“Star Wreck – In the Pirkinning” is not the greatest movie ever made. It is jam-packed with kitsch acting, puerile jokes and amazing CGI – just like the 100 million dollar Hollywood action blockbusters it parodies.
You can download it for free from www.starwreck.com
You’ll need Divx and bittorrent. Download the one with English subtitles!
There are several unique facets to this movie that give us hope for the future.
Firstly it was made totally outside any kind of studio system, Hollywood or otherwise. In fact it was made totally outside any kind of institutionalized moviemaking. It was made by a bunch of passionate young Finns, some of them unemployed, from Tampere, an industrial city in middle Finland. They made it in their spare time, using dozens of friends, ordinary computers for rendering the CGI, a small studio with a blue linoleum wall and semi-pro HD video equipment.
Why is this movie important?
::flippancy::
Star Wreck is important because it was designed to be downloaded for free. I haven’t talked to them, but I would guess that a) There are not too many costs to recover, so b) the business model involves what they will make off self-distributed DVD sales, self-distributed merchandising and rebellious fame. And c) it uses the BitTorrent rallying cry of `Give and you will receive’.
It also exploits the same convergent technical possibilities that the movie Sin City used – that you can create any kind of simulated worlds, environments and locations using computers and place real people fairly seamlessly in those worlds. To shoot the actors, you need only a small studio, minimal but creative lighting, a blue screen and lots of careful planning.
But perhaps the most interesting fact for the future of moviemaking is the whole concept of distributed moviemaking. When hundreds of people can make a small contribution to a large project, amazing things become possible. The world is full of `free’ video cameras, editing programs, layering and 3D programs. In fact you can buy the whole technology for yourself with change from 20k €. But why do even that=
In a world that is becoming increasingly wiki-ised, you no longer need big budgets and big organizations. As I’ve said before, if a million computer owners give just one hour of their time to assist in a major project, that is 1 million hours of work – ie over 100 YEARS OF WORK.
Some exec from Nokia told me once that all we have in Finland is trees and brains. This movie is an example of the innovative thinking that comes about when necessity breeds invention. Star Wreck is a pioneering work which will inspire countless others – just as has happened in the music industry following the so-called bedroom music explosion,
Star Wreck made me laugh a lot because I love kitsch. I hope you enjoy it too. Even if it is not your cup of tea, you have to admire the sheer technical balls that it took to bring the movie to your screen.
So what if the script is hokey? So what if the acting is amateur? So what if the CGI is as good as anything you’ll see? This type of distributed moviemaking will only get better. These people from Tampere were finding their way – inventing their own wheel. What they show us is that we don’t need Hollywood so much any more, just as newsblogs will eventually do away with newspapers.
Star Wreck is a celebration of creativity, not business. It is a celebration of free speech. It is also celebrates that `we the people’ can entertain ourselves in the way we want to be entertained – not as a member of some advertisers target group.
After watching this movie I became suddenly more optimistic about the future.
X-posted at ET
