The 30 finalists have been selected for Transformers "Make Prime Speak" contest. Sadly, originality took a back seat to familiarity. If the filmmakers wanted to save some money, they could just choose 10 phrases from the cartoons and remastered movie coming out next Tuesday and reuse them without the time and expense of recording new dialogue.
Not that its the filmmakers fault. The contest was a great idea and much appreciated. Sadly the fans (me included) didn't take it seriously enough and because of that we get the lackluster list of finalists.
It does prove a point. You can pretend you know a character really well, complain how they are used, look, speak etc, but really get down to it, "knowing" a character and writing for that character is not as simple a task as we pretend it to be.
List of 30 finalists is here.
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Next transformers trailer to be a teaser trailer
ReplyDeletehttp://www.shootfortheedit.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1175&sid=fd2e7d9833ae569ed22a4f1cf9369365
i thought the lines were awesome for the most part. sure some are reissues of the original prime - but what the heck? he is prime right? he has some GREAT one-liners. i like the new ones too.
ReplyDeleteA few good ones still made it through. And while they are seriously outnumbered, there is still hope that there will be a good line or two issuing from Prime's voice circuits... I hope.
ReplyDeleteActually, this WAS the fault of contest organizers.
ReplyDeleteWith an internet contest, among the thousands of submissions, there were definitely going to be some jokes or just plain stupid entries. That's to be expected. When selecting the 100 "Finalists" to vote on, the contest judges did not follow their outlined criteria (being with Prime's character and originality). As a consequence, the contest no longer had any integrity. People who had submitted much better, thoughtful lines were annoyed, and decided since the organizers weren't taking the contest seriously, then they shouldn't either.
It won't make a difference, because whatever line ends up in the movie will still be a good one. But the contest organizers basically mocked the fans by botching this contest.
I too, believe that the poor quality of lines selected as finalists is the fault of the contest organizers.
ReplyDeleteThe "Make Prime Speak" contest was most likely cooked up by the Marketing Dept. at Paramount. Based on the number of blogs dedicated to the production aspects of TRANSFORMERS (such as Don Murphy's), the studio already knows that there is a established fanbase for this film. What the studio was trying to accomplish was to get the casual Transformers fan interested in the new movie.
The contest was probably approved by the producers of the film, but the specifics were undoubtedly handled by the Marketing Dept. That being said, production executives are too busy to bother with small online publicity moves such as this contest. The contest was most likely organized by an executive assistant, and was then handed off to a team of interns, whom then maintained the contest thereafter. In all likelihood, it was these aformentioned interns who chose the 30 semi-finalists for the contest. That would explain the fact that there are a multitude of "recycled" lines from the G1 cartoon series and the 1986 movie. The interns probably monitored the incoming submissions, and when they saw ones that they recognized, or ones that they though were cool, they chose them.
This may sound speculative, which it is, but it is not at all outlandish. I used to work as an intern in the marketing department at one of the top movie studios in Hollywood (not at Paramount, however), and worked on online contests remarkably similar to the "Make Prime Speak Contest." The studio executives and assistants would allow the interns to filter the incoming submissions and "flag" the entries that the INTERNS felt had a standout quality to them. On one particular contest, we received over 2,000 submissions for a contest that ended with only ten finalists. It was our job to go through each submission one by one, and pick out as few as possible for the executives to look through for finalists.
In addition to working on contests such as these, the interns had a number of other duties we had to complete each day such as maintaining the office printers, stocking the kitchen, and mailing out packages, which made it difficult to spend a great deal of time on an online contest. This would compel us to go through the submissions as fast as we could in order to move on with the rest of our duties, which undoubtedly caused us to under appreciate the quality of some of the submissions.
Also, keep in mind that there were probably a number of different interns working on the contest (people with different tastes and intellects), which is why some of the submissions chosen were of better quality than others.
I cannot confirm that the above-described scenario is what took place behind-the-scenes of the "Make Prime Speak" contest. However, there is one thing I'm sure about--the contest was merely a way to spread word about the film to quadrants OUTSIDE of the fanatical fanbase, and was not meant to please the die-hard Tformers fan at all. In the end, no matter how many "true" fans proclaim that they are going to boycott the film, the studio will always call their bluff, and do what they have to do to make sure that the film reaches as broad an audience as possible. Studios are in the business of making money, not making fans happy (unfortunately for people like us).
I'm unhappy with a lot of the changes they've made from G1 for the film, but I can't wait to see it. I love Transformers, and will always be a fan.
-R