Cloverfield Widget Contest

Check out this exclusive footage, and grab the widget to put on your site. We can both win prizes from the Cloverfield production company.

Slusho! Commercial Contest

You can now enter the contest on the Slusho! site. Create a commercial for Slusho! Here's their example:

Cloverfield Movie Updates are....HUGE!

The puppet masters behind the Cloverfield movie have created an amazing situation, where the line between art and life are blurred. They have built sites, characters, and events to give a sense of real events happening in real time. It is an unfolding backstory for the movie, but it also draws pre-launch fans into the action. There are two worlds, the Cloverfield movie world and our reality, and in both of them key events are taking place on 1-18-08.

Here's a list to catch up with changes in the 'campaign':
(Note - much of this first came to my attention by the great investigative work at Unfiction, and the up to the minute reporting at Cloverfield Clues and 11808.blogspot.com.

9/29--New Picture with New Clue
A new picture showed up on the 1-18-08.com site, of a Japanese cook. When you flipped the picture over with your mouse, there was a recipe in Japanese.

9/30--Tagruato.jp Site Discovered
Translating the recipe lead fan (Mr. Toasty) to discover the site Tagruato.jp.
Tagruato.jp is the site for a global corporation, of which Slusho! is just one of their subsidiaries. Other companies they own include ParafFun!, Bold Futura, and Yoshida Medical Research (YMR).

Descriptions from their site:

ParafFun! Wax Distributors - One of the many byproducts of our Petroleum reservoir is paraffin wax, an alkane with dozens of handy uses in your day to day life!

"Bold Futura is the contractor sector of our company principally engaged in the conception, design, manufacture and integration of advanced technology products."

"YMR is a genetic research firm specializing in deep sea bioprospecting."

The Tagruato site also shows the locations of deep sea drilling operations they have, includeing the Chuai Station in the Atlantic, not too far from NYC.

11/21--Research Surfaces on Danger of Slusho!
The Tagruato site posted a press release denying claims that their Slusho! product could be dangerous, or at the least untested adequately for human consumption. The Tagruato release refers to a claim by the "Ravaille Research Center". More on this Tagruato release.

11/23--Tagruato Site Hacked
The Tagruato site appears to be "hacked" by an activist or activist group. They put up a single picture showing the CEO, Ganu Yoshida, with devil horns. The picture also has four sea creatures and a big wave. There were clues to the precise sea creatures depicted, and they were deciphered to be:
Tanner Crab
Irukandji Jellyfish
Dumbo Octopus
Ogre fish



(Note - this wasn't real life hackers, it was part of the movie campaign to make it look like the site was hacked. It's getting harder to tell the movie from reality, day by day.)

11/25--Product Gone Bad?
The phone message was changed at the Tagruato headquarters to the following:

"Thank you for calling Tagruato. Due to high call volumes, your call has been transferred to an automated answering service. If you have questions concerning our ParafFun recall, please leave a message, and one of our associates will find and support you as soon as possible."

11/27--Tagruato Sends out Slusho! Smilers!
bmoney999 at Unfiction points out that there's a new headline article on the Tagruato site. The article is a bit creepy, and seems to suggest Tagruato is using animal shelters are research laboratories for Slusho! See Slusho! story

11/27--Two More Articles on Tagruato Site
In the Investors News section of tagruato.jp, there is an article about launching a satellite during a lightning storm, and another about Bold Futura hiring 100 of the world's top physics majors, with specialties such as ecosystems of deep sea crevices, teleportation, and new energy sources.
Both of the articles suggest that CEO Ganu is desparate to learn or do something, even taking risks and spending enormous amounts of money in a hurry.

11/28--Tagruato Site Hacked Again!
Everything looked the same, but it seems to have been a nudge from the movie puppet masters for fans to work harder to crack the clues viewable from the hack.

11/29--Secret Messages Sent to Fans in Slusho! Purchases
Fans at Unfiction, starting with Elaralas reported getting a torn piece of 'memo' on Tagruato stationery in her order of a Slusho! shirt. On the back of the memo was a handwritten and ominous message:

"American,
"The Chuai Station hides a dark
secret.
Good people have gone
MISSING.
Expect a further communication
in the near future."

-The Wistle Blower"

A group of fans (KOZMO, MrTOASTY, JULIA, BACON ARMY, and KOSMOPOL-- McPhearson) at Unfiction worked hard to translate the japanese on the memo. Here is the result of their Tagruato memo translation.

12/1--A Death at Tagruato Corp?
A new voice message at their corporate phone number has the following:

If you are calling regarding the Kazui Ichigawa memorial service, all seats have been filled, and registration is now closed.

12/2--Hack Clues Lead to New Site: TIDOWave.com
Eliss put the clues together from the Tagruato hacked page, and found a new site. By using the first letter of each of the creatures on the hack page, you get T.I.D.O, and there's a big wave in the picture too.
The site appears like that of an activist movement that wants to expose and stop the Tagruato Corporation. There's tons of new information about Tagruato on their site. The group calls itself Les Guerriers de Mère-Terre (The Warriors of Mother Earth). They are seem led by someone called the Le Bandit Vert (the Green Bandit).
One of the blog posts on the site talks about the death of Kazui Ichigawa. He was a top scientist for Tagruato, who suddently retired, and was then found dead with his family in an RV park. It sounds like he was on the run from Tagruato, and he murdered them, but that's my opinion.

