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.

Trans­former Toys got the scoop on a small descrip­tion of the Trans­form­ers 2 game adap­ta­tion, “Trans­form­ers 2: The Ulti­mate Bat­tle” — not sure if that is a work­ing title or not. The arti­cle sug­gests that Starscream is the ulti­mate bad­die, whilst giv­ing some weight to the rumors of Trans­form­ers that can trans­form into weapons:

“Make every sec­ond count Trans­form­ers 2: The Ulti­mate Bat­tle, as you choose to seek revenge as the Decep­ti­cons or defend Earth as the Auto­bots. Go beyond the movie and drop into pressure-packed mis­sions where sec­onds can make the dif­fer­ence between sur­vival and destruc­tion. Play as a vari­ety of Trans­form­ers, such as the evil Starscream or heroic Opti­mus Prime, to either demol­ish or pro­tect fully destruc­tible envi­ron­ments around the globe. A new Trans­for­ma­tion sys­tem gives you more detailed con­trol as you instantly switch between Robot, Weapon, and Vehi­cle modes at any time to drive, fly, fight and shoot your way through grip­ping lev­els. Then make your choice online as you go head to head against friends in mul­ti­player bat­tle zones. Your alliance will decide whether Earth’s great­est cities stand or fall in ruin as you expe­ri­ence the ulti­mate level of inten­sity in this race against time.”

Mia has sent in via TLAMB some shots of Megan Fox and Ramon Rodriguez film­ing inside and with Bum­ble­bee. Until now Rodriguez has only been men­tioned in the call sheet — this is thought to be the first visual proof to con­firm the rumors. This was thought to be filmed on Sat­ur­day near to the Rich­mond Power Station.

EDIT: Now with video:

On his forums, Roberto Orci has con­firmed that there will be Trans­form­ers that turn into Weapons in Trans­form­ers 2:

Roberto, will there be Trans­form­ers that trans­form into Weapons in TF2?
Yes

Via TLAMB

Zack­lur is back with more Trans­form­ers 2 pic­tures from the night of Bumblebee’s 180 degree skid; with fur­ther close up shots of Isabel Lucas (Alice in the movie), Michael Bay direct­ing and Shia LaBoeuf. This time we can clearly see the green goo on Lucas’ shoul­der — spurted from some unknown source.

Kendall White­house has also updated his Trans­form­ers 2 image set (View in slideshow)

Prior to the Isabel Lucas shoot we saw yes­ter­day and the Bum­ble­bee skid, shoot­ing was tak­ing place at the Cas­tle fra­ter­nity — on cam­pus, “where the party’s at”, or some such.
TFW2005 have pro­vided pic­tures lead­ing up to this, show­ing Michael Bay, Isabel Lucas and Shia LaBoeuf prepar­ing for the scenes and tak­ing time out with some fans. I espe­cially like the shot of Shia tak­ing some time out to sign a toy Bum­ble­bee. Bum­ble­bee, the real thing, can also be seen under his cover — rather indiscreetly:

Report­ing to Powet​.tv, Josh Landow was there later that day to cap­ture video of Bum­ble­bee screech­ing away and pro­vide a report of the events that unfolded:

The frat house is known as The Cas­tle because it looks like a cas­tle. Bum­ble­bee was parked out front and they made it look like he was parked in the bushes. There was a huge light­ing screen over the car, and 2 giant light bal­loons (not sure how else to describe them) float­ing above the set.

[…]

The first shot was a bunch of well dressed good look­ing col­lege coeds walk­ing around to and fro with some of them seem­ingly con­verg­ing on the BB Camaro, say­ing things like “Wow! Cool car.”

[…]

Next shot was the most involved and took about 3 hours to shoot from every which way, with dif­fer­ent light­ing, and with slightly dif­fer­ent lines even. Shia and a few of the bit play­ers were def­i­nitely ad-libbing or at least tak­ing some lib­er­ties with the script. This shot con­sisted of Shia run­ning out of the party because BB’s alarm was going off. Like I said BB was parked in the bushes which gets Sam into some trou­ble with the frat boys who came run­ning after him ask­ing “Hey Fresh­man, is that your car parked in our bushes?” Sam replies “uh uh no, it’s a friend’s car — he went to get a new shirt” (or some­thing dumb like that — they kept chang­ing that line). Frat­boy responds “How about I park my foot up your ass?” Sam says “I’ll move the car now.” He gets in and has (fake) trou­ble clos­ing the door because of all the shrub­bery. It was hard to hear, but when he got inside the car, I think he said some­thing about Decep­ti­cons. And yes it took 3 hours to shoot this.

[…]

Then they moved the crowd back a good ways to shoot some more extras walk­ing about before finally get­ting to the scene that I knew had to be com­ing. Bum­ble­bee backs up and dri­ves away (as seen in my video). This was shot using Bay’s cam­era rigged Porsche Cayenne. I think they shot this like 4 or 5 times with the cars back­ing up to reset after each take

Film­ing con­tin­ues at UPENN, this time it’s a frat party involv­ing Shia LaBoeuf and new­comer Isabel Lucas, TLAMB has pro­vided a set report which describes the in-doors scene via J Fuller:

I was in one of the party scenes. I had to get fit­ted with jeans and a but­ton down dress shirt, we all were and Shia was wear­ing dark jeans and a black but­ton down shirt. In the scene which they shot 3 times from dif­fer­ent angles Shia was sit­ting on a old wooden chair when this girl [Isabel Lucas] in a green short dress (who I thought was an extra) was danc­ing in front of him and kept lean­ing into him. That’s it for the scene I was in but there is a lot more to it.

Action then moved out­side, to a scene involv­ing Bum­ble­bee — Isabel (char­ac­ter named Alice?), leans into the car to speak with Shia, before stomp­ing away. It also looks like there is “green goo” involved, at least that’s the impres­sion you get from the pic­tures. A sec­ond scene with Bum­ble­bee in motion was also filmed — with the car per­form­ing a 180 degree skid to line up per­fectly with the build­ing entrance (Drexel main build­ing), Jszack got a great video of this scene:

These are some absolutely fan­tas­tic shots from zack­lur show­ing Michael Bay, Isabel Lucas and Shia up close:

From Kendall White­house:

From rhavener and Nikos G: