In the trail­ers for Trans­form­ers 2 two web­sites were revealed on t-shirts, the​re​al​eff​in​gdeal​.com and giant​eff​in​gro​bots​.com/. Each of them relates to alien con­spir­a­cies and are peri­od­i­cally updated with new sto­ries, some made up and some link­ing to real news items.

The­Re­al­Eff­in­gDeal (TRED) is run by Sam Witwicky’s new flat mate Leo. Giant­Eff­in­gRo­bots (GER) is report­edly the voice of Agent Sim­mons, coun­ter­ing the child­ish giant robot claims. Recent updates on each of the sites has spurred me to make this post, espe­cially as the ROTF mar­ket­ing builds up.

Click the ever excit­ing more link to read the rest of this entry if the TF2 viral cam­paign holds your inter­est. I’ve cov­ered some of the best bits. A lot of the UFO non­sense on Leo’s site isn’t overly inter­est­ing, but hid­den within are some good Trans­form­ers gems.

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Hark­ing back to the orig­i­nal theme tune, Cheap Trick have recorded a recre­ation of the 1980s “Trans­form­ers, trans­form­ers, more than meets the eye” num­ber. It has lov­ingly been placed on YouTube for us to enjoy in all its cheesy glory:

To aug­ment this, here’s the final track­list for the Revenge of the Fallen score. The titles leave lit­tle to the imagination.

1. Prime
2. Einstein’s Wrong
3. NEST [Con­tains instru­men­tal excerpt from “New Divide”]
4. The Shard
5. The Fallen
6. Infi­nite White
7. Heed Our Warn­ing
8. The Fallen’s Arrival
9. Tomb Of The Primes
10. For­est Bat­tle
11. Pre­cious Cargo
12. Matrix Of Lead­er­ship
13. I Claim Your Sun
14. I Rise, You Fall

A two part review of the Bum­ble­bee fig­ure that comes with its own Sam Witwicky fig­ure. The videos detail the trans­for­ma­tion in painstak­ing detail. Thanks to YouTube user lilbrooksy911.

Two Ger­man dubbed clips have sur­faced online, trans­la­tions are wel­comed. The first of these fea­tures Wheelie sneak­ing about, before being caught on a mouse trap and alert­ing Mikaela’s atten­tion who comes to deal with him. Thanks Randy.

The sec­ond shows footage prior to Scavenger’s trans­for­ma­tion, once again in Ger­man — heli­copter flight in to Beth­le­hem Steel, sol­diers prepar­ing for bat­tle, before the robot emerges and the action commences.

First up, some more footage from the Trans­form­ers 2 world pre­mière in Tokyo, thanks to Marc via Para­mount Pic­tures. These pre­views have been very nicely edited together:

This sec­ond video shows us clips from the press con­fer­ence and the prepa­ra­tion work for the première:

Next up, the Trans­form­ers 2 cast were in Seoul, South Korea for the next première.

Revenge of the Fallen delays Harry Pot­ter IMAX run

The Harry Pot­ter 6 IMAX release will be delayed by two weeks to July 29th in light of Trans­form­ers 2’s IMAX run. Harry Pot­ter and the Half Blood Prince will be released on July 15th. This is a result of Warner Bros. chang­ing HP6 from a Christ­mas to a Sum­mer movie, over­look­ing the four week Trans­form­ers lock in.

Aprilia RSV 1000 R debut

An Aprilia motor­cy­cle, dressed in Trans­form­ers gear, and one that matches the one that Mikaela (Megan Fox) rides, has debuted at Road Amer­ica. Thanks Kim.

GMC Top­kick discontinued

Gen­eral Motors are report­edly stop­ping pro­duc­tion of the GMC Top­kick model, aka our friend Ironhide.

Michael Bay as an M&M

Michael Bay has been car­i­ca­tured as an M&M against a back drop of Prime fight­ing The Fallen. There is a great like­ness here, though I’m not sure why a fem­i­nine pur­ple M&M was chosen.

UK Trans­form­ers 2 contests

Para­mount Pic­tures in the UK are offer­ing up goodie bags, copies of the score and sound­track and more excit­ingly, tick­ets to the pre­mière on June 15th. View con­tests

Revenge of the Fallen score cover

The cover for the score has been revealed, noth­ing too rad­i­cal, a closeup shot of Opti­mus Prime. Pur­chase the score from Amazon

Mak­ing of ‘New Divide’ video

How many videos about a song can you make? Here’s another Linkin Park mak­ing of video, New Divide fea­tures in Trans­form­ers 2.

