io9: fake news

Fake Surrogates News Reel Explains The Rebirth Of Humanity

Meredith Woerner — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:11:07 PDT

There's nothing more wonderful than a movie's fake explanatory news reel. Dark Knight brought us the tabloid Wayne family tell all, and now Surrogates is building the robot backstory with its own news machine.

Zombie Strain Of Swine Flu Just A Crazy Hoax

Meredith Woerner — Mon, 04 May 2009 16:03:56 PDT

A fake BBC news site reports that swine flu is creating zombies. Still it makes our hearts flutter reading news reports like this: "After passing....he rose from the dead and lunged at his mother."

The fake site bounce with me does an excellent job recreating the BBC style and look. We especially love all the graphic little zombie nods here and there.

Meet The Man From Mars

charliejane — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 10:40:23 PST

Is that a little man on Mars in this picture from NASA's Mars Spirit explorer? We didn't even bother to blog this image when we saw it the other day, but tons of British newspapers have seized on it. Sample headline: "Crikey! There's A Little Green Man On Mars!" Actually, my favorite is the one that points out he's naked (gasp!). So what do the experts think?

Says the Bad Astronomy Blog:

That does look like a guy hanging out on Mars, enjoying the 0.01 Earth atmospheric pressure, the 98% CO2 air, the subfreezing cold, and of course, just being four inches tall. Martians are pretty short, it seems. And patient, given its pose.

The Only Minute Of Cloverfield Viral Video You Should Watch

charliejane — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 06:20:17 PST

The still-mysterious Cloverfield monster destroys a deep-sea oil-drilling station in a new set of promo videos. Here's the best minute, in which you actually see the chaos and the people fleeing the sinking platform. The voice-over comes from a fake newscast in Italian, shown on Italian TV. Other videos aired in Spain and Germany. We have another snippet of blurry disaster footage at sea, after the jump.

The rest of the viral footage is pretty boring, especially if you don't speak Spanish, Italian or German. The gist is that the drilling platform belongs to a shadowy Japanese corporation called Tagruato (which is by no means a real Japanese name.) There's also a new viral site from a fake environmentalist group called TIDO that opposes Tagruato's deep-sea drilling. TIDO is suspected of having destroyed the drilling station somehow, but denies responsibility. Here's more footage of the oil rig going under:

Also, J.J. Abrams' hard-working interns updated the MySpace page for Rob, the movie's main character. The new updates confirm that Rob is moving to Japan, to work for the company that makes Slusho!, the drink featured in the movie. (Any guesses what mysterious company that might be?) I have a feeling most of this backstory will only end up being referenced tangentially in the actual movie, and the little references will add an extra layer of meaning to the handful of people who followed all these clues down their various ratholes.

Update: Commenter CAPN_MARRRRK points out that you can see the video in English here. Some of the shaky cam footage turns out to be a camera phone.