Get your InGen pass !

 

Jurassic World is very much in progress. They have recently started their factious site masraniglobal.com.

 

It turns out Masrani buys out InGen, and then continues the dino-dna game.

 

Get your own InGen id pass at:

http://www.masraniglobal.com/careers/index.html

 

Go to the bottom of the page and enter some info in the fields there. Clicking on Submit will take you to next page where you can upload your photo and generate a InGen id pass!

 

Along with this message.

 

 

Congratulations, and welcome to the Masrani Corporation!

Thank you for choosing to join one of the world’s fastest growing families. Given your set of skills, we are pleased to offer you employment as an Intern Genetic Biologist at International Genetic Technologies in San Diego, CA.

Your immediate supervisor is Dr. Henry Wu, Lead Genetic Scientist.

At Masrani we have a philosophy that combines vision with innovation to create success. We will ensure that these skills are presented to you in your orientation, and they will help to guide you through your journey at Masrani.

On your right, you will find an ID badge for you to complete for security purposes. Simply upload a photo of yourself using the upload tool below and you will see your ID card in full fruition.

We look forward to welcoming you as a new employee at InGen's state of the art laboratory facility. In the meanwhile, please continue to check back at www.masraniglobal.com for all the latest news, videos, and images.

Sincerely,

Simon Masrani

Chief Executive Officer, Masrani

Interstellar - Science and Fiction

 

Spoiler : (Biggest shocker for me:) Matt Damon’s character scientist/explorer Prof Mann is a negative role in the movie. It is his treachery which kick-starts the  third act of the movie. I didn’t see that coming, never expected Damon's 'small' role to have such a huge impact.

I watched this movie yesterday evening with my wife at a theatre in Bangalore, and I enjoyed it, though not thoroughly. I have been following this movie eagerly, ever since it was announced in 2009. When I heard the screenplay had been leaked, I scrounged the interweb for a copy, and read through. This version was before the Nolan's where involved, and I put this up on my blog so I could share the link with some like minded close friends. In a way , I am glad a big bulk of the original had been removed, the  whole part of the Chinese station, and two blackholes instead of one in the movie…but even the final trimmed version had excess baggage. Too much to explain in even 3 hours running time.

Enough has been said of the science of Interstellar, with experts and novices on both sides debating if the story holds credibility. I have no new thoughts on the matter, as physic and math were not my stronger subjects anyway. Nolan never made movies which where easy to understand, each one of his movies required careful rewinding and rewatching in order to fully grasp, except maybe for 2002's Insomnia. His movies are drenched with science fiction , gadgets and hero-improvising-at-the-last-moment, they are definitely not for the commoner. But here, I felt the movie was stretched too much, over space and time. Interstellar is not a movie about space travel, it is a movie about time travel. And relativity. And the director's vision that love is a fifth (or is it sixth?) dimension ,which can span across space and time. It is a beautiful work of art, and sound. I am sure the second and third acts were shot completely in a green screen, except the icy planet scene, which was shot at Svínafellsjökull glacier.

So here is the story: Prof Brand Senior wants to save the human species. He asks Cooper to take his daughter Amelia Brand and team on a  space mission to find another planet which can sustain life, so that humanity can populate it and continue. The assumption is that he can find a way to transport millions of humans over space-time to the new planet , after travelling back and forth through a wormhole. This he calls plan  A. And like any brilliant scientist, he has a plan B too. Plan B: In the highly unlikely event that the explorers cannot travel back via the blackhole, they drop a population bomb. They are to carry millions of fertilized eggs with them, which they will incubate..and reproduce via surrogates…and grown on the new planet, so that some part of the human species will live and flourish, but not the existing population alive on earth. Exactly how these eggs will be used is not fully explained, it was not in the original script either. But this ridiculous plan is just a failsafe, he assures them, by the time the mission returns, he would have solved the grand equation and found a way to travel both ways easily.

On his deathbed, he reveals to Murphy Cooper, that there never was a plan A. It would never have worked. The only way for humanity to continue was to populate the new planet with the fertilized eggs. There was no return journey possible. But he greatly under-estimated his pilot Cooper, and his fatherly affection to his children, and his gut determination to get back home. Cooper finds a way to survive the long journey, sends a message home to his daughter, thereby providing Murphy with the quantum data to solve Brand's equation completely, and by the time Cooper is found by earthlings again, his age by earth time is 120 years. What felt like days and hours for him in space time was decades back home. He meets his daughter on her deathbed, and then leaves on a final adventure to find Amelia Brand, who has by this time found an earth-like planet capable of sustaining humanity and life.

