Joel Chang Transformers DOTM Concept Art

so much for the driller... taken out almost instantly from the moment prime shows up

vegetacron wrote:Yeah, i forgot the anime influence...im tired atm...not thinkin straight, but yeah. I forget that the original Appleseed was out and about a little before this (not the one with CGI in it, the original, original). There was also Gundam and Robotech. Come to think of it, maybe all three of these guys were really more influenced from Gundam.

In the commentary of the first TF movie, I recall Bay saying that the concepts he saw during the production of the robot designs were heavily influenced by Japanese anime and manga.

There was also a very enthusiastic Japanese designer named Kenji who caught his eye. Kenji was furious when his colleagues presented their initial concepts for Optimus, saying they were "an insult to the Japanese." [Seeing some of the early designs of the characters, I can see where he's coming from, to be honest.] Bay found this amusing, and put him in charge of Optimus.

Off-handedly speaking, it's very interesting to see that artists from both Japan and the US professing to have been influenced by each other. I've read various interviews where the Japanese artists said they were inspired to draw more gritty and realistic artwork by US comics, while their American counterparts drew inspiration from the eccentric and out-of-the-box creativity of Japanese mangaka.

Like Josh Nizzi, Warren Manser, and Joel Chang, concept artist Aaron Sims has shared his concept work from Transformers DOTM. Mirrored below are a few of pieces, to view the rest visit his website or Concept Art World.

That last one reminds me of Blackarchania.

Wowzers. Those are some fancy designs! Think I'll be getting the finger out and seeing the movie this week for sure

These look very nice.Undermine would have been a much better name for Igor.Too bad he wasn't called that.

The Battle Cruiser kind of looks like HA Backfire's gun mode.

I like how Que looks with the coat and dinged-up white paint scheme. Wish they had kept that.


I wonder what Igor is supposed to be. He's largely made of Long Haul's head, so is he actually Long Haul (Headmaster?), or did Megatron use parts of dead Cons to make new ones, or something else?

I'm not fond of many of those trailer combos, but I do like this hover-bike thing:

Some of these concepts are better than the movie. The last wing attachment for Prime looks way better than the movie one, and they went from all those good looking Laserbeak concepts to what we saw in the movie? talk about bad decision making. I get it though, they probably wanted it to look as far away from human as possible... doesn't mean it had to be so ugly though, jeese.

Sidearm wrote:These look very nice.Undermine would have been a much better name for Igor.Too bad he wasn't called that.

Eh I don't know, I kinda like Igor better, but that design itself is awesome.
I hope if they make a Leader Megatron, he comes with an Igor/Undermine instead of a Mechtech...

It sounds a lot more like a Transformers name.

True, Undermine is more...TransFormery.