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.

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.

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.

Transformers 2 Tokyo Premiere Video, Spoilers (Updated)

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has made its official worldwide debut in Tokyo, Japan with the "human" cast and director Bay in attendance. There was also a rather smoky filled and "dramatic" appearance by Bumblebee that probably wouldn't fly in the states. In addition, below are a few spoilers about the film from someone at the premiere as they write about a few plot beats and the Transformers voices, look, and how used in the film. Thanks to Marduk for the video link and Bas for the spoiler link.

Update: Pictures of the cast from the premiere. Long story short, the ladies looked amazing and Shia needs to shave that mess off his face. Not sure what is next on the premiere train but assume it is the London Premiere on the 15th. TFormers GettyImages


Below are spoilers, now in invisio-text so highlight to read. I would have done it to begin with but honestly didn't thing it revealed anything that wasn't already pretty obvious from the trailers, novels, and comics but comments here and elsewhere indicate that was a false assumption.
Spoilers:

Ok guys just got back! Don't have much time to post, don't wanna miss the train but here's some quick stuff.

Movie was incredible, I liked it much more than the first! More action, more robots, less humans! Though there are some lame sexual inuendos like Wheelie humping Megan's leg.

Anyway, Bay and the actors came right into the theater and introduced the film. I was tempted to scream "Don Murphy Stooges #1" but I didn't want to get led out by security!

The VA thing in the credits was way too fast, sorry guys. The Fallen was Todd something. Welker does voice Soundwave, and Devastator too. Devastator has one line, screaming his name. Soundwave only has a few lines but he speaks English. But he never comes down to earth and never turns into a robot. Bleah. Very little screen time, but at least he doesn't get exploded which leaves things open for the third movie.

Mostly English, not much cybertronian.

The Twins were lame. As in the "bust a cap in you ass" stereotype. I could've done without them.

Jetfire was comic relief. He has a British accent and reminded me of a Monty Python character. He doesn't "combine" with Prime in the normal sense, he gets fatally wounded and rips out his spark, killing himself so Prime can use his parts.

Wheelie is nothing like G1 Wheelie. He kinda reminds me of Rattrap.

Lots of kitchen bots. One was a Samurai too. Bludgeon?

Only named Constructicon is Rampage, and he is red.

Megatron is revived by some Constructicons and "The Doctor."

Sideways never transforms, he is cut in half by Sideswipe in the first battle scene in car mode. Sideswipe is cool. Ravage is cool too.

There was a bot that looked like Blackout but he was not named. Blackout himself was never revived so I can't say it was him. He did not speak and was not named in the credits. In fact in the last battle scene there were tons of, well, "repaints," basically reused animation. So even after Devastator forms, there are still constructicons running around. And some Protoforms. I even saw a truck that looked like Bonecrusher...though I never saw him in robot mode. Scorponok is in the final battle too and is killed by Jetfire in about 2 seconds.

There are three motorcycles, but they appear to be named collectively Arcee. Not much screen time/lines for them anyway.

The term "Matrix of Leadership" is used, it's a key that operates a device to draw energy from the sun.

End spoilers.

Bay: "Film almost finished."

On the eve of the world premiere of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen in Tokyo, Japan, Michael Bay posted an update in his forums. The film is nearly finished as his dedicated crew works to add the final touches to the film which has 42 Transformers total and for the IMAX footage a few moments where prime is rendered to 1:1 scale for those huge screens. Thanks to Firefrost, John, and Katie for the link.

Hey everyone,

In Japan today. After a month and half seven days a week most days going till midnight me and my crew have just about finished Transformers. I have never seen such a level of dedication from every crew member in a movie before.

Even today after the press in Japan and right before the premiere tonight, I have to sneak out to a digital house to approve the last few effect shots.

It has been a long hard road, but really fun one to travel. What you will notice that is strikingly different than Transformers 1, is the level of animation detail. The robot characters (42 in all), you really can feel empathy for them. What is also very different is the sheer scale of the movie. We have been very tight holding back much of the best imagery in commercials and trailers.

The way to see this movie is on IMAX. Never before has there been 4k rendered character animation shot on full IMAX 70 mm film. This is a first and the results are stunning. You will see Optimus Prime in a few shots where he is actually perfectly to scale on the IMAX 50 foot tall screens.

For IMAX, I created a slightly longer cut with more robot fighting. Four scenes were shot on IMAX cameras so the screen will fill the full IMAX screen for these scenes.

Haters beware.

Michael

Bay: ROTF Completed Wednesday

In an interview with MTV before the Movie Awards, Bay indicated when the film would be completed, "I’m a little stressed because I’m finishing the movie tomorrow. Maybe Wednesday.” This goes along with Nelson's post yesterday saying that Bay went straight from the awards to the studio to finished work.

The reason for the time crunch is the planned world premiere of the movie in Tokyo on June 8th followed by the release in the UK on June 19th. There has to be time to create at least one print of the film for the premiere and plenty of time to start cranking out prints for thousands of theatres worldwide for the nearly global launch around June 24th. Thanks to G0M3Z for the link.

