ILM - Behind VFX of Revenge of the Fallen

ILM has posted more videos to their YouTube channel including a look at the visual effects for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Previously ILM had posted videos around the first movie. Visual Effects Supervisor Scott Farrar returns to explains the complexity that was involved in creating many of the complicated images of the film. Even if not a fan of the story, the special effects were outstanding. The channel still refuses to allow embeds so click here to view.

The Sound of Transformers: ROTF

From MichaelBay.com, below is a video about the sound for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. ROTF was nominated for Best Sound Mixing category for the Oscars which will be given out next Sunday.

TF2 Behind Scenes Video and Interview

CG Channel has posted a cool video interview with Dan Taylor, Animation Supervisor at Digital Domain that also shows how the created some of the effects for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. While ILM did most of the digital effects for the movie, Digital Domain (owned by Michael Bay) worked on several sequences in the movie such as the Alice/Pretender sequence, Reedman, Soundwave, and more.

Very informative and worth watching. Makes you wonder why it wasn't a DVD/B-R extra even though some parts do seem to have been used for the Blu-ray featurettes. Sadly no option to embed so instead click here to view the 12 minute video. Still a shame the movie didn't get an Oscar nomination for its work. Thanks to Scott for the link.

Michael Bay Top Earner in 2009

Michael Bay may have had a few bad days in the awards department with multiple Razzie nominations and only one Oscar nod but he is laughing all the way to the bank with an estimated 2009 earnings of $125 million thanks to the success of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and other movies. The info is from a Vanity Fair's Top 40 Hollywood Earners article for 2009 that breaks down the probably sources of revenue for the big players in Hollywood.

Here is Bay's breakdown:
Estimated 2009 earnings: $125 million
- $75 million: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (back-end profit participation for directing and producing, based on worldwide box-office gross of $835 million)
- $28 million: Transformers: R.O.T.F. (share of estimated $280 million in DVD revenue)
- $12.5 million: Transformers: R.O.T.F. (share of toy and other licensing royalties)
- $4 million: Friday the 13th (back end for producing, based on worldwide gross of $90 million, and share of DVD)
- $2 million: The Unborn (back end for producing, based on worldwide gross of $77 million, and share of DVD)
- $2 million: A Nightmare on Elm Street (fee for producing inexplicable remake)
- $1.5 million: Royalties from older films, other income

Remaining Top 10:
2) Steven Spielberg - $85 million ($15 of which from TF2)
3) Roland Emmerich - $70 million (for 2012)
4) James Cameron - $50 million (more coming for 2010 Avatar grosses and DVD sales)
5) Todd Phillips - $44 million (for The Hangover and Due Date)
6) Daniel Radcliff - $41 million (for Harry Potter Deathly Hallows films)
7) Ben Stiller - $40 million (various movies)
8) Tom Hanks - $36 million (Angels & Demons, Toy Story 3, etc)
9) JJ Abrams - $36 million (Star Trek, Morning Glory)
10) Jerry Bruckheimer - $35.5 million (The Sorcerer's Apprentice, etc)

Bay Talks Sounds, Hints at Transformers 3

While at the Cary Grant Theatre to discuss Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen's sound art, Michael Bay dropped a few a small hint to Hero Complex about Transformers 3 that is currently scheduled to come out on July 1st, 2011.

On TF3:

So can we expect more thunderous sound in the third installment? Although the number of robots increased significantly from the first film for the second, the third film ...won’t be as robot-heavy and there will be fewer explosions, a tight-lipped Bay said after the Q+A.

“There will be a nice crescendo ending,” Bay said. “It gets much more into the robot character. The last time you kind of met a few of the robots; this time you’re gonna get a much cooler landscape.”

On TF2's sound art:

“I have like 2,000 people — through their artistry — making my dreams a film,” Bay said. “The artistry of this sound group is just amazing. I love, love sound. It’s 45-50% of the movies.”

