MTV have revealed that The Office star, Rainn Wil­son, will be play­ing a Uni­ver­sity Pro­fes­sor in Trans­form­ers 2:

“I play a col­lege pro­fes­sor,” he told MTV before jok­ingly adding, “that turns into a robot, and turns into a car.”

Prepa­ra­tion at the Steel Works site has begun, and the first images of the area have started to appear online.

It is thought that most of the shoot­ing will be on the west­ern side. A con­cept car not seen before shall be used dur­ing the shoot, and rumors sug­gest this could be a Trans­former, two Black­hawk heli­copters will also be in use. Addi­tion­ally, a car hauler with “2 Sat­urns and 5 chines styled cop cars” has been spot­ted on loca­tion. The Chi­nese sym­bols read only “Import / Entrance”, “Export / Exit”, “Dock­ing”, etc. — vehi­cle imports we can assume?

Pic­tures and infor­ma­tion come via TLAMB and TFW2005.

Via Movie Hole:

Sounds like those robots-in-disguise might be chas­ing down some bikers?

A cast­ing call just arrived in my inbox adver­tis­ing for a “female motor­cy­cle rider” to do a days work on “Transformers”.

This “Very Attrac­tive Female Actor Under 30 Years Old” must “have exten­sive experience/training in rid­ing motorcycles”.

The actress would be a day-player.

Via Heery Cast­ing:

Lit­tle Per­son needed for “Trans­form­ers 2″
We are look­ing for a Male Lit­tle Per­son , age 30–65, any eth­nic­ity, for a fea­tured role in the Dream­works pro­duc­tion of “Trans­form­ers 2.“
Shoot­ing will be in the Philadel­phia area in the month of June.
This is a fea­tured role, we will see both SAG and non-SAG for this. (We will waiver for this)

If inter­ested and avail­able, please send a CANDID pic­ture of your­self (not a head­shot) to:
tr2​philadelphia@​gmail.​com
Please attach the pic­ture as a .jpg and put “Lit­tle per­son” in the sub­ject line.

No Phone calls please.
May 30 2008

TRANSFORMERS 2 EXTRAS
If you missed the open call for TRANSFORMERS 2, you may still sub­mit a picture.

Needed are union and Non-Union back­ground men and women, ages 18–70, all eth­nic­i­ties, for scenes set in Philadel­phia PA, and Prince­ton NJ. Shoot­ing will take place in June 2008.

Col­lege age men and women are espe­cially needed. No act­ing expe­ri­ence nec­es­sary; both SAG and non-union tal­ent will be con­sid­ered. All roles are paid positions.

Please sub­mit a CURRENT pic­ture of your­self to: tr2​philadelphia@​gmail.​com
Your photo must be in .jpg for­mat.
If your head­shot is older than one year, do NOT send it. Instead, send a recent snap­shot — that has you alone in the pic­ture – a close-up is pre­ferred (no party pic­tures hold­ing a beer…)
Your pic­ture must be attached as a “.jpeg” file.
Be sure to include all con­tact infor­ma­tion, height and weight and SAG num­ber (if you have one) in the body of the e-mail.

Please state if you are avail­able for Philadel­phia and/or Prince­ton.
NO phone calls please.
May 23 2008

TFLAB are report­ing, through a tip from “Gwen”, that Nina Dobrev (Degrassi: The Next Gen­er­a­tion) may be fea­tur­ing as a uni­ver­sity stu­dent in TF2.

The Morn­ing Call have revealed that Bethlehem’s film­ing shall be at a steel works, a highly mech­a­nized and per­fectly suited backdrop:

Try to imag­ine giant, extrater­res­trial robots dis­guised as tractor-trailers on Route 22 or cam­ou­flaged among the tow­er­ing Beth­le­hem Steel blast furnaces.

A film crew from ”Trans­form­ers 2″ will bring those shape-shifting robots to life in south Beth­le­hem next month for a movie scene in front of the iconic furnaces.

