Wreckamovie

» see wreckamovie.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The film traveled and the platform did not. Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning came out in 2005 as a free download, a Finnish Star Trek parody made over seven years by people with no money and a lot of rendering time, and it went everywhere a file could go in 2005. Wreckamovie was the company those same people built afterwards, to sell the method rather than the movie, and outside a small circle of independent filmmakers almost nobody used it.

It opened on 1 February 2007, run out of Tampere by Star Wreck Studios with Timo Vuorensola at the front of it. The idea followed directly from how the parody had been made. You post a film project, you break it into pieces small enough that a stranger can finish one in an evening, and you let people claim the pieces. Somebody storyboards a scene while somebody else models a ship, and whoever is good at Finnish subtitles ends up doing the Finnish subtitles.

The explicit rule was that the platform did not distinguish between professionals and amateurs, and that community involvement started at the script stage rather than at the marketing stage. That second part was the actual argument. Most crowd participation in film is bolted on at the end, when the thing is already finished and needs an audience. Wreckamovie put it at the beginning, when it could still change what got made.

By 2009 there were more than three hundred active projects on it. It took the MindTrek Grand Prix in 2008 with a prize of twenty thousand and eight euros, a number chosen to match the year.

~ the record ~

~ the film that made the platform ~

Star Wreck matters here because it is the proof the platform was selling. A parody feature with effects that had no business existing at that budget, given away rather than sold, assembled by volunteers who found the project on the internet. It reached an audience in the millions, mostly through file sharing, and it did so before the video-hosting era had properly started.

The follow-up was Iron Sky, the film about Nazis on the moon, which raised roughly twelve percent of its budget through Wreckamovie and used the platform for production help as well. That is a real result and it is also the ceiling. Twelve percent is a useful contribution and it is not a business model, and the projects that could pull it off were the ones that already had an audience from the last film.

~ open source for a crew ~

The design borrowed from open source deliberately. Task lists were public and anyone could take one, with credit accumulating where everybody could see it. That works for software because the output is text that merges, and because a contributor can test whether their piece functions before anyone else looks at it.

Film does not merge. A shot has to match the shot before it in a dozen ways that only one person can hold in their head at once. So the tasks that genuinely crowdsourced well were the separable ones: translation work, plus anything a volunteer could model or shoot alone at home. The parts that decide whether a film is any good stayed with the director, exactly as they always had. The platform was honest about being a way to find help, and help is not the same as authorship.

~ the last post on facebook ~

The shutdown was announced in October 2014 on the Wreckamovie Facebook page, and the dissolution is dated 13 October. There was no successor named and no promise of a return. A service built on the premise that you should not need somebody else's platform to make something together ended by posting a notice on somebody else's platform, which is the shape of that whole decade compressed into one administrative act.

I was not on it. In 2007 I was in Turkey doing engineering work and had no film to make, so my honest contact with any of this is having watched the Star Wreck phenomenon from the outside, as a download that people passed around.

~ what carried on without it ~

Vuorensola kept making films. Iron Sky came out in 2012 and got a sequel in 2019, both funded partly by the audience, so the crowd half of the idea survived intact. It just relocated to Kickstarter and Indiegogo, where the crowd's job was narrowed to paying, which is the version of participation that scales.

The production half went somewhere else entirely. Collaborative filmmaking by strangers is more common now than it was in 2007, except it happens on Discord servers and shared drives with no company behind it and nobody trying to build a platform out of it. wreckamovie.com now sits with a broker asking for money. The method outlived the website by a decade and never needed one.

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