“All of our sounds are performing almost like actors,” said [supervising sound editor Erik] Aadahl, whom Bay described as the “secret weapon” of the films. “They’re just performing the scene through sound. It just takes a lot of playing around with different elements. With sound, we are completely unfettered by the laws of physics.”

[The Reedman] scene meant to “cleanse the palate” from the booming sound featured throughout most of the film. The volume was turned down to enhance the sound created by the energy sparks. So where did the inspiration for the muted, vibrating zing of the microcons come from? A couple of magnets. Spread an inch apart and tossed in the air, they meet to create a quivering sound that -- when amplified by a microphone -- resembles the chattering of insects.

Aadahl said the vibrating hum from his electrical shaver resembled an bug buzz — perfect for a tiny Decepticon scout. The creak from opening the stove door? That served as the central sound for an older (more rusty) Decepticon. And a slamming dryer door was used as the thud for Devastator’s footsteps -- proving that that it doesn’t always take a large element to produce a big sound. “Those huge things seem small in comparison to the small things,” Aadahl said. “We find the macro in the micro.”

Time Lapse of Final Batte Set Construction

EarthCam.net has posted a video of a time lapse of the construction of the Final Battle set for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen in White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico which I think occurred around June 2008. It gets some of the early filming but not of any of the big explosions and resulting destruction of the set. A set constuction like this helps give you an idea of the sheer volume of hard work that can go into a movie. Thanks to David for the links especially the flash file so could upload to YouTube.

ILM's Benza Talks ROTF FX

The AllSpark has a great write-up with ILM's animation supervisor Scott Benza from the Paramount's press junket from a few weeks ago for the home video release of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. He talks about the challenges and landmarks of the film. A lot of the information has been covered in previous articles and the special edition of the movie but still makes for an interesting read. Below is a snippet, the full article can be found here.

All robots were rigged in a way that they could animate almost any individual part that made up of the robot, ranging from springs to brake pads and all sorts of mechanical pieces one would find in various vehicles, using Mudflap as an example. That way it helped with the robots’ transformation sequences and the way how they moved. Benza added that each robot was defined by both external and internal pieces, sometimes certain parts filling out the interiors and certain animation models used in the first film were reused and revamped in the second. Since they had the same amount of time to animate everything like in Transformers but with a larger workload due to having over 40 robots, the animators had to make use of whatever they created and had. They tried to introduce more personalities into the transformation depending on the character and to work best from the camera’s point of view – Ironhide has a more forward attitude and is a veteran, hence his rather slow transformation, compared to Sideswipe’s energetic and flashy change, as well elegant and heroic for Optimus. Devastator’s combination sequence was intentionally made clumsy and dirty, as well difficult, showing off a pre-visual sequence. None of the transformations are done ahead of time and simply plugged into the shot, Benza noted.

ROTF Featurette Clip on TF Mythology

From SciFiCool.com, below is a preview clip from one of the extra features for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen that discusses the mythology of Transformers and how it influenced the script for the movie. Thanks to David for the link.

Revenge of the Fallen Props for Auction

If you have the money Profiles in History is auctioning props and collectibles related to Transformers and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Items for sale include the Hero Bumblebee robot (not sure if same as one used at the various premieres), the 1977 Camaro (Bumblebee) used in the first film, Jetfire's cane/landing gear, various NEST gear and weapons, Tomb of the Twelve pieces, stunt Matrix prop, actor costumes, Hero Wheelie RC truck, and more. The only caveat is the value of many of the props is measured in thousands of dollars. Even if you don't have the money, the images of the various props are interesting. Each piece includes an image, description and size and comes with a certificate of authenticity from Bay Films and Paramount Pictures.

Two ways to view the available pieces. Either click here, or go to the Profiles in History and type "Transformers" in the search field. Thanks to Scorpio for the link (via the Allspark).