Of course, no one will see the robots because they’re computer-generated. But any­one will be able to see the action at the old Steel site as the film­mak­ers trans­form it into a fic­tional Chi­nese city pop­u­lated by peo­ple from the Lehigh Val­ley.

[…]

The movie crew will film in Beth­le­hem dur­ing the first week of June and will use the blast fur­naces as the scene’s back­drop, Calla­han said.

[…]

Accord­ing to an announce­ment from Heery Cast­ing of Philadel­phia, the film­mak­ers hope to cast local ”Asian men and women, boys and girls, ages 7 [to] 65″ as paid extras in the movie. In par­tic­u­lar, the crew hopes to recruit extras of Asian descent who have mil­i­tary backgrounds.

Thanks locoexw!

In an inter­view with IGN, writer Roberto Orci con­firmed that fan favourite Sound­wave would be mak­ing an appear­ance in the sequel:

Q: What’s the sta­tus of Trans­form­ers 2?

ORCI: That starts shoot­ing in three weeks.

Q: What do you want to do that builds from the first one?

ORCI: We want to fol­low some of our lead char­ac­ters which we thought were so suc­cess­ful. Shia’s char­ac­ter; where is he two years later? His girl­friend, where is she two years later? But for fans, I guess I’ll address this more for the fans, because I think if you didn’t know Trans­form­ers at all and you came in and you liked the first movie, you’ll like the sec­ond one. How­ever, some of the die hard fans, which we were a mem­ber of that group, felt, well, maybe it’s a lit­tle light. Maybe it wasn’t sci­ence fic­tiony enough. And I think the sec­ond one will deliver on a true Trans­form­ers story. You know, the first one, we had a lim­ited bud­get for what it was. Every sec­ond of Trans­former time is a mil­lion dol­lars or what­ever the heck it is, so this time, because we were able to prove through the whole thing that it’s a viable live-action movie, we have a lit­tle more free­dom this time to actu­ally learn about the Trans­form­ers, see them, hear them. It’s a bet­ter bal­ance between the humans and the Transformers.

Q: Is there one par­tic­u­lar Trans­former, good or bad, that you absolutely had to get into the sequel?

ORCI: Yes.

Q: You’re not gonna tell us.

ORCI: I’ll tell you. We had to get Sound­wave in there.

Q: Nice. Where Sound­wave goes, will Rav­age follow?

ORCI: Per­haps! Who’s Rav­age? … I’m kid­ding! You know, we had Rav­age in an early draft of the first movie and Sound­wave, and we couldn’t do it right and I think this time hope­fully we’ll have the abil­ity to do it.

Chud have con­firmed that John Voight (Defense Sec­re­tary John Keller) and Tyrese Gib­son will be repris­ing their roles in the movie sequel:

‘I just talked to Shia a sec­ond ago, and left John Voight a mes­sage 15 min­utes ago,’ he said, inad­ver­tently let­ting slip that Voight’s Sec­re­tary of Defense char­ac­ter returns for the sequel.

‘Michael Bay is going to up the ante on round two and raise the level. I can’t go into any details , but it’s going to be some real one of a kind things in this movie that no one has seen visu­ally in their life. Michael Bay is really fired up to try and outdo what he did on the first round.’

Via Vari­ety and Jordan’s first pavil­lion at the Cannes film fes­ti­val, we have found out that Michael Bay plans to take TF2 to Jordan:

Jor­dan […] is join­ing the Mideast film gold rush with a num­ber of projects and ini­tia­tives designed to bol­ster the country’s film biz.

Paramount-DreamWorks has inked with the Jor­dan­ian Royal Film Com­mis­sion to film “Trans­form­ers 2” in the coun­try and Fox has scouted loca­tions in the coun­try for its bigscreen “The A-Team.” It is believed to be in dis­cus­sions for the action pic to lense there.