Ear­lier this week Slash Film got a scoop con­cern­ing an aer­ial film­ing sched­ule and IMAX qual­ity scenes. This came via a warn­ing let­ter sent from Warner Broth­ers to res­i­dents in the affected areas because of low fly­ing air­craft. The sched­ule is as follows:

They will fly through Cen­tral, West­ern and Wan Chai dis­tricts on Hong Kong Island with state-of-the-art IMAX cam­eras from Novem­ber 6th — 12th from 7:00am to 11:00pm (4 times dur­ing the day, 5 times at night). They will also be shoot­ing some C130 Low-Flying air­crafts on Novem­ber 6th — 9th from 3:00pm to 7:00pm.

CNN are also run­ning a Dark Knight/Hong Kong releated arti­cle, this time cov­er­ing some prob­lems with a par­tic­u­lar Bat­man stunt. “The plan was for Bat­man to be seen jump­ing into the water and then climb­ing up some bam­boo, or some­thing sim­i­lar”. How­ever, upon check­ing a sam­ple of the water in the area they found all sorts of nas­ties, includ­ing sal­mo­nella and tuber­cu­lo­sis. Hence the scene has been can­celled and will instead take place within a building.

The Why So Seri­ous Hal­loween Viral Mar­ket­ing Cam­paign has taken its next step in the most excit­ing of fash­ions. All the let­ters have been filled in and this pic­ture of The Joker was revealed (click for large):

Click­ing that image takes you from Why So Seri­ous to a play on the film’s film­ing title Rory’s First Kiss… Rory’s Death Kiss. Here The Joker presents us with another challenge:

Updated: Rory’s Death Kiss 

I apol­o­gise for the brevity of the last post, it was a hop-in hop-out post as quickly as pos­si­ble dilemma.

As you all prob­a­bly know, the Hal­loween Why So Seri­ous scav­enger hunt is well under­way. “Clowns” have been “ordered” to go and take pic­tures of var­i­ous places through­out an assort­ment of major cities across the United States. These pic­tures are then uploaded to form a message…

“The only sen­si­ble way to live in this world is with­out rules“Not all the let­ters are filled in yet but the mes­sage is clear. It appears like a screen cap from the movie will reveal itself once the mes­sage is com­plete. Maybe it will be related to Two-Face, con­sid­er­ing the pump­kin rot­ting scenario.I have set up a topic for dis­cus­sion on the forums (apolo­gies for the theme on there at the moment, we had to revert back whilst some issues with PHPBB were ironed out):

Why So Seri­ous Discussion

The Clues:

Join the hunt

More details soon.

The web­site Kino has posted some details from an inter­view with the Dark Knight direc­tor Christo­pher Nolan and pro­ducer Charles Roven, sadly how­ever, the web­site is entirely in Ger­man. Not to worry, Bat­man on Film have some inter­preters (oth­er­wise known as Google Trans­late) to work it all out for us non-bilinguals:

As we already know, Bat­man (Chris­t­ian Bale) trav­els to Hong Kong. Pro­ducer Chuck Roven con­firmed [the] Asian trip but would not reveal why Bat­man goes there. “Gang­ster hunt­ing” was mentioned.

The new Bat­man suit will be equipped with “[white] lenses” (some sort of bat sonar equipment).

The pro­logue that will be shown in IMAX in Decem­ber is the first five min­utes of the film.

Here’s a trans­lated quote from Chris Nolan: “[The Dark Knight] is not ‘The Joker Begins’. We did not want to tell how the Joker became what he is.

“In those five min­utes [of the pro­logue], we show how the Joker goes from being a small-time crook to Gotham’s great­est vil­lain. It’s like ‘The Rise of the Joker’.”

Mean­while, com­poser Mel Wes­son, work­ing with James New­ton Howard and Hans Zim­mer on the Dark Knight score, men­tioned the dark theme they were aim­ing to achieve (via Bat­MovieNews):

This is the one I’ve been wait­ing for. Another out­ing for Gotham’s Dark Knight, together with Hans Zim­mer and James New­ton Howard. I began work­ing on ideas in mid Sep­tem­ber ’07, it’s a long sched­ule but it’s good to have time to exper­i­ment and expand the ideas we had on Bat­man Begins into the dark­ness.… don’t for­get ‘Not all jokes are funny’.

It seems our can­dle melt­ing Dark Knight teaser over at Why So Seri­ous is begin­ning to get a lit­tle old and weary with time. Yes, the pump­kin is begin­ning to fray at the edges as rot sets in and the can­dle begins to reach its end.

Well spot­ted all those that sent this in.

EDIT: Right side only it seems, many peo­ple have sug­gested ref­er­ences to Two Face.

Why So Seri­ous has updated, remov­ing the for­ward link to the atro­cious clown site, replac­ing it with a sim­ple yet haunt­ing flash file depict­ing a flick­er­ing jack-o-lantern with a bat shaped ghoul­ish grin. Creepy.

And the rumors — A viral mar­ket­ing cam­paign to reach its pin­na­cle come Halloween?

(Thanks for the heads up Jay)

EDIT: Some astute view­ers have noticed that the can­dle is slowly burn­ing down, if you go to the site now you will see that the can­dle is much shorter.

The Brazil­ian site Omelette got the scoop on this first, but that’s all in a for­eign lan­guage, so let me explain. The rumor is that in front of IMAX screen­ings of I Am Leg­end, a 7 minute pro­logue seg­ment of The Dark Knight will run. This will not be a trailer, but an entire scene with begin­ning, mid­dle and end.

Accord­ing to Omelette the seg­ment shall fea­ture Heath Ledger as The Joker — a sort of back­ground if you will, run­ning in par­al­lel with the end of Bat­man Begins and the start of TDK. Film ick think that the footage will revolve around a bank heist, which was shot in the IMAX format.

This shall only run in front of the IMAX ver­sion of I Am Leg­end, a proper Dark Knight trailer may instead run in nor­mal cin­e­mas, but that is merely conjecture.

We’ll keep you posted!