Editing Transformers ROTF

MichaelBay.com has posted a new behind the scenes video that shows some of the editing process for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I am not sure if this is related to the DVD/Blu-ray special features or separate from it. It shows how complicated it is to put together the film for editors (about nine of them)without the benefit of the CGI robots, reams of footage and a tight deadlines because ILM needs as much time as they can get to do their magic.

ROTF's Paul Ozzimo's Concept Art Preview

Paul Ozzimo, conceptual illustrator for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, had posted a preview of some of his concept art from the movie on his website. Ozzimo is a concept artist and model maker who designed the facial designs for Optimus Prime and worked on Avatar, Watchmen, Transformers I, Mission Impossible III, X2: X-Men United, Superman Returns and more. Sadly the images have seemed to since been pulled and replaced with "Coming Soon" for ROTF but below are the available images for your enjoyment. (via TFW2005)

Interview with Arcee's Creator

Seibertron.com has posted an interview with Will Kenefick of RetroSBK, the creator of the custom bikes used for Arcee in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. For the sake of the toys, the individual bikes are named Arcee (Ducati 848), Chromia (Suzuki B-King) and Flareup (MV Augusta F4). Below are segments, the full interview can be found here.

Skowl: How and when were you approached about working on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen?
RetroSBK: Early in 2008, with a phone call. I spent the first five minutes of the call trying to figure out who was pulling my leg. They had seen my work in a magazine.

Skowl: How much did you know about Transformers beforehand?
RetroSBK: I grew up playing with the Transformers toys and watching the cartoons. Loved them when I was a kid, but when I discovered girls and cars and motorbikes, I think all that went out the window. I hadn’t even seen the first movie, after having been so disappointed with some of the other adaptations from my youth. Needless to say, I watched it, and loved it, the day after my first meeting with Dreamworks.

Skowl: Does your company have any forthcoming marketing tie-ins that relate to the Transformers film?
RetroSBK: Dreamworks and Michael Bay are extremely protective about the characters in the movie, and rightfully so. We don’t have any direct tie ins with the movie, however they have been very accommodating with any requests we have had. All in all this is a VERY enthusiastic group of people, and they take the TF2 brand very seriously.

Skowl: What information, if any, were you given about the bike characters before you started working on them? Rumour is the bike characters were meant to combine but it was cut from the film, were you told about that?
RetroSBK: I was given pretty much the low down on the bikes and the big plan for them. I cant comment on any rumors about the bikes or what they may or may not do.

Skowl: We know you and your team worked long hours to get the bikes finished on time. How difficult was this project compared to your usual work?
RetroSBK: These bikes are more of a styling exercise, where the normal bikes we build are much more performance oriented. Our last bike was built in 4 weeks for my television series, taking more than 400 man hours to complete. The unique thing for me was these really were the first bikes with such unreal paint, and so much graphic detail. Our painter, Chris Wood, from AirTrix came up with new techniques just to do these bikes.

Skowl: What was your level of involvement in the process? Were you given creative liberties with the look of the motorcycles, or was it strictly a "build this for us" thing?
RetroSBK: We weren’t given any, but we still took some. Having our painter, who is the best in the world, we were able to do things that the guys who work in CGI full time couldn’t believe were possible. Usually the CG is far beyond the ability of the real world, but not in this case.

We did work on other scenes in the movie, supplying many of the bikes in the “Mikes Custom Cycles” scene with Meagan Fox painting the bike. That was another scene where we brought in our painter, Chris Wood, to consult, and he worked the entire day teaching her how to airbrush and setting up the shot. Funny part is that in the “goofs” sections on the IMDB website, it says that the airbrush is being held sideways and wouldn’t work, but it’s a very special airbrush that Chris actually uses, and works on its side, just as he showed her to use.

There were other things we had our hand in as well, and it was a great time, and a great way to express ourselves.

