User talk:Alientraveller/Transformers (film)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents

[edit] Suggestions from my talk page

  1. Seperate listings of the robots' voice actors from their mechanical forms?
  2. What about the animated films?
  3. Should mention be made of the comics and toys based on the film?
  4. A discussion of the film's unique take on the mythology or at least its design aesthetic?

Unless you are going to segregate the page to be just Bay's film(s), then I'd incorporate all the films that came before it. If you incorporate comics and films then you are leaking into "Franchise" territory. I'm not sure about the last one at the moment (just woke up so I'm fighting typos and droopy-eye syndrome).  BIGNOLE  (Contact me) 12:54, 17 October 2007 (UTC)


[edit] DVD commentary for Transformers

Michael Bay. (2007-10-16). Transformers 2-disc Special Edition [DVD]. Paramount Pictures.

  • Spielberg called Bay on July 30, 2005 to ask if he would direct Transformers. Bay asked Spielberg to give him some time to think about it, and then, after hanging up the phone, tried to remember what exactly a Transformer was. Bay quickly realized that his "idol", Steven Spielberg, had just asked him to direct a movie he was involved in, so he called Adam Goodman at DreamWorks and asked "what is this movie?"
  • To get him prepared, DreamWorks sent Bay to "Transformers school" at Hasbro, where he sat in a conference room with 20 people and learned Transformers lore. Bay has been asked to do comic book movies in the past, but they never excited him. While listening to the Transformers lore, Bay began looking over some images created by a Japanese artist. The images were "dark" and "cool", and inspired Bay to make this movie. During the meeting, Bay would have thoughts of transforming cars at 80 miles per hour. Bay decided that he wanted to make this movie, but he wanted it to be "real" and "cool".
  • Bay liked the Transformers lore—which was "noble" and had "good morals"—but he wanted to broaden the story, so he brought the American military in so the movie could be relevant to adults. Then he wanted to lead into the smaller story of Sam and the glasses.
  • Phil Stru (sp?),who assisted Bay on Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, was the film liaison for the Pentagon. He would read over the script to determine what could be done, or what needed to be done regarding any military scenes.
  • The real Qatar is the forward command post of the whole Middle-East, so Bay had to convince different bases to imitate Qatar. Holloman Air Force Base, in New Mexico, was used to sub-in for the real base in Qatar, because the surrounding desert area was covered in white sand.
  • The shots of the F-22 Raptors being piloted, both in the opening act and later in the final act, were shot at Edwards Air Force Base.
  • Blackout's transformation at the base in Qatar was the first animation completed for the film. It was created by artist Kae Gee (sp???), who also worked on Optimus Prime's face and head. Bay met Kae Gee at an ILM meeting of about 30 artists. A group of artists were displaying their three dimensional rendering of Optimus Prime's face. Bay's reaction to the face was that it was terrible, a sentiment echoed by Kae Gee when he stood up in the meeting and proclaimed the work to be an insult to the Japanese people; he then requested to be the one to create Prime's face. His outburst in the meeting inspired Bay to allow him to create Prime's look, as well as the "'Rubik's Cube' transformations" the robots would go through.
  • Another reason the military provided assistance for the film was that they wanted accuracy in the portrayals of the military personnel. This extended down to the uniforms the soldiers wore at Qatar being real, standard issue uniforms.
  • Bay wanted to shoot a kind of "suburbia" life, blended with the sci-fi aspect of the film, so that more people could relate to the characters.
  • Bay had casting agents searching London, Australia, Canada and the United States for the perfect "Sam". Shia LaBeouf's name came up, but Bay was hesitant because he could only remember him as a cab driver from Constantine, and he looked older in that film than Bay wanted for the character of Sam. When LaBeouf came in for an audition, Bay remembers that he seemed overly excited, with Bay needing to calm him down every few moments. It was this energy, and his improvisational skills, that Bay loved.
  • Bay originally wanted Steve Buscemi for the role of Agent Simmons, which went to John Turturro, but Buscemi was busy directing a film of his own at the time.
  • Bay knew Megan Fox from her audition for The Amityville Horror, which Bay's company Platinum Dunes helped to produce. She was relatively new at acting at the time, and came into the audition "timid"—Bay knew he needed to toughen her up for the role of Mikaela. Bay brought in Shia to work with her, with the two showing good chemistry. In order to achieve the toughness he wanted, Bay would threaten to keep Fox on set all night long, shooting the same scene over and over again, until she hated that scene and was able to give the "tough" persona he wanted.
  • The dog, Mojo, was created for the purpose of adding more comedy to the story. Bay felt a dog addicted to pain pills, and living in an elevated doghouse, would add to the comedy already present. Another element added was the neuroticism of Sam's dad being obsessed with his lawn. This was inspired by Bay's lawyer, who does not allow his own kids to walk on his grass.
  • When developing the character of Sam, Bay wanted the audience to like him, and not think of him as some simple geek. The scene at the lake, where Sam is confronted by the school jock, was used to show Sam fighting back with "comedy and wit".
