As hinted by Nel­son on Michael Bay’s Shoot for the Edit blog, Empire and USA Today do indeed have the first offi­cial pic­tures from Trans­form­ers 2 along with some juicy scoops and rumor con­fir­ma­tions — SPOILERS herein: Dev­as­ta­tor con­firmed. Dev­as­ta­tor made up of mul­ti­ple robots con­firmed. Sound­wave con­firmed. Jet­fire crossover confirmed.

USA Today

Arti­cle 1: LaBoeuf, Fox Really under fire in Trans­form­ers 2

Juicy spoil­ers and plot synopsis…

This time, the story finds Sam and Mikaela under attack by the evil Decep­ti­cons because of some­thing Sam has learned about the ori­gins of the Trans­form­ers and their ancient his­tory on Earth.

To acquire this knowl­edge, the invad­ing Decep­ti­cons need to cap­ture Sam instead of kill him. Mean­while, the U.S. mil­i­tary and an inter­na­tional coali­tion has united with the good-guy Auto­bots to fight back the vil­lains’ attack.

Some of the most impor­tant new­com­ers are in the robot cast: Decep­ti­cons Sound­wave, a fear­some com­mu­ni­ca­tions expert, and Dev­as­ta­tor, whose arms and legs are built out of other Trans­form­ers. And on the Auto­bots’ side is Jet­fire, a vil­lain whose age and broken-down phys­i­cal­ity leads him to help the Auto­bots [see scratched out decep­ti­con logo on Jet­fire].

Arti­cle 2: ‘Trans­form­ers’ breaks out the big guns for sequel

The U.S. Depart­ment of Defense gave its offi­cial stamp of approval to the Michael Bay-directed film, not only allow­ing pro­duc­tion amid the pris­tine dunes of the Army’s New Mex­ico mis­sile range, but also let­ting film­mak­ers fol­low jets and fighter planes through the sky from nearby Hol­lo­man Air Force Base. More scenes were shot on the Navy’s air­craft car­rier USS John C. Sten­nis, and Marines fill the ranks of the strike team bat­tling the invad­ing Transformers.

Among the equip­ment the movie is using in this desert sequence alone: two A-10 Thun­der­bolt II “Warthog” tank-killing jets; six F-16 Fight­ing Fal­cons; 10 armored Humvees; the Army’s Golden Knights para­chute team; two Abrams tanks; two Bradley tanks; two missile-launcher vehi­cles; two armored per­son­nel car­ri­ers; and a quarter-mile of the mis­sile test­ing range, cleared of unex­ploded ord­nance and built into an Egypt­ian town and tem­ple. (Signs warn not to cross a perime­ter just over the gyp­sum dunes, because live bombs could be hid­den in the sand.)

The final bat­tle the mil­i­tary is help­ing Bay cre­ate is sup­posed to be an enor­mous fire­fight in Egypt, but much of it is being shot in the White Sands dunes in a town built over the roughly quarter-mile cleared span.

Empire

Spoil­ers from the Empire arti­cle pro­vided cour­tesy of Alien­bot:

- Bay and LaBeouf con­firm the Fallen is a sep­a­rate char­ac­ter.
– Egypt­ian hiero­glyph­ics …turn out to be depic­tions of Trans­form­ers who vis­ited Earth.
– Bay claims Mega­tron is not com­ing back and the tank is just a new toy.
– Around 40 robots.
– Bud­get is $200 mil­lion.
– Ramon Rodriguez is the one hold­ing on for dear life to a pole while cars are flung.
– Dev­as­ta­tor appears at the pyra­mid, he’s prob­a­bly 50 feet tall because that’s the height of the cam­era crane they used on location.

Note the hand injury in this image — prov­ing it has been worked into the movie.

Pos­si­ble Fallen images

With Fallen now cited as a sep­a­rate char­ac­ter in ‘Revenge of the Fallen’, it’s a good time to point out some mys­te­ri­ous shots found on Lin­ing up TV, which claims to have on set images of The Fallen. Behind an old pic­ture? Doesn’t seem to fit inline with the Egypt­ian plot arc we are see­ing, I’ll clas­sify as fake for now.

Hello all, hope every­one had a great Christ­mas and New Years, sorry for the lack of updates dur­ing the fes­tive sea­son, things got a lit­tle bit hec­tic. In the mean time it seems that the world of Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen has exploded with rumors, names and pic­tures — offi­cially and unof­fi­cially, best to start with the upcom­ing toys, amongst other news, which will be along shortly in the next post.

Jolt & Megatron

Jolt, the recently revealed name of the Chevy Volt, is back with new close up shots of the ‘Fast Action Bat­tler’ via The Arker, along with some close up shots of the Megatron/Tank.

Jet­fire merged with Opti­mus Prime

Pic­tures of the Leg­ends Opti­mus Prime and Jet­fire toys merged together have been posted on TF08 and more recently TFW2005.

Inter­est­ingly the close up shots of the Jet­fire toy show a Decep­ti­con logo that has been scratched out. The toy has already been con­firmed as a Decep­ti­con, but this loosely sug­gests some sort of team changeover in the movie.

Roll­bar

TF08 have posted shots of the ‘Roll­bar’ toy, now with a con­firmed name. It is unlikely that this vehi­cle shall appear in the movie though.

Knock Out

Seib­ertron posted the scoop on this one, a motor­cy­cle shaped toy with the name Knock Out — could this be a con­stituent part of Arcee? It’s green col­or­ing sug­gests oth­er­wise, it’s unlikely Knock Out will appear in the movie.

