The Trans­form­ers 2 viral site, The Real Eff­ing Deal, has updated with new robot sight­ings, videos and news sto­ries — includ­ing a Leo Spitz video rant at Robo Warrior.

Down­load video collection

Down­load a zip file of four Leo Spitz videos from The Real Eff­ing Deal, three are Ramon Rodriguez and the fourth shows what looks like Starscream dart­ing in front of some Fireworks.

Down­load the Real Eff­ing Deal videos (18mb)

Robot seen in Japan

“Exclu­sive: It is Japan and all but”

Another TRED-head who’d like to remain anony­mous just sent us this link. We’re the FIRST on the net to break this story.

Now we all know the Land of the Ris­ing Sun is known for robots of all stripes — small to eff­ing huge — so spot­ting a bot in Japan is nor­mally no big deal. But this one’s LOOSE. And HIDING. And it looks more advanced than any Japan­ese robot I’ve ever seen. I’m start­ing to cor­re­late all the data we’ve been get­ting for the last few days and all I can say is, this is NOT good, peo­ple. They’re land­ing, spread­ing all over the world, and lying in wait for…something. Why are they here? Either they want our resources, they want to enslave us, they want to use our planet as their new homeworld…or maybe some­thing else. We’ll prob­a­bly never know until it’s way too late.

Robot on the Autobahn

Robot­ics Gone Wild

I don’t know what “gespinnt” means, but he’s right, the “part” was eff­ing huge!! It looks to me like that car actu­ally TURNED INTO a bot. The physics just seem…impossible. Unless the Ger­mans have invented some kind of mor­ph­ing technology…or maybe learned it from aliens. Either way, here’s what wor­ries me: if robots can hide IN PLAIN SIGHT, we’ll NEVER see it com­ing! We could all be sur­rounded by bots right now. What if this com­puter I’m using sud­denly trans­forms into a killer cyber-organism because it doesn’t like what I’m typ­ing??? Yeeesh!

Robot climb­ing tower

That is not a gorilla

A dios mia!!! TRED-heads, you need to check out this video. Watch the upper right for what looks like a grande eff­ing robot! Aus­tralia, Peru, now SPAIN! Either there’s one bot-like entity on a world-wide tour, or there are LOTS of them hid­ing out eff­ing EVERYWHERE.
Dudes, seri­ously. I’ve never seen any­thing like this before. Either someone’s yank­ing our chain here, or we’ve got giant robots — pos­si­bly giant ALIEN robots — appear­ing all over the eff­ing globe. I sug­gest you go back and bone up on your “How to Sur­vive a Robot Upris­ing” book, the one we men­tioned a few months ago right here on TRED.

And, yo, if you see some­thing else like this, send it to us ASAP (and not to ANYONE else, if you know what I mean).

Space Moms

This is a high qual­ity HD ver­sion of the TV Spot we put up ear­lier today. Being in HD we can get a good look at some of the kitchen-bots that come alive when there’s an acci­dent with the AllSpark.

Evolved

Evolved shows a bit more of the small ball bear­ing bots and Ravage.

Save the world

“They’re search­ing for Sam!”

Para­mount Pic­tures have launched their next Revenge of the Fallen pro­mo­tional tool — an aug­mented real­ity tool that uses a plu­gin and your web­cam to super­im­pose Opti­mus Prime’s hel­met on your head, or a mini Bum­ble­bee that stands on a card.

We Are Auto­bots — www​.weareau​to​bots​.com

Vari­ety have posted their take on the Trans­form­ers sequel, open­ing with,

With machines that are impres­sively more life­like, and char­ac­ters that are more and more like machines, “Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen” takes the fran­chise to a vastly supe­rior level of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. As for human intel­li­gence, it’s pri­mar­ily at the ser­vice of an enhanced arse­nal of spe­cial effects, which helmer Michael Bay deploys like a gen­eral launch­ing his very own shock-and-awe cam­paign on the senses. Oth­er­wise, lit­tle seems new com­pared to the first install­ment, except that this ver­sion is longer, louder, and per­haps “more than your eye can meet” in one sit­ting. It will reap sim­i­lar B.O. rewards worldwide.

The review takes an in-depth look at the movie, ana­lyz­ing it with­out cast­ing undue and over­bear­ing judg­ment. A good and rec­om­mended read. Of course, please be aware of the spoilers.

View full Vari­ety review

The exclu­sive BD live Revenge of the Fallen footage is now online. Two of the three clips are those we’ve seen recently; Wheelie being attacked by Mikaela and Sergeant Epps clos­ing in on Demol­isher with NEST. The third is new and shows more of the Sat­urn chase seen wherein the car hold­ing Shia, Megan and Ramon is cap­tured by Grindor and dropped at the feet of Starscream.

BD live clip

The video must be muted because the sound is not cor­rect, and is instead incred­i­bly ear pierc­ing! TURN OFF SPEAKERS BEFORE WATCHING!

