Timo Vuorensola is the director of ‘Iron Sky’ and ‘Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning’. He also cofounded Wreckamovie.com, a crowd-sourcing film production platform where anyone can set up a project and find a community to collaborate with. It aims at developing the idea of community to filmmaking.

DFI: You created wrekcamovie.com for crowd-sourcing. How does it work?
Vuorensola: The process is simple: a filmmaker comes in with a film and starts using the community to do tasks. The community finds interesting tasks and – through a legal agreement – takes part in the production of the film by sharing their creativity or knowledge in order to help filmmaker get the film made.

The community can rate and comment each other’s work, and at best it works when there’s an iterative process behind every community entry – that it’s not just something one person does, but something a bunch of people have collaborated on.

DFI: It sounds great, but what are challenges with crowd-sourcing?
Vuorensola: Crowd-sourcing takes a bit of time and effort to get flowing. It’s not easy, especially if you are not used to working with a community and communicating with people via internet. It can be quite a drag in the beginning but it pays well in the end.

DFI: Are crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding particularly important given the current economic climate?
Vuorensola: For sure [but] recession or not, independent film will need additional funding, and crowd-funding will definitely become an important part of independent film financing. And not just independent, the studios will realise how important it will be to engage the audience during the production, and crowd-funding and sourcing are the best possible methods for this.

DFI: You crowd-sourced and funded ‘Iron Sky’ for resources and finances. What were your top three motives?
Vuorensola: To involve our audience, get them engaged to the production, and eventually finance the missing one million Euros of our budget.

DFI: Your 2005 film ‘Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning’ has been downloaded over eight million times. Did you expect it to be so popular?
Vuorensola: We had absolutely no idea. We knew that we would get a bunch of geeks from the internet interested, but we never ever realised it would become such a huge phenomenon.