We’ve seen the leg­ends class toys com­bine as well as rumors of a more com­plex com­bi­na­tion via blacked out sil­hou­ettes on key chains and boxes. This is our first proper look, albeit a small one, at Jet­fire and Opti­mus prime leader class toys com­bin­ing to form “Power up” Opti­mus Prime:

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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