Hacker Cinema
Iron Sky
2012 · Film · 93 min
Part of Iron Sky Collection
Directed by Timo Vuorensola
In the last moments of World War II, a secret Nazi space program evaded destruction by fleeing to the Dark Side of the Moon. During 70 years of utter secrecy, the Nazis construct a gigantic space fortress with a massive armada of flying saucers.
10 positive3 negative13 neutralfrom 26 commenters
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29 comments on Hacker News
Iron Sky is just a movie...as far as we can tell.
Collaborative writing (1), movie making (2), terrorist hunting (3), and volunteer forum moderation (4), are all things. Fanfiction (5) is also written for free.
All of these have been, in the past, variyng degrees of professional.
1. https://www.makeuseof.com/collaborative-fiction-sites-improve-writing-skills/
2. Iron Sky (2012), Moon (2009), Norwegian Ninja (2010) all involved free collaboration, to varying degrees.
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR6epSP_Xlw
4. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3491102.3517628
5. http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality
Reminds me of the intro to the movie "Iron sky"
It turns out they weren't in a secret nazi base under Antarctica, they were on the Moon.
There's a documentary about it here: :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Sky
Ok? Some military guy in Ukraine has a patch with a skull and... drumroll THE NAZI:S ALSO USED IMAGES OF (not-quite-the-same-looking) SKULLS!!!
If you are into this kind of scary stuff, I can warmly recomend a documentary from 2012 called Iron Sky. It really puts the American moon landings into a new light. No big surprise of course, since Americans often use eagle symbols, JUST LIKE THE NAZIS!!!
The truth is out there!
i like the treatment "Great Dictator" gets in the "Iron Sky" movie.
Have you seen Iron Sky?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1034314/
> The concept would never fly today
I mean I don't know if I would go that far; things like Hipster Hitler got a fair amount of traction, at least for a bit [0]. Hardly indicative of the entirety of human culture, and obviously it's not a major network sitcom like Hogan's Heroes (or Seinfeld).
Also, a staple of the Call of Duty franchise is a tongue-and-cheek mode of running around killing zombie Nazis, isn't it? (I admittedly haven't played it), and it's not like "Iron Sky"[1] was meant to be taken super seriously.
I think it's unnecessarily reductive to say "one generation is ok with subject X and another generation isn't." I don't think humans really form big, homogeneous groups completely based around the year they were born.
[0] http://www.hipsterhitler.com/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Sky
This is a very wise answer! This reminds me of the movie "Iron Sky" which involves Nazis on the Moon. I found the film surprisingly intelligent (at least more than I expected) and had some visually nice political commentary.
> On top of that, it seems like most big movies are formulaic, following the same pattern and not eliciting anything more than mild amusement
Yeah. The problem is that studios have gone risk-averse. A movie production can run way up to 250-300M US$ in budget plus promotion costs (earlier movies had analog reproduction and logistic costs, too, but most cinemas are digital now which has basically no distribution cost). So they tend to stick to either sequels or adaptations of popular comics, to reduce the risk of having to shoulder a 250M $ loss.
The same mindset exists in the cinema industry: either fill your screens with "blockbuster" movies and have an okay-ish visitor count, or risk having a couple indie films which gather no audience.
In old times, there was stuff like the German "Filmförderungsanstalt" (roughly translated to "movie subvention agency") which provided subventions and financial help to all parts of the chain - from production to distribution. But with costs increasing (labor, advertising, and especially the extremely expensive switch to digital), subventions don't have the same impact on production cost to also make indie films viable.
(Exceptions like Iron Sky proving the general rule)
> If hierarchy, market concentration, and single points of failure don't already exist, they will be reinvented.
From another point of view, if at least one point of responsibility does not exist, it will have to be reinvented. There have been plenty of times when I can't download something because, while I can find the torrent on a tracker, nobody is actually seeding it anymore. Sometimes nobody has been seeding some obscure file for years.
Nobody in the distributed protocol is responsible for keeping up old torrents, so nobody actually does. Then it becomes easier to go as Netflix or iTunes for an unpopular old movie than to torrent it.
I'm pretty sure this happened with Iron Sky when I wanted to watch it.
> "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" started as a low-budget picture rendered on Macs. In that film, if nobody touches it, it's CG. Ended up costing $70 million. Worldwide box office $50 million. Fail. "Iron Sky" was made for €7.5 million. Worldwide box office $11.5 million. Fail.
I know very little about the film industry, but is the box office the end of it? I was presuming that there was always some kind of long tail of modest cash flow from stuff like video rentals (days of yore) or online streaming services (present day). Is this a wrong assumption?
