City Hall in Philadel­phia is mocked up to look like Ecole Mil­i­taire in Paris for film­ing which took place yes­ter­day. The set­ting for the scene is a hol­i­day for Sam Witwicky’s par­ents — Kevin Dunn and Julie White.

Video and pic­tures from Mia show Bum­ble­bee, the green Chevy Beat and red Chevy Trax in the area as well as a small explo­sion and panic in the square. If you scroll down you can see what seems to be an exten­sion of this, although tak­ing place at night, of con­tin­ued may­hem and run­ning — this time by Sam’s par­ents, who may or may not have been in the square at the time of the explosion:

Philly­Film­Girl also man­aged to get some can­did footage of Sam’s par­ents in an alley­way run­ning away from an explo­sion, surely with a robot CG’d in later amidst the flash­ing blue lights. The other video shows them run­ning down the alley with a teeny “Smart Car” hastily fly­ing past them — most likely flee­ing from the same thing, rather than being a robot.

Con­tribut­ing Source: TLAMB

On Wednes­day the vehi­cles of Trans­form­ers 2 were out and about in a chase scene on Front Street. Jalop­nik were on hand to snap a cou­ple of shots, show­ing Bum­ble­bee either chas­ing, being chased by or lead­ing the green Chevy Beat car we’d seen at Beth­le­hem, PA and under wraps in other locations.

They also got the first pic­ture of a new Auto­bot, a red Chevy Trax — (pos­si­bly the twin of the Chevy Beat?):

It is also rumored that the thrid of the new Chevy trio may turn up — the Chevy Groove:

Con­tribut­ing source TFW2005.

MTV have been speak­ing with Trans­form­ers star and FHM’s sex­i­est woman in the world, Megan Fox.

“As big as the first movie was, this is 10 times as big, 10 times as many set pieces, explo­sions, and acro­batic stunts,” she told us about “Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen. “Shia and I make out a lit­tle bit; I don’t know if any­one wants to see that.”

“You know, we’ve been hav­ing script meet­ings, and we’ve been rework­ing the script, because they wrote it fast because of the writer’s strike,” she explained. “And, we’ve just been going through and try­ing to do some char­ac­ter stuff for Shia and myself in the mid­dle of this crazy world that they’re in.”

[…]

“I can tell you that we’re on loca­tions in some really exotic places,” she added. “It’s just going to be a badass movie. It’s just going to be a popcorn-visual-spectacle, sum­mer film.”

[…]

As for Michael Bay’s main direc­to­r­ial input to his lead actress, Megan had this to say: “His main note to me is just to look hot; so I try my best.”

As we can see, she doesn’t find this too difficult:

Viva La France. As reported, the area sur­round­ing City Hall has been donned up to look like a sub­urb of Paris, com­plete with signs point­ing towards “La Tour Eif­fel” and French flags bil­low­ing (not that the French actu­ally put up flags all over the place, unlike the patri­otic Amer­i­cans). The Philly­ChitChat blog has cap­tured pic­tures of the set up and the newly added French flavour. Other signs state “Ecole Mil­i­taire”, which means Mil­i­tary Acad­emy and is a Paris Metro sta­tion. There is also a sec­ond report about the French café set.

Whilst at East­ern State Pen­i­ten­tiary, Cheese­burger, via TLAMB, reports that Cell Block 7 is being pre­pared for film­ing on Friday.

Fol­low­ing the reports of Bum­ble­bee being spot­ted at Rich­mond Power Sta­tion yes­ter­day, Ener­gonkid has pro­vided a shot of two Bum­ble­bees (Hero and Stunt), sit­ting side by site:

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:

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.