1-18-08 Project Cloverfield - Warning! Spoilers

"A lot of people worked hard for over a month creating some amazing extra features for the HD release of "Cloverfield." At first it looked like not many consumers would see these features, as the release was planned for HD-DVD like Paramount's other recent titles. But now that Toshiba's HD-DVD format is dead, Paramount is scrambling to release "Cloverfield" on Blu-ray - on the original HD-DVD street date. As a result, the current belief is that there's not enough time to program all the extra features (including lots of new story stuff, along the lines of the viral campaign's backstory) in time for the Blu-ray release, and all this great work will be scrapped. That would suck! So I'm hoping that if you and others help spread the word, maybe the fans could make enough noise to convince Paramount Home Entertainment's marketing division to postpone the Blu-ray release by a few weeks so the disc can include all the extra materials. Demand it!"

Thank you!

-"Anonymous"

Carolyn Porco, a former faculty member at the University of Arizona, will advise graphics technicians after the Star Trek film has been shot, lending a measure of credibility to the imaginary technology depicted onscreen. The movie, which depicts the early adventures of series icons Kirk and Spock, is due out in May 2009.

Porco, 54, served in a similar capacity for "Contact" (1997). She's the leader of the Imaging Science team on NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan, director of the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. and an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado.

"We dream of hope. We dream of change. Of fire, of love, of death. And then it happens. The dream becomes real. And the answer to this quest, this need to solve life's mysteries finally shows itself. Like the glowing light of a new dawn. So much struggle for meaning, for purpose. And in the end, we find it only in each other. Our shared experience of the fantastic. And the mundane. The simple human need to find a kindred, to connect. And to know in our hearts... that we are not alone."

- Dr. Mohinder Suresh

"It's not hard to find Phil Tippett, who is waiting upstairs in the main building of his special-effects studio in Berkeley. Just follow the trail of Tyrannosaurus rex models, which are scattered liberally among the memorabilia from scores of science fiction films he's contributed to since his groundbreaking work on "Star Wars."

"Little boys diverge into two groups: One goes into trucks and the other goes into dinosaurs," he says. "I went into dinosaurs."

Among the special-effects pioneers of his era, many of whom have settled in the Bay Area, Tippett is a bit of a dinosaur himself. The Berkeley native carried the stop-motion animation torch longer than anyone else, and was so despondent when computer graphics took over the industry in the early 1990s, that he became physically ill.

But a decade and a half later, his studio continues to thrive - known for its superior creature effects. Tippett Studio was responsible for the monster in "Cloverfield," and the studio teamed with Industrial Light & Magic to create various beasts for "The Spiderwick Chronicles." Tippett's resume already contained a toy chest's worth of science fiction geek icons, starting with the animated chessboard monsters in "Star Wars" and the stop-motion AT-AT snow walkers in "The Empire Strikes Back."

"Phil's like this big blustery guy - he's grumpy but he's also funny," says Spiderwick animation supervisor Todd Labonte, who has worked at Tippett Studio for almost a decade. "And then you start talking about work, and he has this great understanding of animation and animal behavior." (...continue)