Star Trek Spoof Top Finnish Movie

Dotnaught writes to tell us Reuters is reporting that the science fiction spoof "Star Wreck: in the Pirkinning" has become Finland's most viewed movie. From the article: " [...] relying on free distribution over the Internet to reach more than 3 million viewers in less than two months. "Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning" is a full-length feature in Finnish with English subtitles. It was made by a group of students and other amateur film makers with a bare-bones budget and a few home computers to create elaborate special effects."

Comments

Great movie

[updatelee]

its worth the watch, its quite good.

Re:Great movie

[h4rm0ny]

There's a sudden shift in the quality of the film about twenty minutes in, when they complete the spaceship. Something radical must have happened at that point in making it as it becomes much more impressive and a lot funnier.

They get Sheridan and Ivanova down perfectly. I've only ever seen a couple of episodes of Star Trek (thought it was grim), but Babylon V is very well parodied. Love the boot screen, on the weapon too (blink and you'll miss it).

Star Wreck...

[Donniedarkness]

It's quite good, I'm told. I've not got access to broadband, but I hear that it will be coming to DVD (not that anyone expects to make any money off of it). I'll be getting it, and from what I've heard it's one of those movies that I would buy on DVD even if I DID have access to broadband. I encourage anyone who has any intrest in it to check it out.

Re:Star Wreck...

[Anonymous Coward]

how about you just use mplayer which CAN play pal and ntsc :)

VERBS

[smart.id]

USE VERBS IN YOUR HEADLINES! Where is the verb? Star Trek Spoof is Top Finnish Movie! Does this piss anyone else off?

Re:Now downloading..

[Directrix1]

Creativity is not directly proportional to profit, therefore corporate America (including Joe Dumbass who let himself be bought a long time ago) do not care about relaxing any of these restrictions.

I watched it a couple weeks ago

[saskboy]

If you keep in mind that it's a comedy first, and a drama second, then you won't be disapointed. It's not supposed to be Star Trek, it's Star Wreck, another universe, so don't be whining about how it doesn't match Star Trek canon.

The ending kinda disapointed me, but mostly because I wanted more! So overall I think I gave it a [5/10] because for an amateur production it's 10/10, but up against real actors and writers it's more like a 3/10. The special effects are top drawer though, in any league.

For other Star Trek spinoffs, look up http://www.newvoyages.com/ they have two episodes of original Trek available for free by torrent. A third is on the way soon and features Star Trek TOS and Babylon 5 actor Walter Koenig [spelling?] - Chekov / Bester.

More Realistic

[miyako]

Amature films, as these guys have shown, are all the time becomming more realistc. With the computer power and high availability of digital camcorders any group of friends can write, film and star in a full length movie. With the open source Cinipaint and Blender special effects can even be done on a home computer that can rival a lot of the best special effects of movies from the mid to late 90's, and in some cases even very recent movies.
I've been working on just such a project, doing special effects for a fantasy film that's going to be shot in greece. The entire group consists of the writer/director, a camera/lighting guy, a makeup artist/costume designer, a set guy, 3 actors, an actress, 1 guy doing editing and postprocessing, and myself, doing CGI. That's 10 people, working on a budget of about 12,000. [shamless self-promotion] The script is quite a bit better than most of the dreck that comes out of hollywood- without having the pretentious or preachy feel that people (wrongly) associate with independent films. The makeup effects and costumes are top notch considering the budget (the makeup artist studied with Tom Savini of Night of the Living Dead fame), and the special effects are comming on quite nicely- there is a scene we affectionatley call "Helms Deep" with over 200 creatures that should be one of the main story arcs that I've been working on for about a month.
The movie is going to be released free on the net, with DVD sales hopefully making up for the financing that's come out of pocket from a lot of the people who've been working with the project.
I think this is the reason the MPAA is afraid of Peer to Peer networks, and the internet in general. People now have the ability to make and distribute movies all across the globe for less than the catering budget of most big hollywood movies. It's not that they are afraid that people are going to pirate their movies, it's that they are afraid people are going to make the obsolete.

