The Energon Pub

Nick Mokey from the magazine 'Popular Mechanics' sent us a heads up and link to an article about the Transformers Movie effects and how they were created.

Here's the link to the article.

A couple small excerpts:

"We start with the end result first, then work backwards from there," says animation supervisor Scott Benza. "We'll start Bumblebee standing up in his pose in the composition of the shot, then collapse him down into something of a car shape, where we fold his arms in and hover him down close to street. And then we deal with what we have to fill in the in-between."

"When that crucial "in-between" involves over 10,000 hand-modeled parts pulled out of actual auto body — as Optimus Prime did (his old-school toy had a mere 51 components) — there's a bit more "filling in" to do. "It's hugely complicated," says visual effects supervisor Scott Farrar. "It's no different than going out and machining these parts [in a real car]. Every one of those things has to be connected and travel in the right direction when an animation occurs."

Enjoy this article and watch out for the occasional spoiler which may be entrenched, if you have not seen the movie yet!

This is one of the reasons most people were psyched about the TF movie... very believable CGI, and from what I've seen in the movie, It's all of the same quality... unlike that one Playstation2-Calibur scene in Spiderman 3 (Movie)'s final fight where Monster Sandman Rises in front of Spidey.

ILM FTW. 'Nuff said.

The blend of CGI and RL was mostly seamless. Some parts were noticeably fake though (like the longshot of Shia and the statue plummetting) but overall, it was incredible.

It was certainly more believeable than the old CGI relatives: Jurassic Park, and so forth...

Plus, with the way they are designed, it is simply amazing, I forgot to be scrutinizing and just enjoyed the movie!

Nice article.

It would have been an absolute nightmare to create those transformations from scratch, especially seeing as they also had to look exactly like their real car counterparts.

YES! just saw movie - so amazing!

I have to say this, was I the only one kind of let down Prime let Sector Seven beat up on Bumblebee like they did. I know he told Jazz there wasn't anything they could do, but it just seems out of character, specially for Prime.

Anyway, other then minimal Decepticon voices and no explanation for what happened to Barricade and Scorponok, BEST MOVIE OF THE SUMMER, other than Diehard!

I don't get it. They are saying that it was a challenge to make 10,000 moving parts fit together. So why were they working with so many moving parts? No one put a gun to Michael Bay's head and said you need thousands of moving parts. In fact, many people wanted something less.

"When it came to breathing life into characters such as Bumblebee, the protective Autobot, ILM needed to think backwards to fill in the blanks (and the junk in the drunk) between finished robot sketches and real-life GM cars."

...junk in the drunk?