Along with M dot Strange, this year's Berlinale Talent Campus also hosted Finnish filmmaker Timo Vuorensola who shared his experiences of DIY filmmaking, online movie distribution and film financing.

The beginning of Star Wreck

It all began in 1992 when Samuli Torssonen produced the first episode of a Star Trek parody in the style of a sci-fi animated computer game called Star Wreck. A few years later, Timo joined Torssonen’s team as an actor and sound technician for his project. A number of episodes were produced for the Web, culminating in the seventh episode, Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning. After the original director of the film withdrew from the project, Timo Vuorensola was promoted to directing duties by Torssonen.

Building a Community

Timo and his Trekkie friends have worked together as production company Energia on their feature-length sci-fi parody for seven years, with the help of hundreds of Star Wreck fans and a miniscule budget. They started to collaborate with the people over the Internet and involved them by asking them to join in making a "cool Star Trek film", which they finished in 2005. All episodes of the series and the movie are available for free download and viewing online and are offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives license.

Energia describe themselves on their YouTube channel as “a bunch of Finnish guys of questionable sanity” but after putting their seven-year labour of love onto their website, it became the most popular Finnish movie ever, reaching far beyond the niche Trekkie fan base. Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning was downloaded over 700,000 times in its first week of release, and it is estimated to have been downloaded around 8 million times in its life. Amazingly the fans did not only want to download Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, but also purchase the film on DVD:

Financing Iron Sky

Energia’s next science fiction comedy project Iron Sky is, according to their website, "a science fiction movie in which the Nazis, after losing the Second World War, left the Earth in spacecraft and headed for the dark side of the Moon in order to rebuild the Nazi empire in secret, and to conquer the Earth again once they’d regained their strength."

The project has a budget of approximately €4.5M. Due to the team’s success with Star Wreck and their existing YouTube fan base of 300,000 they have managed to secure over €1M already. In his speech at the Talent Campus Timo talked about Energia’s viral marketing strategy, how they are building a community and the funding of Iron Sky:

Watch the entire video here.