Wheelie clip

The Wheelie clip is also avail­able in HD, with no subtitles:

TFG2 have released another con­cept image, this time of the pur­ple Arcee motor­cy­cle in a great pose. The text on the left arm reads ‘Agusta’ along with a brand image — aka its based on an Agusta motorcycle.

Tokyo, Seoul, Berlin, Madrid and Lon­don. Trans­form­ers 2 is trav­el­ing the world and cre­at­ing tons of press in the process. Here are some videos and pho­tos from the big events, each one reveal­ing a dif­fer­ent Megan Fox out­fit, the Berlin one being par­tic­u­larly odd.

Playlist of Pre­mière videos

A small selec­tion of pro­fes­sional and fan filmed shots from a selec­tion of pre­mieres, for those that couldn’t be there:

Lon­don Première

Berlin Pre­mière

Madrid Pre­mière

Here’s another quick round up of some Trans­form­ers 2 arti­cles that are hit­ting the press at the moment.

Michael Bay’s earn­ings from first Trans­form­ers movie

via Yahoo,

Shia LaBeouf received an upfront sum of $500,000 for his role in the first “Trans­form­ers.” How­ever, Bay’s deal passed on a fee for direct­ing and exec­u­tive pro­duc­ing in exchange for a slice of the prof­its from all the film’s rev­enue sources. The film, which cost the stu­dio an esti­mated $155 mil­lion to make, earned over $700 mil­lion world­wide and was a top-selling DVD. Bay’s final take from the movie: some­where in the neigh­bor­hood of $75 million.

LaBeouf is get­ting a raise for the sequel, “Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen.” His pay­check is esti­mated at about $5 mil­lion. Bay will once again get a cut of the prof­its, which could take longer to accu­mu­late since the bud­get for the sec­ond movie approached $200 million.

ROVE inter­view Isabel Lucas

Matthew Mars­den injured in Heli­copter stunt

The Sun­day Mer­cury caught up with Matthew Mars­den to find out about his near death encounter with a heli­copter on the set of Trans­form­ers 2:

“It was a night­mare,” recalls Matthew, speak­ing from his home in Los Ange­les. “I had a very close shave when a heli­copter crashed and missed me by a foot. I stepped out of the way a sec­ond before it hit the ground. The stunt went off too early, I should have been some con­sid­er­able way away. I didn’t seri­ously injure myself, apart from shear­ing off one of my bot­tom teeth. There was a bit of blood, but my adren­a­line kicked in so I didn’t feel it.

“I just remem­ber the direc­tor, Michael Bay, shout­ing, ‘Oh my God! Every­one look at Matt!’. One of the crew rushed up and said, ‘Dude, do you have any idea how close that was?’. I said ‘As long as I look cool, I don’t care!’. Peo­ple will prob­a­bly think that it’s a computer-generated spe­cial effect, but I can assure you it was very real. It’s fine, I’m still here with all my fin­gers and toes, though not all my teeth.”

Insider inter­view Shia

Isabel Lucas interview

Sky News inter­viewed Isabel Lucas at the Tokyo world première:

It is Lucas’ first [press con­fer­ence] and admits it’s over­whelm­ing. ‘It’s been a whirl­wind,’ she says. ‘I’ve worked on five pro­duc­tions since Home and Away and this is the first one to be released, so I haven’t ever expe­ri­enced doing a press jun­ket or a pre­mière, so this is like really being thrown right into the midst of it, into the deep end.’

Spiel­berg, who is an exec­u­tive pro­ducer on the new Trans­form­ers movie, sug­gested her to direc­tor Michael Bay for the role of Alice after work­ing with her on the HBO mini-series The Pacific, which he also pro­duced. One suc­cess­ful audi­tion later and Lucas had landed the biggest movie role of her career.

‘I was really intrigued by the char­ac­ter because there is more than meets the eye — lit­er­ally,’ she says. ‘She’s a lay­ered char­ac­ter, and that’s inter­est­ing for any actor to play really some­thing dif­fer­ent from your­self and to under­stand and relate to her even though she might have darker inten­tions. She’s fun to play.’

She describes one par­tic­u­lar scene with LaBeouf which required an atten­tion to detail that she’d never expe­ri­enced before. The shot was so spe­cific for a cer­tain CGI effect that they were try­ing to achieve and the cam­era was about 30cm away and he (Bay) was like yelling at me so specif­i­cally to tilt my head down! Tilt it to the right! Tilt it down again! Now lift it slightly! But he really is an amaz­ing visual genius, and the fin­ished prod­uct you under­stand why he was being so spe­cific with details.’

‘They know that this genre of film is not really what I’m drawn to, I’m drawn to scripts that are unique and have mean­ing. But that’s what is so won­der­ful about being an actor, is the diver­sity of the kind of films you can be a part of. I’m just hon­oured for the oppor­tu­nity, and if it opens other doors career-wise I’ll be very fortunate.’