1-18-08 Project Cloverfield - Warning! Spoilers

"Production charts have made it known that Drew Goddard will write CloverField 2. Cant really complain since the first movie was fantastic. IS it just me though or is JJ Abrams getting all the credit? Matt Reeves the directors name is hardly mentioned, nor is the writer. Anyrate I am sure you are all stoked for a sequel since so many of you loved the movie.

Paramount has to complete discussions with Reeves, Producer JJ Abrams and scribe Drew Goddard. Then of course they will have to spin together another tale for Cloverfield. Once that is complete what storyline can they go with? Another story out of the first break out? Or perhaps follow up on the ending of the first?" (source)

(via Variety) "Paramount's "Cloverfield" may have posted the biggest January opening of all time, but it's turning out to be more of a marketing win than a runaway crowd pleaser at the box office.

Pic plunged 68% in its second weekend at the domestic box office, putting "Cloverfield" in that category of films that rely on a huge opening weekend, akin to a much-hyped pay-per-view event.

But Par spent just $25 million to produce the movie, which has grossed $64.3 million in its first 10 days domestically, according to Rentrak. The film, still very early in its run abroad, has grossed $15 million internationally from only a few territories. Par, which likely spent as much marketing the movie as on the production budget, says the movie will easily be a financial success.

Experince a day in the life of a YMR scientist

Hello! In the morning I wake up and I go to work!

At work, samples excavated from the ocean floor are brought back to the lab and spread out on a Petri dish containing some 'media': Nutrients for growth that are combined with agar to form a solid surface! Bacteria that were present in the samples will then grow on the dish, forming a 'colony': Generally a small circle of billions of cells that all started from a single cell/spore in the sample! Each individual colony is then transferred to its own plate and grown so that you have a pure isolate: A pure strain of one bacterial type! Once we have those, they are transferred to a liquid media (also contains nutrients, but no agar, so it stays liquid) and grown in an incubator (keeps bacteria warm and shakes them to aerate the media).

This is called liquid fermentation! Whatever chemical compounds the bacteria might produce are often secreted from the inside of the cells into the surrounding liquid media. Afterwards we extract these compounds from the liquid media using a resin that broadly absorbs most compounds that would be interesting! This resin is then washed with organic solvents which transfers all these interesting compounds from the resin into the organic solvents. Organic solvents are things like ethanol, or acetone (in nail polish remover), dichloromethane (in paint thinner), etc.! These solvent washes, which now contain the compounds produced by the bacteria during fermentation, can then be concentrated and this produces a "crude extract": It contains a whole lot of compounds that were either produced by the bacteria or were present in the liquid media to begin with!

This crude extract (we generate thousands of extracts each year) is then tested in a screen to see if it has any interesting bioactivity! For example, somebody might develop a screen to see if a compound kills cancer cells. A simplified method might involve something like putting cancer cells into a dish, adding this crude extract, and then observing whether or not the cancer cells survive. In a real setting this would be very high throughput...each "dish" would be a tiny 'well' (about the volume of a few drops of water) arrayed in a 'plate'...a rectangular piece of plastic that contains a grid of these wells (usually plates contain 96, 384, or 1536 wells). So then each well of each plate would contain a few drops of a suspension of cancer cells. We add a different extract to each well and see if cancer cells live or die! This way you can screen thousands of compounds very quickly.

You could also do this to look for new antibiotics! Instead of putting cancer cells into each well, you'd put some sort of pathogenic bacteria that you want a new antibiotic against. In reality these screens often end up being a lot more complicated because people don't just want to kill cancer or bacteria cells outright (often these compounds would be toxic to regular human cells too), so they develop a screen that targets something really specific, like a particular protein involved in cancer pathways or something!

If one of these crude extracts turns up as a 'hit' on a screen, we then go about finding out what the specific compound is in the extract that's responsible for this interesting bioactivity! Remember that the crude extract contained everything the bacteria made, which can be hundreds to thousands of compounds. To do this, we perform a fractionation of the crude extract, in which these hundreds of compounds in a single extract are separated based on their chemical properties. This generates a series of fractions, so let’s say I had an extract with a thousand compounds that I separated into 100 fractions.