Skowl: We've seen plenty of the other new Transformers vehicles (Trax, Beat, Volt, Stingray concept) in car shows and photo ops leading up the film's release - but we never saw the bikes anywhere, why is that?
RetroSBK: We worked VERY hard to keep it that way. The ONLY thing that wasn’t leaked in the movie, the ONLY real surprise was Arcee. It was great! In that part of it, reading the forums, and the speculation about the bikes and some of the plot lines about them was awesome, I loved it. The best part was the huge amount of mis-information that was out there about the bikes. Honestly, they generated such an enormous amount of press pre-release that it made it really hard to hide.

Skowl: Speaking of pushing the bikes to the limit, we heard about one of the motorcycles crashing while filming in Bethlehem, PA - what happened?
RetroSBK: It was just a simple low speed miscue. No one was hurt, but maybe a bit shaken up. Part of riding is falling down sometimes, and the rider wasn’t quite prepared. Quite a bit of damage was done to the bike, but it was quickly fixed, and we had a backup bike as well. We actually have the crash damaged pieces of the bike, and will be auctioning them off for charity and other fund raisers over the next few months. A good chance to own a bit of the REAL movie and help some great causes, like the Pediatric Brain Tumor foundation.

ROTF Smithsonian Exhibit

The Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air and Space Museum near Dulles Airport in Washington, DC has a Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen exhibit that shows off various toy prototypes, designs and props from the two movies. ROTF shot at the Center last year for their interior Jetfire scenes. Below are a few images but the full gallery can be found here.

Making of Transformers 2

From Tech Radar, another article that gets into the technical challenges of creating the visual effects in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen by Industrial Light & Magic and Digitial Domain. Few snippets below, the full article is here.

With animators often facing complicated 500-frame shots with three robots, Benza cast his staff according to their skill sets. "Some animators were interested in animating particular scenes, so I'd shift things around to give them a chance to do those shots," he says. "Specialists in animal behaviour would get the Ravage shots because he was a cat-based Decepticon. Others were specialists in dialogue and acting performances."

To create these performances, team members were aided by a rigging system developed by ILM for the previous movie, through which they could choose what parts of the model to connect. "An animator can animate any individual part or any groups of parts," Benza says. In addition, a new system provided the animators with a little procedural help on the more complex shots.

To make matters more complex, Devastator is so big and has so many parts that the animation crew couldn't treat him as a single asset. "When we tried to load the entire model in high res, it would grind the machines to a halt," Benza says. "We had two machines fail trying to work with him. One literally smoked. We don't know for sure if it was a direct result of working with this character, but it certainly did get overloaded – and fried."

"We designed the first version of the fight not knowing how it would be used in the movie, with Bumblebee and the cop car robot from the first movie, Barricade," says Benza. "Michael Bay liked how tight the edit was and the brutality when Bumblebee tears the limbs off, so he found a place for the fight in the movie and substituted a different robot [Rampage]."

Digital Domain's CGI Work for ROTF

I have posted a few times about ILM's efforts for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen but now its Digital Domain's turn with two articles.

The first article from Gizmodo covers how Alice (Isabel Lucas) was transformed into a dangerous robot by the company. The process involved "advanced particle simulation to tear 10,000 pieces of skin away" that Bay found lacking so 40 frames were added of a close-up with 50 pieces being removed that was done by and by five guys over three months for those two seconds of action. The full details with pictures is here.

The second article from CGSociety also covers the Alice sequence but also touches on four others that Digital Domain worked on - the kitchen bots (8 in total), Wheelie, Soundwave and Reed Man. The total shots were about 130. Reed Man is razor thin robot that forms from the combined nano-bugs that Ravage spit out in the movie. The article covers some of the technical hurdles necessary to create the scenes and Bay's creative input on putting the scenes together. The full two page article is here.

Two Arcee Bikes From ROTF

RetroSBK, the creators of the Arcee bikes used in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, has posted a few images (below) of the bikes. In a seperate post they provide some additional information about the base models of the bikes before they added they worked their magic.