Review: Interstellar is not Nolan's best work. It lacks cohesiveness, and the polish seen with his previous works. The movie starts slow, too much time is spent on earth, establishing his family background and current condition on earth. I guess that part was to emphasize that his son Tom was not academically inclined, while his daughter Murphy is brilliant and tom-boyish (tom-boyish means , like Tom, right?). But again, too much time there, by the time the mission is launched and the first spectacle is put-up, (travel through the wormhole), we are nearing the halfway mark. During the launch process, the craft never contacts NASA ! So now we have a trained NASA pilot and some scientists in the spacecraft, but instead of sticking to scientific jargon, as one expects them, they revert to casual everyday talking in layman's terms. Romilly explains to Cooper how a wormhole works using a paper and pencil trick we first saw in the 1997 movie Event Horizon, which is not required because Cooper is a engineering wizard and a bookworm(remember his library back home ? and the original copy of a textbook which Murphy's school no longer follows?). All the scenes in outer space have no sound, accurate , because sound cannot travel in space. But by blanking out the sound it felt disconnected from the rest of the movie which had loud organs and synthesizer music. When they land on the first planet, which is too close to a blackhole, we see daylight there. But surely, it can't have daylight, because the planet is in orbit around a blackhole, and light cannot escape from a blackhole, right ? The gravity levels on the planet where one hour on the surface equals seven years elsewhere would crush all human life. The astronauts would also be squished and “spaghettified” by their proximity to a black hole.The robots TARS and CASE are robots, but they speak with undeniable sarcasm like humans. And even in an ultramodern spacejet, Cooper decides to fly manually to save fuel, even with all the computing power available to him. Surely the computer could have calculated the most fuel efficient path to the planet ? When Cooper and Amelia get back to Endurance, Romilly is there and has waited 23 years for them to return. How can a human wait 23 years locked up in a zero gravity environment, alone ? With no other human to talk to ? And the same question to Mann, alone on this frozen planet, locked up for decades. Anyway, Manns' first reaction on being awakened and seeing another human face was priceless, few actors could have pulled it off. Edmund's planet had better data, but they go to Mann's planet, because he was still transmitting. They just found out the Miller was still transmitting only because of the gravity distortion due to the blackhole, but Miller is already dead. Caution anyone ?

But what got to me most was the ending, the closure, or lack of. The part where Cooper falls into the blackhole into a tesseract, which connects to their library back home, and how Cooper communicates via gravity….it is the most stunning set pieces in Interstellar, with reality-bending visuals reminiscent of Inception. But it's also a ridiculously contrived cop-out twist, illogical, incoherent and profoundly unscientific. I know that the original script didn't have any of this gibberish. There, Cooper loads the quantum data onto a probe and sends the probe back to earth, which is the probe Cooper and family find at the start. That was so much more better. There was a question of matter travelling back, but at least there was nothing supernatural about it.

 

My best part in the movie would be after the explosion on Endurance, when Cooper tries to dock his ranger onto the Endurance. The graphics, sound ..it was all perfect, and had us audience tightly hugging our seats and holding our breath. Of course we knew Cooper would dock the ship, but the build-up to it was spectacular.

 

 

Point of Interest: The probe Cooper finds at the start of the movie is from India ! It was supposedly from Delhi Mission Control. Clearly India has made giant leaps as a space superpower, but by the time they do it, the planet is dying !

Tailpiece: I am going back to my favourite space travel movie: Apollo 13. Again, the movie was ahead of its time, but it was simple and concise. And long shelf life too. I have already watched it some 50-something times. And time to revisit.

Costuming The Blacklist - Tyranny Of Style

 

 

The Blacklist, the new crime drama that pairs one of the FBI’s most wanted criminals with a rookie special agent to solve high-profile cases, has been one of the runaway hits of the Fall. This unique show has been keeping audience coming back week after week for a strong core of complex characters with fascinating stories that run up against a slew of domestic and international terrorists. The woman at the helm of dressing this remarkable range of characters is costume designer Christine Bean. I recently had the opportunity to ask her about her work on The Blacklist.

The Blacklist, Costume Designer Christine Bean

Tyranny of Style: Can you give us a brief description of your background in costume design?

Christine Bean: "I moved to LA to study Fashion Design at The Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising.  While working on my degree I had a series of internships in both fashion and film. It became clear to me that, like many people who move to Los Angeles, I was being drawn into the world of show business. After I graduated from FIDM I spent some time designing and assisting on low budget and student films, which led me to Western Costume where I learned a tremendous amount about period clothing and earned my union status. Following Western I worked in just about every role in the costume department. From set costumer to shopper I worked in LA for 10 years before moving to NYC, where I have been for the past 3 years. Through the years I costume designed several indie movies and assistant designed on big budget projects like The Dark Knight Rises and most recently Smash for NBC." 