Now each fraction contains maybe 10 compounds. Each of these fractions is then rescreened, and hopefully we find that the bioactivity is in a particular fraction. Now we know the active compound is one of 10! We then repeat this fractionation process on these 10 compounds, rescreen them and find the active one, and then identify what that compound is. If it's a new compound, somebody would go about studying whether or not it could be a useful drug. So for example, using the screen, we might know that the compound kills pathogenic bacteria, but it wouldn't be a useful drug if it's too toxic to people, or gets broken down in the body too quickly, things like that! This might involve a “clinical trial”: Trying the drug on real people after it's been through plenty of tests and development!

After work, I go home and dine with my wife Akemi! Then I go to bed!

"Shells fired by M-1 tanks from the New York National Guard's 42nd Division just bounce off its hide. Same with MLRS and AT-4 rockets, missiles from F/A-18s and Mk 82 bombs dropped by a B-2 bomber. Infantry are like camouflaged candy to the five-legged, 500-foot-tall creature that flattens Manhattan and gobbles hipsters in the new movie Cloverfield. After the everyday weapons fail, in a last-ditch defense the U.S. military apparently deploys one of the most powerful non-nuclear bombs in its inventory: the Massive Ordnance Air-Burst, aka "Mother of All Bombs."

MOAB releases a cloud of combustible gas before igniting, creating a vacuum effect that pulverizes anything nearby and, at a distance, can turn bodies inside out, according to legend." (source)

• Tagruato Official Site >
• T.I.D.O wave >
  

CS: What were the specific visual inspirations for YOUR monster?

Reeves: We hired this guy Neville Page to design the monster, and he is a genius. We would go into his office and he would have what I affectionately referred to as his "Wall of Terror". On the wall were all sorts of bits of color, and as you got closer suddenly your interest turned to revulsion because those pictures were like pictures of intestines and eyeballs and pieces of animals. What he was doing was having a biological, evolutionary basis for every aspect of the creature. That was really cool because there are parts of the monster that can do things that we actually didn't have a place for in the movie, that's how thoroughly designed he was.

The key to it is that the monster was a baby. The monster was suffering from separation anxiety and was absolutely disoriented and pissed, "where's mommy?", and terrified. That was the most important aspect of the creature. Not only was he furious and in a rage but he was scared, because to me there's nothing scarier than something huge that's spooked. If you're at the circus and the elephants are going nuts you don't want to be near them. We talked with Neville about the idea of how when a horse gets spooked you see the whites under the bottom of its eye. He fleshed out those sort of details. We talked about wanting the monster to be different in that it was white. All these different aspects which were important to us. It developed in many different ways and it came down to what Neville was doing which was amazing.

CS: Any possibilities for a "Cloverfield" sequel?

Reeves: This was so fun 'cause we'd never done anything like it, and I think we'd want to find a similar challenge, to find a way to have its roots in this but be fresh and new, otherwise you're just repeating yourself. There's a moment on the Brooklyn Bridge, and there was a guy filming something on the side of the bridge, and Hud sees him filming and he turns over and he sees the ship that's been capsized and sees the headless Statue of Liberty, and then he turns back and this guy's briefly filming him. In my mind that was two movies intersecting for a brief moment, and I thought there was something interesting in the idea that this incident happened and there are so many different points of view, and there are several different movies at least happening that evening and we just saw one piece of another. That idea sort of tickled me. We'll have to see if anyone would want a sequel. If the movie does well and we find a compelling reason to do so then it would be fun to do a sequel.

Did you see the thing in the last shot? In the final shot there's a little something, and I don't wanna say what it is. The final shot before the titles. The stuff at Coney Island, there's a little something there and I don't want to give it away 'cause the fun is sort of to find it, but I will say this: there's a funny thing, you look at the shot and until you see it you don't see it and you really don't see it and obviously you don't 'cause none of you have seen it, but once you see it you'll never stop seeing it.