I wanted to take a minute to end the speculation about what really makes up Arcee…

No buell… never was. Quite frankly, I never thought of Arcee as overweight and under powered! Svlete and sexy or muscular and ready to rock, but not loud and slow!

The Pink bike is a Ducati 848, The Blue is a Suzki B-king. The purple is another bike, but she gets.. well see the movie, and you know what happens…

Escalating Visual Effects for Transformers 2

A new article from VFX World talks about how Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen raised the bar in visual effects for movies. The challenge for Industrial Light & Magic was creating the more complicated effects of 46 robots rather than the first movie's 16 while making them bigger, more complicated and at the scale IMAX requires all in the about the same amount of time it took to do the first film. Below are the highlights from the three page article that is worth the read as its amazing the details that have to be considered when creating a CGI sequence. Thanks to a site fan for the link.

- 46 robots in sequel, 14 robots in first
- ILM had about same amount of time to do the increased demands of the second movie as did for the first.
- Takes around 12 weeks to build the model and then another 12-15 weeks to do the rigging and painting for each robot in the computer.
- ILM created 60 builds for ROTF, Digital Domain also designed a few including Alice.
- Disc storage went from 20TB for first film to 150TB.
- Crew size maxxed out to 350 to reach deadline.
- Devastator, if in the real world, would be 150 feet high and Jetfire would be 50 feet tall.
- "both Michael Bay and Scott Farrar wanted to introduce the fact that these characters are alive. Drooling and spitting and bleeding and breathing. Rather than mechanical beasts standing around."
- "[Jetfire] has a sneer at one point, so we had to redesign the face and the eye area so he could wince," Farrar explains.
- "We utilized a lot of martial arts influences and spent about two months doing previs for forest fight sequence and did a full three-minute animatic (in Maya) before the plates were shot for that sequence. "
- "It took 72 hours per frame to render Devastator. We tried a little bit of everything for the forest fight. It's still an action sequence but the hard part was shooting thematically. We know the IMAX people tell you to slow the camera down and lock it off. Well, that's not how Michael shoots. We have pause moments, where you see the characters slow down, but then we have high speed and go back and forth that way."
- "People in computer graphics don't want to reduce motion blur, but the problem with the robots is that they have so many little pieces that they become artifacts with so many sharp things moving through the frame. I found it's better to reduce motion blur in certain moments, like when Bumblebee comes close or Starscream has moments in the forest fight and Optimus and Megatron, where we reduce motion blur to half, a third and an eighth."
- ...the breaking apart of a pyramid top was eight times bigger than the previous ILM rigid simulation record. It only required four or five shots but that took seven months just to create the simulation of the blocks tumbling and being torn apart by Devastator.

Atlus Airmen in Transformers 2

Air Education and Training Command website writes about several airmen based at Altus Air Force Base in Oklahoma, USA that provided consulting services and flew aircraft for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Below is a portion of the article but the entire thing plus more pictures can be found here. Link found by Voiceroy.

Capt. Judd Baker, 58th Airlift Squadron, was one of the C-17 Globemaster III aircraft commanders during filming at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., and Holloman Air Force Base, N.M. Captain Baker said, a mission that started as ordinary quickly grew into something much greater.

Aircraft and Airmen from the 97th Air Mobility Wing appear prominently in the combat scenes of the film. Even when the aircraft and the aircrews are not on screen, the experience and expertise of Altus Airmen guided the action. Every time they would have something going on with the C-17s, it was, 'Would this be real? Would this be how you would do it? Is this how you say that or was this what you call that?,'" Captain Baker said. "And whatever we said, it was, 'Yep, change that in the script. That's what we'll say.'"

Staff Sgt. Christopher Worthy, 58th AS loadmaster, said the experience of being on a Hollywood set was far different from his usual duty day. "It's something I never thought I would get to do," he said. "Here, we fly the line, train the guys so they can go out and do the real world missions -- it's a unique experience to get the call and go do something other than train."