I don't know why Iron sky returning ~50% is not considered a success, but it is a pretty funny movie. Also if budgets are what we go buy, the Blair Witch project, which grossed nearly a 1/4 billion at a budget of 60k.
>> Netflix has no huge advantage.
Netflix has better data about what and how viewers watch, That gives it some advantage. than, a netflix one-hour episode cost about $5-$10 Million.Breaking Bad did costs $3M/ep. That's $5-$15 for a movie of content. About the cost of Iron Sky.
Than instead of spending a lot of money on marketing, they use their algorithm. And even if they do spend some money marketing online, it's easier, because consumption can be immediate and measured.
Than you have the favorable economics of TV series - it's basically a 20-30 movie sequels with very good customer loyalty. And there are no time limits - people can watch whenever they like, and the content has some value over years/decades.
Production cost is a problem, and technology has made it worse. Look at that long, long list of animators and technicians at the end of any effects-heavy film today. A cast of thousands.
In the late 1990s, when I was working on physics engines for animation, I was talking to a major Hollywood director. He'd done some of the first films that had both live and photorealistic CGI characters. He wanted to get the cost down, so he could make $20 million movies. At $20 million, he could direct; at $100 million, he was running a huge operation that had to have everything pre-planned in great detail.
His model was the early CGI cartoon, "Reboot". Reboot was a weekly half hour cartoon made by a staff of about 30. He wanted to get to that level of productivity at theater quality - make a 2 hour film in a month with 30 people.
That didn't happen. Not even close.
It's been tried. "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" started as a low-budget picture rendered on Macs. In that film, if nobody touches it, it's CG. Ended up costing $70 million. Worldwide box office $50 million. Fail. "Iron Sky" was made for €7.5 million. Worldwide box office $11.5 million. Fail.
There were successful low budget directors in the past, Roger Corman being the prime example. (His autobiography is titled "How I made a hundred movies in Hollywood and never lost a dime".) It's harder to do that today. Viewers today expect incredible production value. Most TV shows have more production value today than 70s movies did. Hollywood has so many people on set because they bring a team together on short notice to do a job, then disband the team. They need many competent people with different skills to make that work. If you cut corners, it looks like Youtube crap.
On big movies, we've mostly replaced set painters and carpenters with people who sit at workstations and do the same job with CG models. "Big" is now cheap, but "detailed" remains expensive. Procedural visual content generation can generate good landscapes and vegetation now (check out SpeedTree), but as yet, nobody has been able to procedurally generate one convincing block of a city street seen at ground level. Making GTA V cost $265 million. Not seeing an incoming reduction in production cost.
Netflix has no huge advantage. HBO is in the same position - they make content to sell to their own customers, and know exactly what sold. Data collection is retrospective. Trying to figure out what movies will be box office failures in advance remains hard. That's why Hollywood generates so many sequels - predictability.
In the 1990s, when I was working on animation software, I was told something like that by a major Hollywood director. He'd directed some of the early films that had both animation and live acting. The costs were high. What he really wanted was to get the overhead down, so he could make first-rate films for about $20M.
At the time, "Reboot", the first all 3D cartoon, was being cranked out at one episode per week by 30 people. He was hoping the technology would let him produce feature films with a similar sized staff. The idea was to pull in set models from a "digital back lot", green-screen in the actors, and go.
The technology didn't deliver that. Instead of a cast of thousands of actors, we now need thousands of animators. Look at the credits for any action movie today. There's just too much custom modeling, artwork, move matching, and manual editing of the edges of clipping paths. (The last two are outsourced grunt work and likely to be automated soon.) Viewers wanted photorealism, and that requires as much detail work as set-building.
People have tried to do CG action features on the cheap. "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" was supposed to be one. But that cost $70 million, and only made $54 million. (The semi-noir look didn't help. Done better, it might have been a franchise like Captain America.) Iron Sky (budget $10M, box office $8.1M) almost a decade later had much better effects; the CG isn't as obvious.
Other than low-budget horror features, most notably "Paranormal Activity", there haven't been many successful low-budget action movies in recent years.
Why shouldn't they be open to legal action?
I went to a special screening of Iron Sky. Some of the production of that was done in Australia. During the Q&A they were saying that due to Australian laws they can't do something like Kickstarter in Australia. If they took money to finance the film, the people giving the money would have been investors with rights. Basically a legal and logistical nightmare.
This doesn't sound unreasonable.
That's all self-censoring. The law says use of such symbols is fine if it serves art², however the agency tasked with judging the youth impact of games does not think games are art. However, that's just their opinion and does not reflect actual legality, since this was never challenged in court.
So, until they change their opinion, or a game company decides it's worth it and takes them to court, game companies just end up censoring themselves in advance so they don't have to deal with it in the first place.