Movie Trailers - Movies Blog

Transformers 2 Performing Pickup Shots

Turns out that Transformers 2 production is not quite finished as the cast performed some pickup shots this week for the film. This information is supported by an interview with Tyrese, a tweet from Megan Fox and a video of the area that includes shots of Shia, Fox, Optimus and Bumblebee.

Megan's tweet:

surprise surprise! shia and i were filming some more scenes the other day. can't wait for everyone to see :)

Tyrese on the shoot and pickups with SciFi Wire:

"Yeah, we did some new scenes, some new shots, got to the set around 10 this morning," Gibson said in a group interview. "Today we officially wrapped Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. Any missing pieces there were, we picked them up today. They're going to go ahead and put it in the chop shop and put the magic around it and go ahead and add it into the film."

What exactly were the pickup shots you did today?
Gibson: I can't really speak on it, but that was a nice try.

Did you get to go to Egypt?
Gibson: No, I didn't get to go to Egypt. I was supposed to go, but you won't be able to tell I'm not there. ...

Will you be part of the third one?
Gibson: I didn't die in 2. I can tell you that.

Based on Megan Fox's outfit, Shia's burnt shirt (as seen here), the background, and set, this appears to be pickup shots for the Egyptian desert sequences. They may also being doing pickups for Princeton based on the outfits of some of the other people on set. The magic of Hollywood where one scene has the potential to have been crafted from literally around the world. Thanks to Megatron for the video link.

1st Trailer and ShoWest Comparison Shots

More screenshots, but this time cool comparisons of the exact same moment from the first trailer and the ShoWest montage that illustrates the ongoing work of the magicians at ILM and Digital Domain. Thanks to John for putting them together and below note. (Click the images to larger size)

I've noticed several updated shots in the Showest footage compared to the first trailer. Attached is an example of Optimus getting kicked in the head with added dirt and grass, more "blood" and darker in general. Other shots are the one of Ravage walking on the beach which had water added dripping off him and the Fallen's teleporting has been changed slightly.

Transformers 2 Runtime Locked

Transformers 2 director Michael Bay has informed MTV the runtime of the sequel. “It’s four minutes longer than the last one,” explained Bay, saying that the runtime was locked. The 143 minute time of the first movie + 4 = 147 minutes long movie. “I don’t ever talk (to executives) about run times,” [Bay] grinned. “Studios always ask, ‘What’s the run time?’ And I’m like ‘If you enjoy the movie, do you care?’”

The reason runtime matter to studios is it reflects the number of showings per screening. So a 90 minutes movie might have 7 showings a day to five for a 150 long movie. Over 3000 or so screens that can be a lot of money the studios think they may not get. However, I think its nonsense. A sell out does more for a movie's word of mouth (an excited, full audience raises any viewing) then a half empty theatre will any day of the week. Besides, if someone wants to see the movie, less show times during the day isn't going to stop them, especially with all the screens the movie will likely appear on (my guess, 3.5k). Thanks to Mcat for the link.

Reshoot, Trailer Rumors

Two pieces of unconfirmed news regarding Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. One is a reshoot at Edwards Air Force Base and another involves the trailer.

From "KevKev", who found the article in the November 28th edition of his local newspaper, The Antelope Valley Press, and transcribed it for the website.

Transformers' return to Edwards

The Autobots and the Decepticons rolled out to the Antelope Valley last week, returning to Edwards Air Force Base.

A production crew for the sequel "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" was spotted Nov. 19 at the base, and appeared to be settling in for the remainder of the week. No other details were available as of press time.

The second "Transformers" project was last seen in the AV in September at the Service Rock Quarry, at Palmdale Boulevard and 75th Street East.

The production previously filmed at the quarry for about a week in mid-August, staging an action sequence featuring a helicopter, pyrotechnic explosions, wind machines, debris and gunfire. A crew spent about a month prepping at the site.

"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" also filmed in July at Edwards Air Force Base. Several fan Web sites have posted pictures online allegedly taken the last time the crew visited the base.

They showed Autobot chief Optimus Prime being loaded onto a trailer, a couple of shiny silver sports cars and an assortment of other vehicles arranged outside a large hanger

If a reshoot occurred, chances are its second unit work that didn't involve Bay or the principle cast and is simply being used to fill out shots that the editing process determined was needed.

In regards to the potential trailer, Cody reports that someone he knows involved with Transformers 2 said they are "90% sure" that the trailer will premiere with The Day The Earth Stood Still which comes out December 12th. They also said the trailer was "finished about a month ago".

Considering that the trailer for Wolverine is debuting with TDTESS, it seems that there is an expectation that the movie will have a demographic that TF2 advertising would be aiming for. It’s also the last big budget popcorn movie of the year so last chance to get the most eyeballs aware that the sequel is coming before year end. After that, it seems to me that the next opportunity will not be until Watchmen in March. After Watchmen, the final theatrical trailer will premiere with Star Trek, no surprise since both are Paramount productions.

Thanks to KevKev and Cody for the information.

Update: Added the name of the newspaper and the date KevKev found the article. I tried to find it on their website but apparently a lot of what they print isn't mirrored on newspaper's site.