Slashdot Mirror
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."
it is also the only Finnish movie
its worth the watch, its quite good.
From their website:
p _subtitled_xvid.torrent
http://www-uk.starwreck.com/torrent/star_wreck_it
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.
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
Star Wreck 6 Finally Complete (August 22nd, 2005)
Star Wreck Released as Download (October 1st, 2005)
USE VERBS IN YOUR HEADLINES! Where is the verb? Star Trek Spoof is Top Finnish Movie! Does this piss anyone else off?
blog & fiction: jd87
can't wait for the slashdot effect on the torrent...it is rather sluggish.
Blog via SMS text messaging
Actually, Roddenberry's son, the guy who owns the rights to the Star Treck franchise, allows fan films to exist as long as they do not make ANY money from them. I don't think this is unreasonable at all, in fact I think it's pretty damn generous. There's an article in the recent issue of Wired that discusses another Star Trek fan project. 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 such as the shorts on AnimWatch, the stuff done by studios like , or the music from thousands of small bands too numerous to list here.
To be fair, they also spoofed Babylon 5.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I thought it was some newly invented star trek language, to get around the copyrights on Klingon.
Klingon is copyrighted, yes?
although this is still a good tactic.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Spoofs and such can't be prevented by the rights owner. For example, the Barbiegirl song, in Mattel v. MCA Records.
Fight Spammers!
Unfortunately, they wouldn't sell me a disc, citing "legal reasons." Oh well, maybe I'll buy a t-shirt or something.
Defenestrate Windows...
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.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
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.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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.
Then it would need to be "spoofs", at least in American English, since "Star Trek" would be considered a collective singular noun. In British English, if the rule for referring to collective nouns as plural even when the word itself seems singular, such as in the names of sporting teams, applies in this case, then I suppose the line could be misconstrued as you mention.
Before Star Wreck previous top movie was made 1955, and in 50 years it has gathered an audience of 2,8 million. The movie is called Unknown soldier (Tuntematon sotilas), and it is based on novel by Väinö Linna. Basically it's a story of a finnish army unit in second world war, and it's point is to tear down the myth of clean and heroic finnish soldier.
About Star Wreck being the most popular: can you really compare a strictly finnish audience with a potentially global audience? Excluding Aki Kaurismäki's Man without past, this is one of the few finnish movies, that have ever got any international distribution.
As a non-Finn who speaks fluent Finnish and has an extensive knowledge of the Finnish movie world let me add a few things on this fan movie.
The lead character is a sterotyped Finnish youth, i.e. loud, half-drunk, not very subtle nor very polite.
The plot is not that clear, but the special FX are not too bad.
Should you ever make the mistake to consider that this is a typical Finnish movie, please don't: go look for movies made by Aki Kaurismäki and see by yourself what a master Finnish director can produce.
All in all this is neither brilliant nor dreadful. Nothing to write home about either.
I recall a Star Wars spoof which was quite more successful at spoofing, but perhaps they got a "cease and desist" letter meanwhile...
Thufir Hawat
Part-time Mentat