“Though he is an incred­i­bly flashy and skilled fighter, KNOCK OUT is also des­per­ately inse­cure. He prac­tices awe­some com­bat maneu­vers con­stantly in pri­vate to be sure that the other AUTOBOTS will notice him on the bat­tle­field. His high­est ambi­tion is to be the leader of a spe­cial com­bat team, and to get the com­bi­na­tion retro­fit every­one has been talk­ing about.”

Dead End

Pic­tures of a red super­car auto­bot have been posted at ACToys, the name Dead End comes from a shot of the instruc­tion book­let that accom­pa­nies it. Another unlikely movie hope­ful — if this was X-men 3 I’m sure all these guys would get thrown into the mix at some point.

Leader Class Opti­mus Prime

TLAMB have also posted a pic­ture of the new Leg­ends Class Opti­mus Prime toy.

The pic­tures…

TF08 have snagged a back of packet image show­ing the Chey Volt’s robot mode and char­ac­ter name which is “Jolt”, appro­pri­ate con­sid­er­ing the elec­tric nature of the vehicle.

The robot comes with ‘elec­tro whips’ which make him an ‘almost unstop­pable whirl­wind of crack­ling energy’. The detail on the robot image falls inline with the con­cept art and style of the Trans­form­ers movie franchise.

This is nigh on con­fir­ma­tion that the Volt is in fact a Trans­former, as recently speculated.

He is chaotic and impul­sive, always out for the next big adventure.

Trans­form­ers at the moon have heard from Para­mount Pic­tures UK that the Eng­lish release date for Revenge of the Fallen will be the same as the US date, June 26th 2009.

It’s good to see us Brits not being delayed again — it was pretty tough blog­ging about The Dark Knight release know­ing that I had to wait one extra week to see it!

Looks like I for­got to post this one when it first came out, sorry folks. Michael Bay updated his Shoot For The Edit blog with some news about Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen,

Hey every­one. Back from Egypt and Jor­dan — we had a won­der­ful shoot over there. I will miss the crew they were an amaz­ing bunch of peo­ple and a lot of fun.

I’m stuck in the edit room up to my eye balls — also fin­ished pro­duc­ing Fri­day the 13th and The Unborn — com­ing out the after the new year. Our Trailer for Trans­former you have been ask­ing about — First there will be a teaser poster soon after the new year, and the teaser trailer will be out either in the the­aters early Feb. or on the Super­bowl. Can­not decide yet. I’m going to release some set stills on this site in a few weeks. I’ll keep you informed. Going back to do more selects now from my portable avid that I take home from work. It’s late, see you.

Dark Hori­zons have pointed out that on the upcom­ing release sched­ule for Ger­many a sec­ond Trans­form­ers sequel, which would be Trans­form­ers 3, has been sched­uled for a June 29th 2011 release date.

TLAMB have posted the first look at Trans­form­ers: Revenge of The Fallen’s Mega­tron and Rav­age, sent into them via Sylar. Illus­trat­ing a pos­si­ble beat mode design for Rav­age and a robot mode for Megatron.

Note the tracks on Megatron’s feet, lin­ing up with the Tank mode we have already seen.

Seib­ertron are report­ing, despite the state­ment on Michael Bay’s blog that film­ing had wrapped, that TF2 has been film­ing aboard the USS John C. Sten­nis air­craft car­rier over Novem­ber 1st and 2nd.

Pic­tures from the set

These images show Shia LaBoeuf with ‘bat­tle dam­age’, Michael Bay film­ing shoot­ing a cat­a­pult launch, Josh Duhamel and Tyrese.

Set Report

Skalor’s Post­card
Greet­ings from San Diego! Just got back today from deploy­ment at sea on board the U.S. Navy car­rier Sten­nis and thought I’d fill every­one in on what I expe­ri­enced this past week with the ROTF cast and crew. It’s true, film­ing did take place this past week, all shoot­ing was com­pleted in a two day span, Sat­ur­day the 1st with the IMAX folks film­ing flight oper­a­tions, and Sun­day the 2nd with Michael Bay in action around the ship. Rumors flew around for weeks about what exactly was going to hap­pen with the movie so it was really cool to see it all go down.

Sat­ur­day after­noon two trans­port planes arrived, the first car­ry­ing Shia Labeouf on the first and on the sec­ond were Michael Bay, Tyrese Gib­son, Megan Fox and Josh Duhamel. They arrived in cos­tume (at least Tyrese and Josh did) and began work­ing almost imme­di­ately. From what I saw, all of the film­ing with the cast was done in “closed” sets. The rest of the film­ing on the flight deck seemed to be flight oper­a­tions, of which I was there and will hope­fully make the final cut. We were told to just act nat­ural and con­tinue our jobs as nor­mal, which is easy to do when you’ve actu­ally got work to do. I did how­ever try really hard to get into one shot in which I just walked back and forth for about 20 min­utes.

The whole expe­ri­ence was a lot of fun and every­one in the cast and crew were really cool. Shia Labeouf and Megan Fox were really hard to find on the ship, I think they were work­ing just about their whole time there. I’m not sure which part of the movie was filmed there but it is prob­a­bly some­where toward the end, (Shia had “beat-up” make up on, and Duhamel and Tyrese were in dress uni­forms). Over­all it was an awe­some time.

Sorry if I didn’t give you any good spoil­ers or any­thing like that, but I think the sus­pense is more fun any­way. By the way, the crew work­ing on this movie have been bust­ing their asses to make a good film, that much I can attest to.

This should put to rest any of the rumors that they’ve com­pleted film­ing for now, although this may have been the last of the film­ing (I didn’t ask). […]