New Cloverfield Trailer!! Shown before Beowulf

A long awaited second trailer for Cloverfield was shown to audiences attending Beowulf in theaters. It's much longer, and has glimpses of both the BIG BAD monster, as well as hints of smaller parasitic creatures which are more creepy to me than the biggun.

Check out the second Cloverfield trailer in HD at Apple.

Title Official for Cloverfield trailer --- Cloverfield, duh

After months of secrecy and speculation about the title of the movie code named Cloverfield Project, it appears they are sticking with the name Cloverfield. This has been confirmed with ComingSoon.net and others. The posters are starting to go up at movie theaters, and you can even buy them now on Ebay.

The excellent resource Cloverfield Clues has pictures showing the new poster and Cloverfield standees in theaters.

There has been speculation but no official explanation of why the name Cloverfield was chosen, maybe it will be revealed in the movie. However, I found awhile back that there was a place called Clover Field near movie studios that had an interesting story during WWII. It probabably doesn't have anything to do with the movie, but just in case I posted about it. See this Cloverfield Project post at Unfiction forums.

Cloverfield: Whale meets the Thing Theory

All the theories put out probably have a 99% chance of being wrong, even the cool 3 biblical monsters one. This is no different, and it's not all mine. Others have posted whale angles, but I've been fond of it and spent some time playing with it, so I want to put my version of it here. I invite reasons why it's a stupid idea, but the journey is half the fun anyway. As they say, "It's so crazy, it just might work!"

I've heard a working name for the monster is 'parasite'. So, think of the parasite from The Thing, which is a great monster movie. Think about what it did to the dog and others. The Thing parasite comes from space, and is 'discovered' by Norwegians who dug up a frozen spaceship. Some have said there's an alien angle, so that covers that. At the end of the Thing, everyone is doomed, and Carpenter even called it the first of his Apocalypse movies.

However, there is no proof the parasite is destroyed, and is free to be frozen again in the Antarctic, to be found again for a new movie. A slusho is frozen ice, as antartica is. The slusho history says the ingredient must be kept cold. If a new team found the alien parasite from the Thing, they would be wise to keep it cold.

So a team could find the parasite, or maybe just the spaceship with some of the parasite still in it, and bring it back to a NYC museum for research. In NYC there is a 94 foot blue whale on display. Yes, it's a model, but maybe they say part of it is from a whale, with it's dna. It is the world's largest replica of a creature, not a bad target to bring to life.

If the parasite got ahold of a whale, it could make one mean, weirded out monster with spider legs, tentacles, who knows what. And of course a huge mouth for spitting out the Statue of Liberty head.

As we all know, the slusho site tells the story of how an ingredient turned Ganu into a big whale in his dream. Also, I still think the phrase "....it's alive..." is a big clue. You might say that if you saw something that you knew wasn't supposed to be alive, but now is, like a museum whale. The slusho site also has the blue-oven-mitt thing, which many have connected to Orka/Whale. I've heard audio comparisons that people have done showing the blue whale sound very similar to the cloverfield 'roar'. What would the sound be from a 400 foot super-whale?

[added8-29: Now there's a new youtube video comparing the sound of the cloverfield roar to a roar in The Thing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhUrKZtav4A ]

Here's an artists concept using a whale as the cloverfield monster.

In the Thing, the alien ship is found by Norwegians, and the slusho site plus Rob have japan connections. I know, it's goofy, goofy, but I think back again to the band from Switzerland (swiss cheese anyone?) called The Monsters, who have a label on their photo saying "100% Whale Approved - Japan and Norway". http://www.themonsters.ch/Gifs/knoedel1.jpg I thought nothing of that weird connection, but then read that jj used real existing sites for his games, like the Jeep site. What if he paid that punk group to add the label on top of their photo, and allow a password to activate their form? I don't see anything else in their history or material that references whales, so that label sticks out.

In the end of the Thing all the heroes die (9 I think). I've heard the cloverfield movie is all a flashback, so maybe they are all doomed there as well. Even if the army were called out to blast the 'monster', if it had the parasite in it, it would just infect people all around, creating a situation hard to contain. Lots of smaller land-whales?

After reading all this, I realize how insane this sounds. I hope I don't annoy anyone, but it's summer break and I have nothing better to do.

JJ put a polar bear in the Lost island, why not whales in Manhattan? Or maybe I'm still stuck in my review of Whales on Stilts.

Cloverfield spoilers from the set??

If you don't want to read spoilers about the ending, you may not want to read this story...I haven't read it past that warning, so I don't know what it says, but claims to have info from the last day of shooting. I'd rather wait and be surprised, I think...but my fingers are itching to click back to it.

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