Re:More Realistic

[RAMMS EIN]

``It's not that they are afraid that people are going to pirate their movies, it's that they are afraid people are going to make the obsolete.''

I'm pretty sure this goes for the RIAA. It's probably true that the spreading of music that P2P has brought about increases the popularity of the music, and it's not hard to imagine this would lead to increased sales of RIAA-endorsed media.

However, movies are different. A movie costs much more to make than a song, and ends up being watched far less often than most songs get listened to. So you both lose a lot more when someone gets your movie for free instead of paying you for it, and people are far less likely to pay for a movie once they've seen it.

In short, I think the movie industry has a good reason to fear lost sales due to piracy. In addition to that, of course, there's the fact that the 'net and distribution methods like Bittorrent facilitate competition. I couldn't say which is the bigger threat, though.

Re:More Realistic

[Maxo-Texas]

A large part of the reason movies are so expensive is what people in california cost.
In fact, I'd guess that over 60% of your 100 million dollar budget is not spent on physical consumables.

So... doing the math... thinking about how hollywood folks are different than skilled programmers... I can't see why outsourcing is not a severe threat to them too. There are millions of talented people who can make increasingly high quality entertainment for less and less money every day. At the very least, I can't see why you would spend $120k on an editor when you can get an editor in india for a tenth of that (who has probably edited a LOT more films since they still make a lot more films over there).

And as far as the 'talent' goes- I found at least a third of the actors in Star Wreck to be pro-level acting and only a couple seemed poor (after taking into account it's a spoof). I personally find it hard to get up the interest to see a Tom Cruise film since I don't respect him after the Brooke Shields thing where he came across as a world class idiot.

Now when I see MI I see Jim Phelps (world class idiot) fighting the bad guy (as an idiot) and going on a mission (as an idiot).

So seeing a decent looking actor, who can read the lines well and just play the damn part who doesn't have a trainload of baggage seems more appealing every day.

Re:well done

[Golias]

Personally I find it sad that far too much attention is paid to fan films and music mixes instead of the the truly inspiring original works...

An easy sentiment to applaud, but if said original works were so darn inspiring, wouldn't they manage to, oh I don't know, inspire more attention?

The flash-based Strongbad letters on homestarrunner.com managed to carve a niche mostly through word of mouth, as have various on-line comics such as Penny Arcade, Megatokyo, and Order of the Stick.

Now, the vast majority of people doing that sort of thing don't really manage to make any money (though Piro managed to quit his day job and live of t-shirt sales and book deals), but if something deserves attention in this content-starved age, it usually gets it.

Besides, spoof, fan-fiction, "shipper" stories, doujinshi, etc., are an art form in and of themselves. Some would argue that they are a more pure art from than the stories they are derived from, since they were motivated entirely by love of the subject matter and the desire to create, rather than to meet some TV station's shooting deadline and get a paycheck.

I'm not saying I'd rather read an erotic "Spuffy" fan fic than watch the final episode of Season 6, I'm just saying that there's really nothing that makes such a composition any better or worse, culturally speaking, than some starving writer's attempt at a first novel.

Re:Understood 'to be' or not 'to be'

[Timothy Chu]

The reason a verb is necessary is that the word "Spoof" could be interpreted as the verb, making the headline sound like Star Trek is doing the spoofing.

Re:Reuters forgot to mention

[Anonymous Coward]

(No, I don't know why Gillette use the same supply of cans for Scandinavia and the UK(!))

I do not know the reason why Gillette does that, maybe they have come to same conclusion as I have, citizens of UK are more close to Nordic people than they are to central european people. :)
For me it is easy to come by with the Brits, same kind of humour and attitude, weather can be harsh in both places and you can drink beer like real men and you are not some kind of wine sipping fancy-pants like those central/southern europeans. :)

Anyhow, what's up with all those double-dots above half the letters in Finnish? They're *everywhere*!

You mean letters ä and ö, right? Otherwise English and Finnish have exactly the same alphabets (well, okey. There is a letter å but that is a Swedish letter not to be found in any Finnish word). Ä and ö are vowels (just like a, e, i, o, u and y) and Finnish has a lot of vowels in it. For more info click here.