² As mentioned here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9777854 , it was for example fine in the movie Iron Sky.
Germany has a law about this, with some exceptions that would specifically apply to cases like this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_§_86a
When a movie like Iron Sky has no problem being shown in German cinemas with the swastika left untouched, because it's clearly art, then it should be fairly obvious to Apple that banning historically accurate representations in historically accurate interactive art is far overreaching; though not legally, but ethically.
> Every scene is just genius :)
Specially the arcade-style fighting scene. Pure fucking genius!
The style and attitude of this movie (and that of the Danger 5 TV series) are incredibly well suited for parodying things we feel nostalgic about. Unlike the disappointing way in which Iron Sky tried to take itself seriously.
Wasn't this the basic plot of Iron Sky? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1034314/
Reminds me of that bit in Iron Sky ...
(not gonna spoil it for those who haven't seen it, it's a totally hilarious film about Nazis on the dark side of the moon, just go watch it)
Iron Sky : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1034314
It's funny, I look at all this and what comes to mind is the movie "Iron Sky" with its cleverly depicted political landscape. If you watched it, you'll understand :)
The US cheated their way into the Iraq war. Invaded Afghanistan. With Iran likely the next target. Stirred up the Middle East with Egypt, Libya, Syria on fire. Commit drone strikes worldwide. Kidnap and torture people on foreign soil. Keep half the world under surveillance. And the language they converse in is of demands and threats.
I think we have a major bully emerging here.
Hah, yeah I totally get that :) The brain seems to have to know what language they're listening to before it can understand it. And it takes just slightly too long:)
I noticed this again when watching Iron Sky, a movie with both English and German text (I am Dutch, and can understand both--though English is easier for me). For some reason the cinema showed a version with German subtitles for the English parts instead of the other way around. It was very hard to understand, especially because some scenes were English with German accent or vice versa. I'd hear the start of a scene, and--subtitles or not--I needed a few seconds to determine the language before I could comprehend what they were saying. So I missed the first few seconds of many scenes, because at the same time there was a lot going on on the screen, making it very hard to keep up.
(I did watch the movie again with English subtitles, and caught much more of the jokes--such as a Brazilian resembling the Führer's moustache. Great movie)
Author of Rolling Stone piece is focussing on the JOBS act as an enabler for stock fraud. They don't seem to be clear on its alternate function of enabling Quickstarter-type ventures where what's being sold isn't stock in a company that is trying to bypass accounting norms for an IPO, but a one-off product development (like the movie "Iron Sky", or any number of items on Quickstarter). It's a totally different business model.
(Random example: let's say I, as an author, announce that I'm going to write and sell a book if I can get enough pre-purchases; let's set the gate at 10,000 readers willing to pony up $10 each in order to receive an ebook when I've written it, a year down the line. Right now, as I understand it, if I was in the US I'd be expected to undergo the same accounting procedures as a corporation prepping for an IPO because of the number of people involved -- which would make it a non-starter: the accountant's bill alone would exceed the total revenue, especially as writing a book is a one-off project. The JOBS Act is supposed to relax that requirement for the sort of venture I'm describing. But Taibbi doesn't seem to get this at all.)
I'm not quite sure how they work, but one example of a better way to do movies might be the "Wreck a Movie" people. That Iron Sky movie they've been working on for a while is coming out early this year apparently.
Generally agreed. You need to pay for people's time. That is 100% certain. (There can of course be exceptions with lots of volunteer time like Iron Sky.)
Is equipment so expensive nowadays anymore? I don't think so. You can buy most with one month's median salary.
You can use still cameras nowadays, as their sensors and processors have sped up and they've overtaken traditional cinema cameras of a few years back already. They work quite well even in natural light. (Especially if you use a hack and enable high bit rate encoding.) You can edit with a normal computer. There are led lights etc. Cranes and dollies can be much lighter, simpler and cheaper with this modern technology too.
There's lots of possibilities of "lean" film making with this new technology.
I presume the revolution would happen in documentaries first as the technologically adventurous people wouldn't generally be those who have grand visions or are good at organizing the other parts like scripts, talent, sets etc the whole "running a play" thing.
Hell, there are character centric Dogma movies like Open Hearts that get rid of a lot of fancy technical stuff, and it never bothered me when watching them.
Look at what guys like Philip Bloom or Andrew Reid make with ordinary cameras. The freedom is already there, people just don't know how to use it.
There's collaborative movie producing site Wreck A Movie http://www.wreckamovie.com/ which is currently used to produce Iron Sky among other films.
I think Iron Sky will be so good that Wreck A Movie might gain some serious traction, checkout the trailer here http://www.ironsky.net/