CS: It's the thing dropping in the water, right?

Reeves: Ahh, you saw it.

• Reeves Runs Merrily Through >

(via Wired.com) Japanese magazine Shonen Ace posted the first installment of a manga based on J.J. Abrams' new monster flick, Cloverfield, to its website last week. The tie-in manga, titled Cloverfield/Kishin, follows the story of a Japanese boy named Kishin whose fate is somehow tied into the apocalyptic events taking place in New York City. Artist Yoshiki Togawa will draw three more installments of the manga, with the next one slated for online release in late February. There aren’t any English translations available yet, so for those who are curious, here’s a brief synopsis:

The first chapter opens with Kishin helplessly being picked on at school. The bullies tease him about his mom being a weirdo (we find out she is dead in a flashback sequence). Just as a pretty classmate helps Kishin out, giving him back his stolen pants and untying his arms from behind his back, the school emergency alarm goes off. But that doesn’t mean he's off the hook yet –- the bullies decide to lock him in the gym storage space, snickering: "Isn't that what you're supposed to do in an emergency? Go somewhere safe when you're in danger? It's dangerous outside, with us here."

While this is going on in Japan, a cargo shipper at sea is anxiously waiting to dock. He has a baby on the way and can't wait to get home to his wife. Just as he's being reassured that they're not far from shore, a mysterious set of eyes starts to emerge from the sea. The last sentence reveals that Kishin and this monster are somehow tied together.

Check back to Underwire for a synopsis of Chapter Two.

"At the end of Cloverfield you can see something. Many believe that the origin of the Cloverfield monster is from space, and that might be true considering at the end of the movie something falls from the sky.

I still believe that the Targruto company was responsible b/c of their deep sea drilling, but maybe we'll find that out in the next movie.....i hope. The video isn't all that good and you might have to watch it in full screen, but i've seen the movie 3 times already and something does fall from the sky into the water....it happens on the horizon kinda near the boat."

"The creature-feature "Cloverfield" became the first monster hit released in 2008, debuting with $41 million, a record opening for January, according to studio estimates Sunday.

Paramount's tale of a giant reptile causing chaos in New York City surpassed the $35.9 million premiere weekend of the "Star Wars" special edition in 1997, the previous best for January. " (source)

"To understand just how fervent the buzz has been about the movie, you kind of have to look at how Paramount sold the movie in two completely different ways to two completely different audiences. Or, as I call it: The Tale of Two Cloverfield Campaigns"

"J.J. Abrams wanted to keep the movie's very existence under wraps until the debut of the teaser, which he'd already sketched out. ''When I was a kid, a trailer was the first place I ever heard about a movie,'' he says. ''I just thought the greatest thing in the world, the thing that would just blow my mind, would be if I saw a trailer for a movie that totally intrigued me but I had never heard of before.''

In April 2007, Abrams learned that in order to get Cloverfield's teaser hitched to Transformers, the filmmakers would have to submit something to Paramount ASAP. Problem was, filming hadn't started yet. In fact, Cloverfield's screenwriter, Drew Goddard, wasn't even finished with the movie's script due to the demands of his day job as a coexecutive producer on Lost. So instead of cobbling something together from existing footage, as most filmmakers do, Abrams & Co. awarded the teaser a shoot of its own.

According to Reeves, ''a large part of our 12-week prep for the whole movie was used just to prepare for the teaser.'' The actors, who had auditioned for the film without even knowing it was a monster movie, felt crunched too. ''We were like, 'What? We don't even have a script!' They gave us a couple pages of outline and we just went with it,'' says Odette Yustman, whose character spends most of the movie trapped in her apartment awaiting rescue. Improvising proved to be a blessing for the crew.

The film ''had a lot of complicated logistical issues,'' says Reeves. ''How do we do the special effects? How do we make it all look naturalistic? How do we edit? We used the trailer as a workshop; the experience taught us how to make the movie.''