Bumblebee film concept art for the Decepticons and Bumblebee's battle mask

Ah darn I forgot to post the rest of the concept art here after I saw them up on the artist's Instagram, I'll make sure to post any other concept art though since I'm following just about every concept artist who worked on the film.

For my thoughts on the Bumblebee mask designs, the first one resembles a junk/gas mask to some degree, would like to see the "face" on a flamethrower or toxic based Decepticon like Oil Slick, Acid Storm or Sun Storm.


The other ones make for some nice pilot mask looking guys, maybe battle masks for Arial bots?

-Crossfire- wrote:
Whirl, is that you?

I was thinking that same thing

Ultra Markus wrote:Bee has a hard hat

1547180267-bbconcept8.jpg

*Gasp* head design for generic prewar Constructicons! (Not the group of 6 we know I mean a worker class with set designs like the Seekers)

Could also work as pre war miners or something.

Acolyte wrote:I realize the filmmakers didn't feel like they were "resigned" to recreating G1 onscreen, but with enough more GEEWUHN! in ALL of our evergreen pop culture franchise, we're all going to start feeling the burnout soon.

We'll be sure to check in with you when that happens.

My hot take? That's exactly what happened with the old movies. Designs that were confusing to follow in motion. Designs that made crowd scenes unintelligible. Designs that made following characters between scenes difficult ("Is he the one from before?").

Bumblebee's currently rocking a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. That's more than the previous four films combined.

If you want to tell stories that feature the robots as characters, you need to make them personable and easily identifiable. That's what they did.

You know, the more I think about it, the more I feel that this movie going for a more heavily G1-inspired look for its robot cast was kind of a necessary move to bring back audience familiar with the classic G1 looks after TLK had burned its audiences so much.

TLK was not the success it was anticipated to have been, so the Bumblebee movie really needed to do something new to really shake things up and pull audiences back in. And what with this movie already being a love letter to the pop culture of the 1980s, what better way to capitalize on that 80s nostalgia than to try for some 80s Transformers nostalgia?

It's actually a pretty smart move when you think about it. Giving people something familiar to reel them in, kinda like what The Force Awakens did with its many homages (both thematic and conceptually) to A New Hope.

The child of BM Strika and Obsidian

Well here is some more Bumblebee concept art, this time from multiple people.

First we will start with an artist who has already shared art with us, Joshua Viers also known as conceptbyjosh, he has shared some early Decepticon head designs which eventually led to Dropkick's final head design, you can see the whole "speaker" mouth concept was planned for at least awhile as according to the description in the instagram post.

"Quick Decepticon head concepts for #bumblebeemovie . The director had some specific ideas that were fun to play with."

Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bsgxja1lnws/

Although the final design looks great itself and probably fits more with the "G1" like designs of the other characters these ones are still good looking on their own.










Compare with the final version in the film.




Next up we have another concept artist Thomas Pringle (Pringleart) who has done work on Transformers in the past, recently The Last Knight but has done other projects such as A Quiet Place and Star trek Discovery.

Only one art piece for now with presumably more to come but probably the most revealing one, art for a frozen Megatron with a different design, not quite G1 inspired like the ones in the final film or as describe by those who saw the Test Screenings in March but it is a much more rounded design and certainly one that clashes with the depiction in the 2007 film.

Much more is that the date for the art piece is 2017, 03, 28 which is March 28 in 2017, so they were possibly toying with reboot or redesign ideas before The Last Knight even hit theaters, this is a good example of how much time it takes to develop the behind scenes and development art for movies and a good reason why for Hasbro's movie toys tend to draw from concept art rather then final film stuff.

Even further backed up by the description on Instagram.

"A concept i did for the Bumblebee movie a few years back."



Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/BsgCY2sFc21/


The final art for today comes from artist Tim Flattery who has done some work for previous Transformers films such as The Last Knight and even the original 2007 film not to mention his other work.

There is a lot of photos so I'll only post a few after the description but from top to bottom we have art for the "arm thing" that Bumblebee drops from his undercarriage when Charlie first works on him in her garage in the film.

Then we have have our first look at the "Allspark mutations" that were originally supposed to be in the film when Bumblebee accidentally got "Allspark Engergy" on the electronics in Charlie's house causing them to come to life and trash the house, ultimately despite the props for the creatures having been made and the scenes presumably filmed with other reports that Martin Short was to lend his voice to the scene, it was cut from the film and instead Bumblebee trashes the house all on his own, however one element of the film remained in an odd line from Charlie's Mom about why the Tv cord was cut.

Then we have some art and some pictures of the props for a couple of Sector 7's equipment in the film, first we get a look at the Harpoon guns that were used multiple times in the film at the start and the end, then we get a look at the "Electric Gun" that Sector 7 use to disable Bumblebee at one point in the film and Charlie used to "revive" Bumblebee after Dropkick shot and left him for dead, this electric gun resembles a Grenade tube launcher somewhat.

Finally we see some pics of a Bumblebee head and chest prop with notable focus on the "eye" design.

The source comes from his website http://www.timflattery.com/work/bumblebee/ and I'll post one picture for each of the concepts that I just talked about.












Final art, although this has been up for a bit I couldn't find any page sources for the art itself but according to others the art is from Mark Yang who did do some work for The Last Knight and it fits his art style so it's probably true.

So while I wouldn't add it to a news article until the source is found I wanted to share the art regardless, these are near final designs for Blitzwing, Shatter and Dropkick with only some slightly different proportions and different but very similar head designs to the final film.

Although Tfwiki has the art on their page for the artist so maybe they have a real source
https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Mark_Yang

Design changes are the least bit worrying regarding continuity look at aligned I think the idea was that Bumblebee was meant to be something of a last hurrah for that timeline and that a reboot was always planned (just not as soon as they first wanted) to allow the franchise to blend in seamlessly with the other hasbro movies that are being planned.

That said, a smaller cast of characters and a smaller budget with a tight script is probably the best way to handle tf movies at the moment, to gather momentum again.

With Bumblebee comfortably enjoying its fourth weekend in American theaters, fellow Seibertronian Sabrblade has made us aware that Bumblebee’s success has not been limited to the critical-sphere. Far from it, for a recent statement from Viacom CEO Robert M. Bakish has cemented Bumblebee as a financial success.

Speaking at the Citi TMT West Conference in Las Vegas this last Wednesday, Bakish made explicit reference to Bumblebee’s success, and that it had proven “solidly profitable”. Bakish specifically compared Bumblebee to 2017’s infamous The Last Knight, which had lost over $100 million domestically. As recorded by Box Office Mojo, Bumblebee currently stands at a domestic gross of over $100 million with a $135 million budget, with an additional $307 million grossed worldwide. Though relatively low compared to early films in the franchise, Bumblebee does appear to be steering the franchise back towards profitability.

With Bumblebee still running strongly in theaters, only time will tell how far it climbs. Fortunately for fans of the films, it appears that these earnings only further reaffirm the franchise's continuation into the foreseeable future.

Please lead to Beast Wars movie, please lead to Beast Wars movie, please lead to Beast Wars movie, please lead to Beast Wars movie... And also a reboot because this movie is too different from Bay's universe, and it'd be nice to see a new cinematic Transformers universe