T/S: The costumes for the Pilot of Blacklist were designed by Amy Westcott, can you speak a little to how you became involved with the show?

CB: "While finishing Season 2 of Smash I got a call from Amy Westcott regarding the pilot for The Blacklist. She was looking for an assistant designer and I came recommended from costume friends of hers. I was a huge fan of Amy's work and had wanted to work with her in LA but our paths had never crossed. I was thrilled to be able to have an opportunity to work with her in NYC. Amy and I had a seamless work style and a similar aesthetic, so although we had never worked together before, it felt very natural.

With Pilots, I think most designers think of taking them on as they would a feature film. There is no guarantee that the pilot will be picked up, so they often will have projects already lined up after the pilot and may not be available if it goes to series.  However, even if not available to do the series, their work has defined and established the characters. If the studio and network are happy with the look, then it will be the responsibility of the designer of the series to keep the continuity of the pilot while continuing with the development and evolution of the characters. Deservedly for all involved in creating the pilot of The Blacklist, it was picked up for 13 episodes after the pilot tested extremely well. When we got word that the pilot was picked up, Amy Westcott reached out to the producers and recommended that they hire me to design the series. 

Because I had been on the pilot, going onto the series felt like picking up where we had left off. I was able to secure much of the same crew that we had on the pilot as well, so it was a very easy transition for the actors, producers and crew."  

The Blacklist, Costume Designer Christine Bean

T/S: How much of the look of the costumes for the show were established by Westcott on the Pilot and at what point did the designs feel like yours?

CB: "Going into the series with a full cast and already having had the experience of working closely with them, I was really fortunate to be able to hit the ground running. One of the things from the pilot that I knew would be a priority was having Reddington's wardrobe custom made. The pilot was so fast that there wasn't enough turnaround time. The moment I got the call that I was hired, I starting choosing fabrics for shirts and suits. So while the 2nd episode opens with Reddington wearing his pilot wardrobe, by the first commercial he changes into a custom 3-piece suit, handmade shirt and a custom hat. That, with the addition of 4 series-regular cast members that had not been established in the pilot, it felt very much mine." 

T/S: Can you tell us a little bit about the difference between filming in NYC versus LA?

CB: "While the show is set to take place in Washington D.C., we film in NYC. Having worked in LA the majority of my career, I am still constantly adjusting to the logistical differences of the two. One thing is I miss the tremendous resources available in LA as far as costume rentals. Being able to access MPCC, Western, CRC and Sony is such a huge time and money saver. We have done episodes to have taken place in Montreal, Shanghai, Berlin, Texas, Miami, etc. so we are constantly looking for specific uniforms as well as general stock to really sell the location. It takes a lot more legwork in NYC to make this happen."

T/S: The character of Reddington, an incredibly wealthy criminal, is always so well dressed with coordinating overcoats, hats and accessories. Can you speak a little to the inspiration and references for his character, sourcing the appropriate pieces, and working with James Spader to develop this character?

CB: "It was important for both James and I to have Reddington be incredibly well dressed but still practical. Even though his wardrobe is extremely high-end, there is a utility-based concept behind each piece. His shoes are Italian with a beautiful pebble grain leather, but they also have a practical rubber sole. His Loro Piana outerwear, while from the finest cashmere and wool, is also wind and water repellent, with many pockets and a removable hood. He has suiting appropriate for various climates depending on where the episode may take him. We make sure that there is an underlying color palate so that pieces can be mixed and matched and repeated.  I am also careful to choose colors that make Reddington stand out from the FBI agents. He should not look like one of them. Often times pieces of his wardrobe are integrated into the storyline, such as in "Wujing" you see Red buying fedoras that he will later wear, and then in "Frederick Barnes" you see him being measured at a tailor shop, which is the real tailor used to custom make all of Reddington suits. 

Reddington Costume Research Board, Including Fabric Swatches, The Blacklist, Costume Designer Christine Bean

Finished look from research board above, The Blacklist, Costume Designer Christine Bean

When starting the design process of a Reddington suit, I usually start at Beckenstein's Fabrics in New York's garment district. I also source fabric from the Holland & Sherry showroom. Once I decide on a fabric I pick the specifications for the suit, for example if the lapel should be peak or notch, style of pockets, vest and pant details. We work with Martin Greenfield Tailor in Brooklyn to make all of Reddington's suits, vests and pants. The shoes, ties and socks we purchase from Paul Stuart, Zegna and Saks. The outerwear has been from the Loro Piana boutique in Manhattan, and the hats from JJ Hat Center or if a custom hat is required we use Worth & Worth."