  • The art server, which housed all the images of the Transformers, had over 39,000 attempted hacks in January 2006 alone. The server had to get security encryptions that were close to government level in order to keep the hackers from stealing the images. Unfortunately, Bay's personal computer was successfully hacked, and the script stolen, but they managed to get it back before it could be leaked further. For safety reasons, Bay was the only one with an original script, as the cast and crew received either old scripts, or coded scripts.
  • Hasbro had to know a year in advance what Transformers the film would be using, and what vehicles they would be using as well.
  • Spielberg suggested that Bay keep the number of robots small, around 6 to 5 for each side, to make the story more manageable.
  • Frenzy was animated by a French artist at ILM; "The French guy", as Bay referred to him as he did not know his name, gave the Decepticon "quirky kind of movements", which Bay like as it added a sense of personality. Unfortunately, different artists would often work on the same characters in different scenes. Bay, who had come to identify the characters based on their individual movements, had to demand ILM bring back "the French guy" to work on Frenzy—"the French guy" had moved on to work on Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End—because Frenzy had become an entirely different character, in Bay's eyes, in scenes animated by artists who were not "the French guy".
  • Bay's theory on special effects is that they "come down to the lighting". To make effects look real, the effects team used a process called ray tracing to help with the lighting. The idea is that when shooting digital cars you have to take into consideration the various qualities of light that will hit the car.
  • In terms of who did what digital effects, and how much, ILM created 3/4 of the effects in the film, with Digital Domain creating the final 1/4. At the time, ILM's most complicated creation was Episode III's General Grievous, which Bay saw as "simple" compared to what he wanted for Transformers. Optimus Prime would have 10,108 digital parts, which all had to move.
  • Advisors had to be present for all military scenes, especially ones inside the Pentagon, to make sure the scenes were portrayed accurately. Though they would not tell the cast and crew what to "say" or not to "say", they would make sure events that took place were depicted to the best of the filmmaker's abilities. For example, the only way for Bay to get clearance to shoot the scene where Rachel Taylor's character, Maggie, sneaks into the private meeting of the Secretary of Defense was if Bay shot someone attempting to get her out immediately. The reason the advisor gave Bay was that no one could ever infiltrate a room in the Pentagon in that way.
  • Primacord explosives were used to create a ripple effect to simulate Scorponok's movements under the sand. A computer was used to set off the explosives in timed increments, while Duhamel and the rest of the cast for that scene ran overtop of the explosives; they could not stop for even the briefest moment of they would be caught in the blast.
  • Most of the Army Rangers were real Rangers. Bay had once been told a story that involved a soldier, in the middle of a firefight, attempting to contact the Pentagon via a cell phone. The soldier had to go through an operator who required a credit card number just to get into contact with the Pentagon, so they could send in air support. This became the basis for a similar scene in Transformers, when Scorponok was attacking the Qatar Base survivors.
  • The military allowed Bay to use one of their AWACS planes for the scene where Gibson's Sergeant Epps calls in the reconnaissance place, which came with the regular crew as well. For a more realistic experience, Bay broke the scene involving Scorponok down for the crew, and then they went about creating their own dialogue, and performing their normal actions, as if the event was really occurring on the ground.
  • The Scorponok fight scene was the first full scene completed, with digital effects, and it was used to show to distributors, like the Japanese production company Toho, and theater owners in an effort to get them on board with the film.
  • The original initial budget was $145 million, but by the end of filming it had stretched to $151 million. Spielberg made sure Bay digital effects shots only when necessary, to conserve the budget.
  • When deciding where to film and what crew to use, Bay opted to relinquish 30% of his fee so that he could film in America with his usual crew, as he felt it would be too costly to go to Canada or Australia and fly in his crew.
  • Ethan Van der Ryn and Mike Hopkins invented many sounds to give each of the robots individual personalities through the noises they make.
  • Bay saw the prototype Camaro in a magazine while looking for vehicles to use for the film, and immediately knew it was Bumblebee. Since it was a prototype, the crew had to build their own Camaro, after GM gave them permission and allowed them to view the CAD files.
  • Bay believed in making it all realistic, which included making sure the robots were the size they were supposed to be based on their relative vehicle size. This played into the reason Optimus Prime was made into a long-nose semi-truck, as opposed to the traditional flat-nose truck. If Bay had stuck with the flat-nose, Prime would have been 20 feet tall; instead, the long-nose design gave him an additional 8 feet in height.
  • Cullen auditioned twice.