Perhaps the most excited viewers were the children who saw their dads on the big screen with some very big counterparts. When asked about his children's reaction, Captain Baker smiled. "They said, 'Hey, daddy was in a movie and got to meet Optimus Prime,'... I think that's fun," he said.

Top 10 Burning Questions from Transformers 2 (Updated)

This post pretty much assumes you have seen the movie, so spoilers within.

If you’re a fan of science fiction and comics, part of the fun is coming up with explanations (sometime elaborate ones) to explain inconsistencies in continuity. As my review of the movie indicated, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has story holes large enough for Optimus Prime to drive through. From Yahoo! Movies here are top ten questions (really more then that) about Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, many of which will probably be beyond the ability to retcon. Thanks to aunit2011 for the link.

1. In "Transformers," there was this giant battle in the middle of downtown Los Angeles -- excuse me, Mission City -- that was witnessed by thousands of people at the very least. But somehow the government was able to cover up the whole thing, and now the existence of alien robots is just an internet rumor? How did they do it? Pay off everyone who was there and quickly fix millions of dollars in damage? Also, didn't Keller (Jon Voight) go on TV and tell everyone we were being attacked by "a technological civilization far superior to our own"? How did they spin that?
If remember, the novel said Mendelson Robotics is blamed as part of a failed test of new weaponary. Also at the end of the first movie Keller even indicated it was explained as a failed training exercise.

2. There are two pieces of the Allspark cube left: the military has one under lock and key, and Sam discovers another. The Decepticons steal one and bring Megatron back to life. But when Sam (Shia LaBeouf) wants to bring back Optimus, he has to find the Matrix of Leadership on the other side of the globe. Why not use the other piece? Mikaela (Megan Fox) has it in her backpack the whole time. It brought his kitchen appliances to life, why can't it do the same for Optimus?
Mikaela's shard was used on Jetfire

ILM's IMAX Challenges

A new article from Studio Daily (via Tformers) covers the challenge Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) had in building robots for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. For example, Devastator is comprised of 52,632 parts with 12 million polygons, the biggest model ever created by ILM. For the first movie they were talking about the complexity of Optimus Prime's 10,000 parts. The result of this, other decisions, and IMAX requirements resulted in Transformers 2 maxing out to 83% of ILM's render farms capacity with all of ILM's other projects squeezed into the remaining 17%. From there the article gets very technical and shows the huge amount of effort that ILM poured into the movie to create the awesome effects we enjoyed. A section below, full article here.

“Their visual effects covered some portions of the frame,” Smith says of Dark Knight. “But we were dealing with robots everywhere covering up everything. When we compared the resolution we were scanning and putting onscreen to 35mm film at 2K, we decided 4K looked great. Plus we knew painting clean frames and color grading would be more difficult above 4K. When you hear 2K to 4K it might sound like double, but the render times are six times bigger and the memory requirements are six times bigger in IMAX. Across the board, it turned out to be six times bigger.”

During the height of production, ILM dedicated 80 percent of its total rendering capacity to Transformers 2, one time even hitting 83 percent. “We broke all the ILM records,” Smith says. “Everyone else squeezed into 17 percent.” How much is that? ILM’s render farm has 5700 core processors, the newest of which are dual processor and quad cores (eight cores per blade), with up to 32 GB of memory per blade. In addition, the render farm can access the 2000 core processors in the artists’ workstations, which ups the total core processors to 7700. As for data storage, the studio’s data center currently has 500 TB online. Transformers 2 sucked up 154 TB, more than seven times the 20 TB needed for 2007’s Transformers.

The switch to 4K resolution for the IMAX sequences had an impact beyond rendering. “Everything is bigger with IMAX,” Smith says. “When we were rolling out the IMAX sequences, we had more model resolution and detail, and we had a huge wave of machine upgrades all the way through paint and compositing. We switched to [The Foundry’s] Nuke to make handling the comps easier.”