Michael Bay has today com­mented on the ShoW­est footage that briefly appeared on his per­sonal site, and has since been pulled from there and every­where else.

The Show­est footage was pulled down because it was just a 12-hour thing.

I just wanted the fans to get a taste of what we have been mak­ing for a year and a half because we have been so quiet. The piece was cut about a month ago for this Show­est thing I accepted this past month — so as you can see many of the shots were far from being fin­ished ren­ders. This dinky lit­tle site received over 1,500,000 hits and 550,000 down­loads in this short time. Any­way the trailer is being printed today and com­ing out on Wolver­ine and Star Trek. 64 days left!

Michael

This post con­tains spoil­ers, beware. The May edi­tion of EW con­tains a Trans­form­ers 2 arti­cle with excerpts from Michael Bay, it’s main focus is on Shia’s hand injury and the trou­bles of incor­po­rat­ing it into the movie.

To sum­marise the piece:

- To build Shia’s injury into the movie the screen­writ­ers added a scene show­ing Sam Witwicky being injured by a “Space Bridge“
– Shia was given a cus­tom made pro­tec­tive and pho­to­genic cast after delay­ing surgery
– The Pyra­mids in Egypt are the set­ting for the final bat­tle
– Bay likes to blow things up, noth­ing has changed: “A fish tank, a heli­copter, con­crete tubes. We blew up a library. This set you’re look­ing at? This will all be gone.“
– Using CGI to cover up Shia’s injury was too expen­sive and “a pain in the neck”.

Space Bridge

The bridge is from the G1 car­toons and was built by the constructicons:

The space bridge appears in sev­eral uni­verses. The exact prop­er­ties of the space bridge vary, but typ­i­cally they serve as a more con­ve­nient means of mov­ing Trans­form­ers from one planet to another than the tra­di­tional means of space travel. [e.g. Cyber­ton to earth]

Scans after the break…
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TF08 gives us another look at some Revenge of the Fallen toys; this time its The Fallen in his box, com­plete with biog­ra­phy, as well as the leader class Jet­fire toy.

The Fallen

For mil­len­nia, he has waited. Thou­sands of years have dragged by as he recruited prox­ies, one by one, to scour the cos­mos for the arti­fact he required. Now he finds he must return to the prim­i­tive, flesh-slug infected planet on which his quest began. Noth­ing will stand in his way this time. If need be, he will scour the sur­face of this dis­gust­ing world clean in the fire of his rage, and search through the blasted rub­ble for that which he seeks.

Jet­fire

UPDATE: Final Trans­form­ers 2 Trailer released in HD (30th April 2009)
See also our in depth analy­sis of the trailer with high qual­ity screen­shots of all the key scenes, robots and Megan Fox.

Update: New Trans­form­ers 2 trailer leaked early (29th April 2009)

The footage from the Las Vegas ShoW­est 2009 is now online for all to see, pub­lished to Michael​Bay​.com. As pre­vi­ously described, the footage opens with Bum­ble­bee and Sam dis­cussing his leav­ing for col­lege and the already infa­mous cry­ing with washer fluid, before jump­ing into a mon­tage of robot awe­some­ness. Typ­i­cally this mas­sive news appears on the week­end I am out in the coun­try with­out inter­net access.

We get to see Dev­as­ta­tor, Jet­fire, Wheels, Chro­mia, Mega­tron smash­ing Opti­mus Prime across a field, The Fallen, Skids, Mud­flaps, Side­swipe, pos­si­bly Black­out, Scalpel, Bum­ble­bee and more.

Watch the ShoW­est Trans­form­ers 2 Trailer/Footage

The YouTube and Vimeo videos got pulled.

The Robots

Dev­as­ta­tor

Con­struc­ti­con

Chro­mia

Jet­fire

Jet­fire being old and moan­ing at the bone­yard

Side­swipe

Skids & Mudflaps

Note in this first image the paint­ing — back in Decem­ber we reported on a pos­si­ble Fallen scoop that looked to all extents and pur­poses to be a fake (see bot­tom of this post) — the pic­ture matches the one in the screenshot.

Orig­i­nal Fallen scoop images:

Black­out or Springer

Black­out, the first active Decep­ti­con in the first movie looks to now appear in Revenge of the Fallen, but the rotary blades are much smaller, some sug­gest this is instead Springer.

Mega­tron

Images cour­tesy of The Cin­ema Source, show­ing Mega­tron ham­mer­ing Opti­mus Prime, send­ing him air­borne and fly­ing across a field.

Ram­page

This one isn’t so clear but it appears to be Bum­ble­bee and pos­si­bly Ram­page duel­ing — judg­ing by the flail­ing tracks.

Scalpel

Wheelie

MTV have the skinny on another Trans­form­ers exclu­sive, this time it’s the first Revenge of the Fallen standee, show­ing Opti­mus Prime and Bum­ble­bee step­ping out of the scene, pre­pared to fight, with Megan and Shia run­ning fran­ti­cally away from a pyra­mid behind them.

There will also be new Trans­form­ers things to shout about next Tues­day. What form that will take is anyone’s guess.

