Zack Snyder Needs Your Help to Finish Watchmen

Got a camera and a hankering to be a part of the Watchmen movie? Well get your creative hat on, because director Zack Snyder is looking for a few good Veidt commercials he can use to populate the many TVs in the film. Forty finalists get a poster signed by Snyder, then those go to a user voting round where the top five videos get a High-Definition Canon Vixia HG10. Up to twenty of Snyder's personal favorites get $1000 and a chance to be in the film itself. Download some product assets here, read the official rules here, and hit the jump for a couple of sample commercials. Videos are due June 2.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Watchmen

It's T-Minus one year until the Watchmen movie comes out, and to help fan those fandom fires, Zack Snyder has posted full body portrait-style photos of all the main characters, excluding special effects heavy (I'd assume) Dr. Manhattan. Here we have Patrick Wilson as Night Owl, the Batman parallel made a whole lot clearer more overt than in the comics. Check out the other pictures for a very, very young Ozymandias who looks almost exactly like Toby Miguire, and on the other side of the spectrum, the Comedian looking like he just stepped off the page.

For more on the look of the film, check out our painstakingly compiled movie still-to-comic panel comparison.

Zack Snyder Says "Hello" From the Watchmen Set

Warner Bros. is circulating a video from the Watchmen set of Zack Snyder saying... Not much. "Hello" is the gist of it. It seems to be a test run for future "messages from the director" that will maybe give us some juicier bits to chew on. He claims that everyone working on the movie loves Watchmen, but you can tell he's lying. That's ok, I still think the movie will be awesome.

The Black Freighter Makes the Watchmen Cut?

Whenever talk of the Watchmen movie is bandied about, one of the big questions is "How will they compress the whole thing down to two or three hours?" Director Zack Snyder claims it would be a six and a half hour movie if they shot every frame. So some things clearly need to be cut, and it always seemed to me that the very first thing to go would be The Black Freighter, the comic within a comic that parallels and illuminates a lot of the action in the book. However, IGN has an interview with Snyder in which he claims The Black Freighter is in! Or is it? Snyder:

"I don't have a time frame right now. I think it's running pretty long right now - it's about a 130-140 page script, not counting the black freighter. The black freighter is about 16 or 17 pages as a script."

That's pretty vague language, it's hard to tell what the meaning of keeping them so separate as scripts is... Are they just going to shoot it and see if they can fit it in the movie after the fact? Will it be a short film on the DVD? Questions are numerous, including the obvious one of how will the charm of reading a comic within a comic translate to the big screen? You can't read a comic in a movie... Will it become a movie within a movie? I doubt Snyder wants to do that, but then what? Have the onscreen action be the imagination of the kid reading the comic? It's a tough hurdle, methinks.

Also, while I was searching for a Black Freighter graphic to use in this post I came across a webpage where someone has pieced together The Black Freighter comic from the bits we get in Watchmen. There's a lot of white space where Moore gave us words but no pictures, but it's interesting to see how the story stands alone.

Rorschach's Journal: Fan Prank, Viral Campaign, or Both?

It's been around since the web was born, but that "highlight for hidden text" trick never gets old. We recently saw it used in the "I Believe In Harvey Dent" viral campaign for The Dark Knight, and now a similar gag on "Rorshach's Journal", which appears to be a cryptic promo site for Zack Snyder's Watchmen movie. The site is just the one page as seen above; clicking on the graphic links to rorschach@rorschachsjournal.com.

Now about that hidden text...it's written in Morse code, and according to the commenters at iFanboy.com, it's displayed several different messages throughout the day.

Detailed analysis of all the alleged secret messages after the jump, plus some surprising discoveries...



10:35am: "Stood in street. Watched it burn."

This is a line from Chapter VI of Watchmen, page 25. It's from Rorshach's narration as he describes torching a dress warehouse with a kidnapper inside.

11:am: "You remind me of Weatherbee. I don't like you."

Now this is interesting - I thought it was a commenters joke at first, but someone else verifies it. This is a line from Chris Sims' hillarious Archie/Watchmen mashup, posted on Chris' Invincible Superblog. The comic can be seen here, but here's just the relevant panel, with a bit of context. It doesn't seem likely to me that an official viral campaign would reference something so obscure, but the parody IS awesome, so maybe they're just really going for indie web cred.


UPDATE: We contacted Chris Sims himself, and got this response:

"I actually saw it posted on some LiveJournal today and I thought the same thing--that a commenter was making a joke. But then, it became abundantly clear that the people on the LJ had no idea who Weatherbee was, let alone your ol' pal Chris Sims. You're the first person to email and let me know, so I can only assume that somebody involved with the making of the site either

a) Is a "fan" of mine and thought it'd be a funny reference, or...

b) Did it by accident, thinking it was an actual line from Watchmen.

Now that second one might sound unbelievable, but when Kevin Church did a parody of Watchmen re-lettered with Stan Lee-esque dialogue (called, appropriately enough, Just Imagine Stan Lee's Watchmen), the images ended up being used in some documentary about comics. I think it was on the history channel."

1:14am: "Maybe you've forgotten how we do things..."

Checking my copy right now to see if it's in the book...sounds like something Rorschach would say to Dan Dreiberg. Any Geekanerds out there who know off-hand where the line is from?
UPDATE: Found it. Fourth panel of page 10, Chapter 10. Is indeed Rorschach talking to Dan Dreiberg, as they get ready to "Visit Bars. Squeeze People.", in pursuit of the mask-killer. It tips Dan off on a mini-rant about how hard it is to be Rorschach's friend, leading to that super awkward handshake.

UPDATE: 2:22pm, June 30th..."Kitty Genovese was the start". Chapter 6, Page 10 - the line doesn't actually appear, but this is when Rorschach talks about how the Genovese case effected him.

As pointed out by the iFanboy commenters, the site can also be viewed at http://staff.theonering.net/xoanon/rorschach/index.html, leading some to speculate that this is either a prank headed up by www.theonering.net, or the site's collective has been hired to help with Watchmen's official viral marketing. Mysterious! Who watches the pitchmen?

Read about the continuing Journal updates HERE and the revelation that the site is unofficial HERE.