At long last the name of the Trans­former with an alt mode in the shape of a Chevy Beat has been revealed, “Skids”. Te dis­cov­ery was made via Jalop­nik and the pic­tures they received show­ing Bum­ble­bee the Beat and the Trax at the Bone­yard, the name is on the reg­is­tra­tion plate.

Skids Details in the Trans­form­ers Wiki

TLAMB’s Anony­mous source that pro­vided a set report has returned with the promised pic­tures of Bum­ble­bee, Ratchet, Opti­mus Prime and Iron­hide. None of the new auto­bots were on show however.

The set report:
– The core cast is at the loca­tion, Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gib­son
– Today they shot a fight scene at a desert set sim­i­lar to one from the first movie.
– Extras on set com­prised of var­i­ous needs includ­ing a “Strike Force” and Jor­dan­ian sol­diers.
– Heard rumor that Julie White and Kevin Dunn (Sam’s par­ents) where also on the White Sands set.
– Addi­tion­ally heard that TF2 may film in Rui­doso which is about 30 min­utes from Alam­ogordo. Rui­doso is in the moun­tains sur­rounded by a dense forest.

This anony­mous set report from Alam­ogordo comes via TLAMB and reveals details of the film­ing and details of the scenes shot.

Don’t know if you are con­cerned, but they are in fact film­ing here in Alam­ogordo, NM. They’ve been here for some­time now.

Sep­tem­ber 12th — They were film­ing on base from 12:00pm — 10:30pm. They used a large mil­i­tary plane, like a C17. It was parked and they had many of the mil­i­tary extras walk­ing to and from the plane. Some­times load­ing onto the back of the plane and then deplan­ing afterwards.

Josh and Tyrese were there as well. I saw them stand­ing at the end of the stair­well, the land­ing of the C-17. The mil­i­tary extras were walk­ing and in some takes they were running.

Tyrese was try­ing to keep the mood light as I wit­nessed him doing some kind of “chicken dance”. I hear through the grapevine that he was pretty silly that day. I hon­estly think it’s to pre­vent him­self from going crazy from bore­dom. As you prob­a­bly know, there are many, many, many takes just for one shot! And then they want to do the same shot from another angle. So you’re talk­ing, 10 takes each at least! Need­less to say, that could take all night, and some­times it does! There were a few times while every­one waited as they set up the shots, Tyrese would say out loud, “Are we ready yet? What’s the hold up? C’mon lets go!” They were out­side doing this scene all night! The walk­ing scene was done at least 20 times. Rid­ing humvees around the plane was shot in the day and later in the night.

The humvees had gun­ners on top, about 4 of those rid­ing around and around the plane. They were def­i­nitely film­ing a fight scene.

I really don’t want to go into too much detail for fear some­one I know that is work­ing with Dream­Works will get into a lot of trou­ble. I would love to tell you the story line of which I’m sure you’d be sur­prise, but I truly do not want to spoil it for any true Trans­former fan.

They start shoot­ing tomor­row (22nd Sept) at White Sands for the entire week. Unfor­tu­nately I won’t be able to watch any film­ing while they are out there. Only the extras and crew are allowed. I hear they will be shoot­ing here in Alam­ogordo, whether it be on base or at White Sands, they will be here till early October.

Here is what I’ve observed so far at Hol­lo­man. They had men and women and very few chil­dren dressed in Mus­lim cos­tumes. The peo­ple looked very authen­tic I saw them early one morn­ing walk­ing to the trail­ers. Bum­ble­bee was on base; how­ever he was shielded from pry­ing eyes as they cov­ered him up with a car cover. Not a great job because his rear and sides were pok­ing out of the cover and one could tell it was Bumblebee.

Some of the extras are Air Force guys por­tray­ing Army guys and some extra Army guys are por­tray­ing Air Force guys. I hear “some” of the Air Force guys were look­ing “tighter” in dress and hair­cut. The cast­ing dept. thought they looked more of what some­one in Army would look like? I know some Army guys won’t like to hear that, but it’s true.

