Visual Effects Supervisor Jeff White who worked on the first Transformers trilogy is returning to work his magic on Transformers 4. In this interview with
Collider, he chats about his career at ILM and gets into pre-production of TF4 and his involvement on Transformers: The Ride.
Where do you go from here? What are you working on next?
WHITE: I’m starting pre-production on Transformers 4, which has some really exciting stuff in it. And then, we’ll see what the future holds. Certainly, if the opportunity came to work on the next Avengers, I’d definitely jump at it.
Does it feel the same way with Transformers?
WHITE: Oh, yeah! We thought Transformers 1 was the hardest thing we’d ever done, and then we did Transformers 2. And then, Transformers 3 came and Michael [Bay] came up with this sequence where the building is falling over and they’re inside of it. He said he came up with it while he was doing stomach crunches. But, it’s great! We don’t want to do the work that we’ve done before. We love trying to figure out the problems and create imagery that people haven’t seen before.
You also did that with Transformers: The Ride.
WHITE: Yeah, it’s really fun! I just went on it about a month ago, now that it’s opened in Los Angeles, and it’s nice ‘cause I finally had had a little separation from it. It ended up being about a two-year process to create it. To then go on it with people who had never been involved, everybody screams at the same place. It was a lot of fun. Typically, you’ve got a movie theater screen and, even if it’s 3D, you’re bound by a frame. All of a sudden, we had no borders, so we could do a lot of fun things in 3D with that. The beauty of it is that you sit in a car with 11 other people and you get that immediate feedback. It’s funny, they took us up in the rafters and it’s literally like the car drives in, everybody screams, and then the car drives out, every time. It’s cool to see that it has the desired effect.
