The Energon Pub

by **Choc-o-bot** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 4:24 pm

Hello everyone, I'm a long time reader of the seibertron boards, first time post, and this is a big one.

I recently went to a week long animation and computer graphics conference called SIGGRAPH. While there I was able to attend a presentation by several people from ILM about their work in Transformers. Unfortunately I don't have any footage or pictures of the conference, mostly because they asked people not to tape it and had a big scary picture of Michael Bay pointing at us with the caption "I see you filming this!" (They apparently also used the picture for valentines day cards too)

Anyway I still want to share with you what I remember from it since it was some truly amazing stuff. Some of the stuff they showed were breakdowns of how they did several shots, test footage, and how they did the transformations.

There were five speakers from ILM:
Scott Farrar: Visual Effects Supervisor
Russell Earl: Associate Visual Effects Supervisor
Scott Benza: Animation Director
Jeff White: Digital Production Supervisor
Richard Bluff: Digital Matte Supervisor

There is actually so much that I could talk about that it would take forever to write it all out so I am going to give a few bullet points of what I saw and if you want me to go into more detail on any other stuff that I saw, I will tell you what I remember.

-They showed a picture of an ILM employee with what looked like almost every transformer ever made all around his cubicle. They said if there was an earthquake they would find him crushed under them all.

-Michael Bay wanted the Transformers to be as photo real as possible and when ILM were working on shots, the big questions they would ask themselves about it was "Is it cool?", "Is it badass?"

-Optimus Prime had 10,108 pieces compared to his 51 pieces as an action figure

-Many of the shots they had to place the robots in had tons of debris, explosions, and smoke which is a nightmare to composite digital characters in.

-The entire Bonecrusher Transformation sequence is 100% digital. Bonecrusher, the other cars, the debris, the environment is all digital.

-They showed some cool early test footage such as how a transformer would jump from a building and how the ground would react. They had one bumblebee slamming another bumblebee onto the hood of a car. There was what seemed to be part of a Bumblebee vs Barricade fight in the city, with Bumblebee throwing Barricade into a building and Barricade running up the side of another building, doing about 3 fast barrel rolls and landing behind Bumblebee.

-The animation team pretty much filmed about 20% of the action sequences, because they were just given the shots and had to add the Transformers themselves.

-They showed reference footage of people acting out some of the action sequences, such as Optimus killing Bonecrusher, and Barricade attacking Bumblebee. (That spiked thing he took out was apparently nunchucks)

-Optimus and Megatron going down the side of the building was completely digital as well with simulated fire escapes and walls breaking.

-The shot of Optimus and Megatron flying through the building was the one shot where a miniature was used. There was a "Security camera shot" from inside the building not used in the film, but you could see all the detail in there such as tiny desks and coffee cups, etc.

-The Starscream vs the jets sequence was done 3 weeks before they had to pass everything along and was completely CG as well.

-The furby truck actually had furbys in it. Someone on set took a picture and you could see thousands of furbys flying through the air. They took out all of the hard parts and electronics so they wouldn't hurt anyone. Unfortunately they were on fire and even cause a few fires in buildings that left windows open.

- I know about the whole mass shifting controversy going on here and to let you know, I have no idea how this will affect everyone:
Every transformation in the film is done for the camera. It is done to get the best looking shot for where it is. Optimus never transforms the same way twice. This also means that many pieces will just disappear when they move to the back. In Optimus's last transformation they showed the animation file for it pulled way back and you could see pieces floating all over the place, but it didn't matter because they weren't in frame.
Also in the Blackout sequence, when he is blowing up the planes, he is over 100 feet tall, much bigger than his actual size, because if he was his normal size he wouldn't be taller than the planes and it wouldn't look as cool.
Ironhide's blasters come out of really skinny arms. For this to work when he pulls them out they had them telescope out from within the arms so it doesn't seem like they were just scaling up in size.
They also mentioned that some of the transformers would simply not actually fit in their alt modes, such as Starscream. There is just too much geometry from him to fit all into a jet.
So there is technically some mass shifting, but no mass scaling (except for blackout but you don't actual see him scale up). So they will have parts that come out of places that shouldn't really be there but they will not suddenly grow or shrink in size. Such as Soundwave in the cartoon.
They can get away with this because it is in a movie where you are shown what they want you to see. The toys can't do this because they are physical objects that have a certain number of pieces that must go somewhere.

-ILM were even confused by some of the names. One of them kept calling Blackout Incinerator. They said many of the robots had fake names to confuse the fans so they wouldn't find out which ones were really in the movie, but with sometimes 3 names for one (Blackout was also called Vortex at one time) it started to confuse them as well so some would just call him The Helicopter guy.

-If you are ever cornered by an angry Michael Bay, show him an explosion and it will calm him down and say, "Oooh nice explosion!"

Sorry if I've been jumping all over the place, I will try and update this later with what I can remember and what everyone wants to hear about. There is also a great article in the Computer Graphics World magazine about the movie as well.