  • The studio wanted Frank Welker to return and voice Megatron, but Bay felt his voice was "too cartoon", and he did not feel it would be appropriate to ask Welker to change the voice he had used for years. Early on, Bay wanted Liam Neeson, Michael J. Fox, and Hugo Weaving's voices to be the inspiration for the voice actors selected to voice Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, and Megatron respectively. Lorenzo di Bonaventura knew Weaving from The Matrix trilogy and got him to do the voice work for Megatron. Since Weaving was in Australia at the time, Bay directed him via an iChat, with Weaving receiving a copy of the film and script to work with.
  • Bay came down with the flu during filming and had to direct from his trailer. His absence slowed production down from 50 setups a day to 15 setups.
  • For scenes where the actors had to interact with the robots, window washer poles were used as stand-ins, with tennis balls in place to act as an eye line.
  • Artists at Digital Domain, instead of using motion capture for facial expressions, would imitate what they wanted on video, and then animate what they see.
  • Turturro tried to imitate Michael Bay in his portrayal of Agent Simmons. Part of the back story he and Bay came up with involved Simmons being part of a generational family of Sector 7 agents, as well as the fact that he would be the kind of person who still lives at home with his mother.
  • The life-size Bumblebee that was built cost $200,000. He is the only robot to receive a full body mock-up. A mock-up of Optimus's face, and Megatron's legs and hands were built. Megatron's legs cost $500,000 to create, but the idea behind creating these objects is to save more money from not needing to use digital effects to create them.
  • Bay used the Porsche Cayenne, mounted with a camera, to achieve shots that required high-speed movements for the scenes involving the robots.
  • Blackout's pilot in the film was played by the actual pilot of that MH-53 Pave Low helicopter. When Bay showed Spielberg the pilot, they both agreed that he was exactly what they had imagined "Mustache Man"—the name given to the holographic man by Bay and Spielberg—to look like.
  • Steve Jobs would not allow Bay to use an iPod for the scene where Simmons uses the radiation from the All Spark to create a mini-Transformer out of Maggie's phone; instead, Bay got permission from Nokia.
  • Steve Jablonsky is the protégé of Hans Zimmer; Zimmer helped out the musical score on a few pieces of the film.
  • For Transformers 2, Bay wants to focus more on the faces of the robots.
  • The stunt driver operating Optimus's semi-truck was doing 55 miles per hour when her performed the 180 degree turn-around when Optimus, Ironhide, Jazz and Ratchet catch up to Sam, Mikaela and Bumblebee on the highway.
  • To achieve the shot of Bonecrusher transforming on the interstate, a go-cart was used to film the shots that appear underneath Bonecrusher, and the Porsche Cayenne was used again for the pull away shots; these two shots were transitioned together to create a seamless camera movement.
  • The artists who create the digital Transformers are not fight coordinators, so Bay hired a couple of real fighters, with different fighting techniques, to act out the scenes where the Autobots and Decepticons battle each other in hand-to-hand combat. Then, the artists would match the fighter's movements to the animations they had created.
  • Bay was not allowed to film on any city block for extended periods of time, and was regulated to shooting only on the weekend, so he had to shift around to four locations to achieve the shots necessary for the final battle in Mission City. There were two separate city blocks used in Los Angeles, one block used in Detroit, and a soundstage on the Universal backlot was created as well. All of these shots, whether on-location or on the stage, had to be blended together to give the appearance that it was all the same location.
  • When coming up with movements for the Transformers, Bay did not want them to be "clunky, fat, f'in robots". The crew studied ninja, karate, and samurai movies to get a feel for the warrior-esque movements Bay wanted, which included the robots having the ability to jump and spin.
  • To keep with the realism, Bay had LaBeouf stand on the edge of a 20 story building for the scene where his character is cornered by Megatron.
  • To achieve the aerial shots of Starscream's attack on the F-22 Raptors, Bay had a helicopter fly as fast as possible through a set of buildings, and shoot footage with VistaVision to get a wider negative to be able to move objects in the scene around more. Bay brought in some of the animator's who worked on the planes in Pearl Harbor to create the shots of Starscream for his aerial battle.
  • Audiences wanted to know what happened to the Witwickys and Starscream when the film was shown during a test screening, so Bay went back and added two more scenes, which aired during the credits, revealing what happened to those characters. He also had to add the scenes at the Griffith Observatory, where Optimus explains that he plans to put the All Spark into his own chest to destroy it, because audiences were confused as to why Sam would put the All Spark in Megatron's chest to kill him.  BIGNOLE  (Contact me) 00:02, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Headlines

Some of them may already cover what's already in the article, but just wanted to dump what I have in my Google Alerts here. Feel free to remove if you think they're not necessary.

[edit] 1

[edit] 2

[edit] 3

[edit] 4

[edit] 5

[edit] 6

[edit] 7

I tried to provide citations that you may not have come across, but I don't know how well sites like seibertron.com or tformers.com followed the media. Hope this benefits you! —Erik (talk • contrib) - 20:58, 8 November 2007 (UTC)