The world pre­mière of Trans­form­ers 2 aired last night in Tokyo! We’ve got the pic­tures, video and most impor­tantly — movie reports to best describe the event for all those that couldn’t attend.

Reports

The first report comes via the Don Mur­phy forums — obvi­ously LOTS of spoil­ers herein!

Ok guys just got back! Don’t have much time to post, don’t wanna miss the train but here’s some quick stuff.

Movie was incred­i­ble, I liked it much more than the first! More action, more robots, less humans! Though there are some lame sex­ual innu­en­dos like Wheelie hump­ing Megan’s leg.

Any­way, Bay and the actors came right into the the­ater and intro­duced the film. I was tempted to scream “Don Mur­phy Stooges #1″ but I didn’t want to get led out by security!

The VA thing in the cred­its was way too fast, sorry guys. The Fallen was Todd some­thing. Welker does voice Sound­wave, and Dev­as­ta­tor too. Dev­as­ta­tor has one line, scream­ing his name. Sound­wave only has a few lines but he speaks Eng­lish. But he never comes down to earth and never turns into a robot. Bleah. Very lit­tle screen time, but at least he doesn’t get exploded which leaves things open for the third movie.

Mostly Eng­lish, not much cybertronian.

The Twins were lame. As in the “bust a cap in you ass” stereo­type. I could’ve done with­out them.

Jet­fire was comic relief. He has a British accent and reminded me of a Monty Python char­ac­ter. He doesn’t “com­bine” with Prime in the nor­mal sense, he gets fatally wounded and rips out his spark, killing him­self so Prime can use his parts.

Wheelie is noth­ing like G1 Wheelie. He kinda reminds me of Rattrap.

Lots of kitchen bots. One was a Samu­rai too. Bludgeon?

Only named Con­struc­ti­con is Ram­page, and he is red.

Mega­tron is revived by some Con­struc­ti­cons and “The Doctor.”

Side­ways never trans­forms, he is cut in half by Side­swipe in the first bat­tle scene in car mode. Side­swipe is cool. Rav­age is cool too.

There was a bot that looked like Black­out but he was not named. Black­out him­self was never revived so I can’t say it was him. He did not speak and was not named in the cred­its. In fact in the last bat­tle scene there were tons of, well, “repaints,” basi­cally reused ani­ma­tion. So even after Dev­as­ta­tor forms, there are still con­struc­ti­cons run­ning around. And some Proto­forms. I even saw a truck that looked like Bonecrusher…though I never saw him in robot mode. Scor­ponok is in the final bat­tle too and is killed by Jet­fire in about 2 seconds.

There are three motor­cy­cles, but they appear to be named col­lec­tively Arcee. Not much screen time/lines for them anyway.

The term “Matrix of Lead­er­ship” is used, it’s a key that oper­ates a device to draw energy from the sun.

Ok that’s enough for now, not gonna check this board again till tomor­row! I sup­pose this thread will be about 100 pages long by then so I’m sorry if I can’t answer everything.

Thanks again Night­bird for the tix!

Whilst Sora at the Michael Bay forums says,

I loved Trans­form­ers 1 so much, but I’m sure you’ll feel like the pre­vi­ous movie was just a dash of bit­ters in a glass of appe­tizer Mar­tini. Be pre­pared to be impressed!

Video of stars arriving

The stars arriv­ing and sign­ing for fans, as well as the pho­to­shoot and Bumblebee

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From the words of Michael Bay:

Hey every­one,

In Japan today. After a month and half seven days a week most days going till mid­night me and my crew have just about fin­ished Trans­form­ers. I have never seen such a level of ded­i­ca­tion from every crew mem­ber in a movie before.

Even today after the press in Japan and right before the pre­mière tonight, I have to sneak out to a dig­i­tal house to approve the last few effect shots.

It has been a long hard road, but really fun one to travel. What you will notice that is strik­ingly dif­fer­ent than Trans­form­ers 1, is the level of ani­ma­tion detail. The robot char­ac­ters (42 in all), you really can feel empa­thy for them. What is also very dif­fer­ent is the sheer scale of the movie. We have been very tight hold­ing back much of the best imagery in com­mer­cials and trailers.

The way to see this movie is on IMAX. Never before has there been 4k ren­dered char­ac­ter ani­ma­tion shot on full IMAX 70 mm film. This is a first and the results are stun­ning. You will see Opti­mus Prime in a few shots where he is actu­ally per­fectly to scale on the IMAX 50 foot tall screens.

For IMAX, I cre­ated a slightly longer cut with more robot fight­ing. Four scenes were shot on IMAX cam­eras so the screen will fill the full IMAX screen for these scenes.

Haters beware.

Michael