutes remaining of the day, we started to set up a shootout without any idea what to do. Luckily, that’s when my brain seems to usually kickstart the most effective way, and I gained control of the situation through a very clear and precise set of instructions I came up on the fly, and acted like I knew exactly what I was doing. It’s one of the director tricks: if things get desperate, act like you know exactly what you are doing. This gets the team stop thinking, wondering and questioning and just blindly following your lead. If it leads to a bad result, at least you gave it a try – but usually, the energy of such situations create value of its’ own, and you’ll get a completely passable scene done anyhow.

In the end, we got (almost) everything we needed, and although few days later we recognized because of yet another translation error that actually there was one more shot to be done, I walked home pretty happy about the day’s results.

Well, I had it coming. I woke up feeling rather rotten on the morning, and the reason was not far to be found: yesterday’s sitting in the freezing cold weather got me a nice flu, and now I’ve been mostly in my bed, sneezing and lazying around, doing mostly nothing. Isn’t that what they say, the most loyal workers are the ones who fall sick on their free time…

During the day, I wasn’t feeling too bad. I watched a movie (Andy Garcia / Dustin Hoffman -pic “Hero” – I quite liked it!) and had some lunch from the room service. I spent most of the time in my bed, catching up with blogging, dozing off every now and then, talked with my son who had been out in the city shopping with his friend without any adults around for the first time, and I felt that time does fly: it wasn’t so long ago that he was just a little baby, now he’s turning into a teenager. Wow.

Mika and Ants asked me if I’d like to join them for shopping in Qingdao, but I decided to stay in, trying to focus on myself. I went to the gym and then had a nice, hot sauna (I may have mentioned it but there is a really nice Finnish Harvia sauna downstairs my hotel!), then went for a great dinner at the Thai restaurant downstairs, enjoying some soup, beef salad and pork neck.

I did do some work, too, of course. Interestingly, the shoot of Iron Sky: The Ark will finish in Finland. We are planning to shoot two last shooting days in Turku, Finland because we couldn’t find the right kind of a location and extras from China, so we decided to head over to Finland to finish the film off. The dates are in mid-January, and finally I got enough free headspace to start thinking about that part. Funnily, I’ve never really shot in Finland, save maybe some small promos or commercials – actual filming I’ve always done abroad, so this will be new to me, too!

I also took a peek at next week’s schedule. Already tomorrow, we have a rough day ahead of us. Four pages of text including a fight sequence, and all the remaining cast working through the whole day – that’s five main cast actors. Dealing with that will be a huge challenge, especially if it takes a while to get the day started, which I anticipate it will since it’s a very strange shooting day all in all. The stunt coordinator has already shot one shot to the scene, so I have to pick up the scene from where he left it. That’ll be a puzzle…

I was really pissed off at the production for not having the day after Andy’s departure a day off, but instead scheduling a long outdoor scene to the end of the day. 6:15 pickup was pure bullshit scheduling, when I would’ve really needed a day of rest and reset after such an intensive push with Andy; now, I had to readjust my brains in just few hours to a completely new setting and have only few hours of sleep in between.

Well, what can you do. There I was sitting in a car at 6:45 (yeah, I was late…) headed to a Qingdao Tech University for the shoot. The sun was making its’ way through the thick layer of pollution, which gave an eerie feeling to the morning traffic. I tried napping during the long car drive, but couldn’t get to sleep. David Bowie was singing in the background and I let myself drift through the last week’s shoot eating my bacon and croissants.

Since this would be the last outdoor shooting day and there was no big name actors involved, I knew already the production hadn’t bothered with trailers. But this time, I had my long johns on, so nothing could stop me, not even the freezing Qingdao winds. I was wrong. After sitting in my monitor in the freezing wind for few hours, my legs felt like ice sticks and my face was frozen over.

The first part of the scene was really jumpy. I liked the way the scene read on the paper, but didn’t like the location that much, and the conditions were not nice. I was – the whole team, actually – were all very tired after the big push this week, so everything worked a little slower this time. I tried to tackle the scene but couldn’t get my head around it, and didn’t have time to solve it properly. We had been scheduled for four and a half pages of scenes to be shot for the day, which was a *lot*, and got stuck right in the first lines.

We had to change some of the dialogue on the fly and fiddle with the props and costumes, and all had to be done in a sub-zero temperature. Yeah, the sun was out but somehow it doesn’t warm here the same way. I was grumpy after we finished the first bit, and went out to McDonald’s for a healthy lunch.

We did take our time on the lunch and coming back realized we had been longer out there than we realized. Our production manager was pissed off, complaining to me in Chinese something I understood had to do with the time. Also, we had a scene coming up with a girl in a skimpy dress, and we just couldn’t and didn’t want to put her standing there in the wind for hours. She would freeze over and die, so we changed the scene a bit and put her sitting in a nice car instead. It worked perfectly and gave the character an aura of respect around her, and suddenly, the rest of the day – the remaining 3 pages – went flying by. By the time the sun dipped below the horizon we wrapped the day and went on our merry ways to enjoy the day off the next day, with a nice two scenes in the bag!

Mika wanted to go out to have a dinner at the Big Tits Seafood, and we took Ants and David with us and had some raw beer and seafood hot pot under her watchful big tits and cheerful smile.

A great week done, few more to go!

Andy’s last day was packed, since we had to do every last closeup we could ever imagine with Andy, plus two scenes, out of which the other one was quite a heavy one. What I loved working with Andy was his ability to come up with great, improvised ideas to freshen up a scene. He taught me a way he likes to work, calling it “free takes” – a director gives the actors a free take, which means he gives no directions and they can do whatever they want. Coppola does them, for example.

So whenever I gave the actors – especially Andy – the free takes, they usually brought up something that’s just brilliant for the scene and definitely will stay in the movie. For example, we were working on one scene which was just two guys meeting in a room. Nothing wrong with the scene, but the staging felt dull. Then, Andy suggested that what if instead he was laying flat on the floor, in a strange yoga pose, to bring up the eccentricity of the character instead. That sounded first like a really bad idea, but when we ran the scene few times, it became the one greatest thing in the scene.

The whole shoot was full of that kind of moments, where he just with his personality and sense of filmmaking was able to bring up that little something that sets good scenes apart from regular scenes. I was watching the other day some scenes that had been edited from the movie, and the character – actually, all the characters – just work brilliantly.  It’s too early to say how the whole film works, but at least I know we have a good handful of great scenes to work with.

After the whole day was done, we finally wrapped Andy with flowers and a glass of Maker’s Mark. I thanked him – and his amazing assistant Joe – for their work here in China and the trust he had given to us joining the project, and wished him well. We planned the last dinner together but instead decided to call it a night – I had a terrible 6am pickup and they had an early flight.

Arriving to the hotel room I was feeling weirdly empty inside. I had built so much expectations to working with Andy Garcia, and we had such an intensive weeks working together creating great scenes and moments, and now he was already wrapped. That also meant the whole film would actually be on its’ real, final stretch. The next week, I would be wrapping Lin Feng and Da Fei, the leading male and his best friend! Then, it would be only mr. Duan, Rhydian and Vivienne left for the last few weeks.

It’s incredible to realize that there is less than a month to go until we wrap the whole film.

When I started this job coming over 131 days ago in Beijing, I wasn’t even sure we’d be able to start shooting. We had so many challenges ahead of us, and I was so afraid of our shooting schedule falling apart, but here we are, I can already see the finish line.

Of course, I shouldn’t be fooled by it. There’s still a lot to go, and the last mile is, as they say, the hardest.