Just a quick update for you folks.

There have been reports, as expected, that film­ing is tak­ing place at the Rich­mond Power Plant today, where there have been cit­ings of Bum­ble­bee. The crew have also been spot­ted film­ing at the Philadel­phia City Hall.

The prob­lem with Arcee is quite sim­ply — how do you cre­ate a believ­able Trans­former that fits into the space of a fully func­tion­ing motor­cy­cle. The answer is to get 6 cus­tom built bikes from Ret­roSBK, after Dream­works con­tacted owner Will Kenefick, so Ven­tura County Star report.

Kenefick has since worked ridicu­lous man hours to get these six bikes (the turn­around for one usu­ally being 6 months), ready in time for film­ing. The 3 “hero” bikes and 3 “stunt” bikes were ready in time and some were in action at the start of June in Penn­syl­va­nia — Kenefick was on hand to fix and main­tain the vehi­cles, some­times get­ting only 2 hours of sleep. My guess is that the bikes we have seen were the 3 stunt bikes (this fits in with the call sheet), the 3 hero bikes being used for close up non-action shots, which is prob­a­bly where most of the paint has gone!

He esti­mates that 1273 hours were put in and that each bike cost $40,000, with $10,000 on paint alone (which added a fur­ther 1036 hours of work). Because the bikes are small it is expected that they will be show­cased at the movie’s première.

One of RetroSBK’s awe­some cus­tom built bike’s:

Given the recent remarks over a March 2009 shoot­ing date, Favreau has pub­licly com­mented that this is a lit­tle unrealistic:

“It’s been five weeks since the one and only phone call my reps have got­ten from Mar­vel. I know their hands are full with the Hulk and I’m sure they will get into it shortly, as they tell me they intend to. I ran into the Mar­vel guys at the Hulk pre­mière and every­one sounded eager to get to work on IM2.

I am con­cerned, how­ever, about the announced release date of April 2010. Nei­ther Robert nor I were con­sulted about this and we are both con­cerned about how real­is­tic the date is in light of the fact that we have no script, story or even writ­ers hired yet. This genre of movie is best when it is done thought­fully and with plenty of prepa­ra­tion. It might be bet­ter to fol­low the BB/DK, X/X2 three year release pat­tern than to scram­ble for a date. It is dif­fi­cult because there are no Mar­vel 09 releases and they need prod­uct, but I also think we owe it to the fans to have a great ver­sion of IM2 and, at this point, we would have less time to make it than the first one.”

Before watch­ing this I’ll give you some fore­warn­ing. This video isn’t as finely cut and edited as the pre­vi­ous incar­na­tions, it lacks a cer­tain aes­thetic qual­ity and in that reveals more of the movies’ events. The video con­tains much more dia­logue and spans a good 2 min­utes. If you don’t mind spoil­ers, please enjoy:

Thanks again Csam Cram!

Csam Cram informs us that sam­ples of The Dark Knight Sound­track are now online for all to lis­ten to. The sound­track will be released as a stan­dard ver­sion and a lim­ited edi­tion ver­sion. We’ve pre­vi­ously reported on the track­list­ing and the art­work.

Philly​.com have revealed that today’s film­ing is focus­ing around the East­ern State Pen­i­ten­tiary and later in the week Rit­ten­house Square will be made up to look like Paris. Then, next week, it’s off to Princeton.

Trans­form­ers 2 cam­eras and crew have been all over (Fair­mount Park, Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia) and today are due inside East­ern State Pen­i­ten­tiary, while Rit­ten­house Square will dou­ble as Paris later this week. Sat­ur­day is the sched­uled Philly wrap; next stop: Princeton.

IESB have posted some back­story to the attach­ment and unat­tach­ment of Super­bad star, Jonah Hill:

You know how Jonah Hill was attached to TRANSFORMERS 2, and then was sud­denly and with­out expla­na­tion un-attached? Appar­ently, Jonah was more or less offered the part in the room, but then had to go into Bay’s office to read the script — because it’s so super top secret and the plot is so extra-specially com­plex, you know.

Jonah sits down, opens the script. The char­ac­ter of the chubby side­kick is named “Jonah.” How per­fect. Jonah reads 20 pages of the script, puts it down, and silently walks out of the room. Wants no part of it. Next thing you know, his reps call Bay, he’s off the project.

I’m think­ing this may be because the chubby side­kick char­ac­ter was just too stereo­typ­i­cal with a whole host of ter­ri­ble one lin­ers and very lit­tle depth. Last thing you want to do is get typecast.

Trans­former Toys got the scoop on a small descrip­tion of the Trans­form­ers 2 game adap­ta­tion, “Trans­form­ers 2: The Ulti­mate Bat­tle” — not sure if that is a work­ing title or not. The arti­cle sug­gests that Starscream is the ulti­mate bad­die, whilst giv­ing some weight to the rumors of Trans­form­ers that can trans­form into weapons:

“Make every sec­ond count Trans­form­ers 2: The Ulti­mate Bat­tle, as you choose to seek revenge as the Decep­ti­cons or defend Earth as the Auto­bots. Go beyond the movie and drop into pressure-packed mis­sions where sec­onds can make the dif­fer­ence between sur­vival and destruc­tion. Play as a vari­ety of Trans­form­ers, such as the evil Starscream or heroic Opti­mus Prime, to either demol­ish or pro­tect fully destruc­tible envi­ron­ments around the globe. A new Trans­for­ma­tion sys­tem gives you more detailed con­trol as you instantly switch between Robot, Weapon, and Vehi­cle modes at any time to drive, fly, fight and shoot your way through grip­ping lev­els. Then make your choice online as you go head to head against friends in mul­ti­player bat­tle zones. Your alliance will decide whether Earth’s great­est cities stand or fall in ruin as you expe­ri­ence the ulti­mate level of inten­sity in this race against time.”