The Blacklist, Costume Designer Christine Bean

T/S: Elizabeth Keen, the rookie Special Agent thrust into the center of these high profile cases exhibits such a wonderful range of strength and vulnerability. Can you speak a little to the inspiration and reference for her character, visually capturing her duality, sourcing garments, and working with Megan Boone to develop this character?

CB: "In creating Elizabeth Keen, we wanted to highlight the fact that she is balancing two lives, one is an ever increasingly high profile and dangerous career, and the other is being a wife and possibly a mother. While at work, her wardrobe represents the armor that Liz puts on to become Special Agent Keen- dark tailored suits, jewel tone blouses, and very little jewelry aside from her wedding rings. Keen is seeking respect from her fellow agents as well as Reddington. Additionally she needs to be able to run and wear a gun holster, so a tailored pant suit with low-heeled boots are her go-to uniform. At home and with Tom is where you see the side of Liz that is softer and more feminine. She is able to let her guard down and be more romantic, wear florals, lace, pastels, things that she couldn't wear to the FBI and be taken seriously. 

Elizabeth Keen Costume Research Board (left side- home, right side - work) The Blacklist, Costume Designer Christine Bean

The Blacklist, Costume Designer Christine Bean

For sourcing Liz wardrobe, her FBI looks are often Theory, Tahari, Reiss and Helmut Lang. Her casual and home looks come from Anthropologie, Zara, Rag & Bone, Rebecca Taylor and local/specialty shops such as Norbu and Bird in Williamsburg for interesting jewelry and accessories."

The Blacklist, Costume Designer Christine Bean

T/S: You dress such a huge range of extras and guest stars including everything from crowd scenes in both domestic and international locations, visiting dignitaries and international terrorists. How do you approach such variety in each episode, shifting gears, finding authentic global research, sourcing appropriate garments, and executing this large task?

CB: "Luckily I have an amazing team! An average week we will be filming one episode, prepping another, there will be a still photo shoot for crime scene photos, countless fittings, insert unit and often a tandem crew to overlap an episode, not to mention the concept, production and costume meetings that take place. Since I cannot be in all of these places at once, there would be no way to accomplish it all without a top-notch crew.  It requires that I put a lot of trust in each person in the department. For example, the last episode had a scene taking place in Germany, and it was decided that we needed 10 costumed beer maidens to work the next morning. I gave my assistants research and within an hour they had found a woman in Manhattan who came to our office with a suitcase full of authentic Bavarian dirndls.

The Blacklist, Costume Designer Christine Bean

Another time we were doing an episode taking place in Shanghai and I noticed that many of the female street vendors in Shanghai wore arm covers to protect their skin from the sun. I was unable to find them on-line or in stores, so overhearing the dilemma our tailor cut up some old hazmat suits and re-purposed them as disposable sleeves for the background.  It is small details like these that add to the production value of the show. Each person in my department is creative and resourceful, which keeps us one step ahead of the demands of The Blacklist." 

The Blacklist, Costume Designer Christine Bean

A special thanks to Christine for taking the time to talk with us about costuming The Blacklist. Check out The Blacklist, and Christine's incredible work Mondays on NBC 10/9c.

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Who Was Edmund Thomas Clint ?

 

Edmund Thomas Clint was the only son of M.T. Joseph and Chinnamma Joseph, a couple who hailed from Kochi, Kerala. His life was cut short to just 2522 days due to his prolonged illness and suffering due to kidney malfunction from the age of two. But despite all those sufferings he completed 25,000 pictures which were indeed breathstaking!

Clint used every medium: chalk, crayons, oil paints, and water colours to create drawings and paintings that depicted the world as he saw it. His collection stunned art admirers and critics who were astounded by his maturity and convinced of his artistic genius.

Clint passed away a month short of his seventh birthday leaving behind a treasure trove of art work. He had the unique ability to understand how people felt, and drew inspiration from these powerful emotions. Despite his young age, Clint created art that depicted intense themes like death, solitude, and love. In addition to being an artist, Clint was also a voracious reader. He was drawn to the drama of epics like the Mahabharata and Ramayana and was keen on listening to adventure stories like Robinson Crusoe. His mind grasped every detail described in these stories and then expressed them as a colorful canvas.

Clint's father was an ardent fan of the Hollywood actor, Clint Eastwood, and gave his son the actor's name. After Clint passed away, Sivakumar, renowned documentary film maker from India, made a documentary on the young artist's life and work. The film was shown at international film festivals and Clint Eastwood saw the documentary in Brazil. The actor was so touched by the story of Clint that he sent a message of condolence to Clint's parents and expressed sorrow at the child's untimely demise.