MTV have released the next part of their ongo­ing Michael bay inter­view, this one sees the Trans­form­ers direc­tor talk­ing about his favorite robots, call­ing The Fallen an ulti­mate bad boy and claim­ing that the Dev­as­ta­tor spe­cial effects are ten-fold more com­pli­cated than any­thing Lucas’ com­pany has ever done. I’m still not sold on the Skids/Mudflaps twins.

“The Fallen is the ulti­mate bad boy,” Bay explained of the mys­te­ri­ous evil­doer glimpsed briefly in the trailer for the June 24 film, whose venge­ful mis­sion gives the film’s title its dou­ble mean­ing. “He goes way back in the Trans­former world. He’s one of the first Transformers.”

“The twins are quite fun,” Bay said of the comedy-relief duo, remem­ber­ing his inspi­ra­tion for includ­ing them. “I just kept think­ing, ‘What if we have two dumb Trans­form­ers that are young and dumb?’ … They are just irrev­er­ent, dumb Transformers.”

“[Dev­as­ta­tor is] the most com­pli­cated model that George Lucas’ com­pany has done in 30 years,” Bay mar­veled. “In all the 30 years of [Indus­trial Light and Magic] mak­ing movies, it’s the most com­pli­cated dig­i­tal model — and it’s ten­fold in terms of the most com­pli­cated. It’s taken a long time to do.

“There’s a lot of great new char­ac­ters in this movie — some funny ones, some devi­ous ones, there are some lit­tle teeny ones that are a lit­tle irrev­er­ent,” Bay said of a robot group that includes such new­bies as the four-legged Rav­age, sleek Side­swipe and oth­ers. “You know what is bet­ter in this movie? The act­ing of the robots. It’s just evolved from the last one, and in terms of the ani­ma­tion we are able to put these robots’ [emo­tions] in.”

Such act­ing inno­va­tions have also helped a big break­out robot from the orig­i­nal “Trans­form­ers” film, who Bay insisted remains his favorite Trans­former of the group. “Bum­ble­bee is great in this movie,” he promised.

The offi­cial Trans­form­ers 2 video game site has launched today, con­tain­ing new screen­shots, the video game trailer we have pre­vi­ously seen and an inter­est­ing set of con­cept art for the game. Mean­while Kotaku have posted some addi­tional screen­shots of the PS3/360Wii and Nin­tendo DS ver­sions of the game.

Video game con­cept art

One area found on the new site that is com­pletely new is a small gallery of con­cept art images. They show an inner city con­struc­tion site being looked upon by Bum­ble­bee and Bum­ble­bee fight­ing the huge two wheeled exca­va­tor con­struc­ti­con in Shang­hai. There is also an inter­est­ing image show­ing a beam of light com­ing down from the sky — the pic­ture is named ‘har­vester’ — per­haps the Sun har­vester men­tioned in Defi­ance #4 and pos­si­bly seen in the kids col­or­ing book.

Details about the game

Kotaku go into some depth about the game’s fea­tures, which I have surmised:

- Closely fol­lows plot of movie
– No lin­ear story, cen­tral hub from there you select mis­sions to play
– Can play as Auto­bot or Decep­ti­con and can choose your Trans­former
– Mis­sions are timed and com­plet­ing them quickly can earn you Trans­former upgrades
– You can climb up the sides of build­ings
– The demo showed that Side­ways (Audi R8) is a sniper robot, com­plete with rifle
– One but­ton quick trans­for­ma­tions are still in
– Each Trans­former has a spe­cial abil­ity when trans­formed
– Can attack an enemy by div­ing at them and trans­form­ing next to them
– Starscream has a hover abil­ity
– Lame chauf­feur­ing Shia mission

Video Game Screenshots

A selec­tion of the more inter­est­ing screen­shots as posted on Kotaku. Show­ing Starscream in fly­ing bat­tle above an air­craft car­rier, Bum­ble­bee attack­ing a pur­ple char­ac­ter and Opti­mus Prime doing bat­tle on the Wii:

Wall­pa­pers

1600x1280 res­o­lu­tion wall­pa­per downloads:

Screen­shots of the site

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Michael Bay recently screened his cut of Trans­form­ers 2, “Revenge of the Fallen” to exec­u­tive pro­ducer Steven Spiel­berg in an empty Sony the­ater. He has reported back via his Shoot for the Edit forums stat­ing that Speil­berg called it “Awe­some” and pos­si­bly Bay’s best. Work on a new trailer has just fin­ished and it is set to appear before the new Wolver­ine movie, due for release on May 1st in the US.

Steven Spiel­berg sat next to me in a big 100 per­son the­ater at Sony today. There were 98 empty seats. The lights came up after we just watched my cut of Revenge of the Fallen. He turned to me and said “It’s awe­some”. He felt this movie was bet­ter than the first — and prob­a­bly my best, who knows — at this point in a movie you start to lose your objec­tiv­ity. I just hope the fans like it. I’m going to start putting it in front of audi­ences in a few weeks — no you are not invited, yet.

We have 60 days left. Let me tell you it will be a race to fin­ish. It’s 12 at night and we are still work­ing here in the edit room. Every­one at ILM and DD are killing them­selves right now, they are doing a stel­lar job on the effects. We also just fin­ished our trailer which is com­ing out with Wolver­ine. Talk to you soon.

Michael