Some where on base in a hangar, holds Iron­hide, Opti­mus Prime, some of the “pimped” out humvees the pri­mary cast will be dri­ving. (Most likely Tyrese and Josh) The Corvette was there as well, it is sil­ver in color. The peo­ple who were there at the time didn’t want any pho­tos taken of the Corvette, they were adamant about that. Appar­ently GM would have a cow if that photo got out. Now I hear they are going to let [us] take pho­tos of these vehi­cles tomorrow.

Also, the Can Am Spy­der will be in the film too, but they’ve got it all decked out with a more futur­is­tic look to it.

Anony­mous in Alamogordo

A reli­able source that has proved cor­rect in the past has pro­vided some infor­ma­tion con­cern­ing the G1 com­biner Dev­as­ta­tor robot to TFW2005:

Dev­as­ta­tor details

- Seven con­struc­tion vehi­cles merge to form Dev­as­ta­tor
– Dev­as­ta­tor has lots of upper body strength, like a gorilla
– Not just green, some of the vehi­cles are red and yel­low
– The pre­vi­ously Long Haul con­cept art by Josh Nizzi is legit

Quite frankly, some­thing of this size and com­plex­ity would be both awe­some and epic.

TLAMB raise some very valid points which put this news into doubt, and why I can­not report this as a con­fir­ma­tion. Specif­i­cally — we have not seen any con­struc­tion vehi­cles dur­ing film­ing, a toy that is cre­ated from more than 5 parts presents a dif­fi­cult engi­neer­ing task for Has­bro — some­thing that will be more expen­sive “than the $25 sweet point”. They also stip­u­late that given Prime’s height of 35 feet, the size of an aver­age con­struc­tion vehi­cle, this robot could reach up to 80 feet in height.

The Josh Nizzi Concept

As part of the pro­mo­tion for the new Trans­form­ers DVD releases, Wal­mart has a new flash sec­tion on their site that is promis­ing to release new, offi­cial, behind the scenes footage from Trans­form­ers 2. A new video will be added each week.“Have fun, keep it safe”. The first video is set at the Beth­le­hem Steel works and is titled “On the set: Day 1″. This is our first look at the motor­bikes and their crazy color schemes — bright pink, pur­ple and blue — we see them speed­ing past us as an Audi R8 skids out of the way. We also see a large group of sol­diers with an assort­ment of weapons, some car­ry­ing Mini guns and of course, there is another big explosion!

Mini gun…

More explo­sions:

To access the videos on Wal­mart you need to insert the code AllSpark62609 in the box.

Here’s a ref­er­ence image of some Arcee con­cept art:

In an inter­view with MTV con­cern­ing the Trans­form­ers 2 pre­quel comic, pub­lisher IDW con­firmed that they would be pro­vid­ing a wealth of back­ground infor­ma­tion on the new main vil­lain, The Fallen.

“[We’re going to] explore the back­ground of The Fallen — the main vil­lain of the movie — as well as expand on the ‘Reign of Starscream’ story that we’re doing and tie every­thing in to what this next movie is going to be,” explained writer Chris Mowry, who part­ners on the book with artist Alex Milne. “The next movie starts out with just tons of action and there’s obvi­ously going to be a lot of ques­tions, so we’re hop­ing to answer some of those beforehand.”

[…]

“Des­tiny” will estab­lish much of the sec­ond before fans are intro­duced to an increas­ingly com­plex sto­ry­line with mul­ti­ple new robots. “We’re def­i­nitely tak­ing every char­ac­ter that we can from the sequel,” said Mowry. “So you’ll see some Sec­tor 7 involve­ment and how they devel­oped into a new group that will be intro­duced. The same thing with some of the new char­ac­ters, we’ll explain how they get to Earth. Because like I said, [the sequel] starts out with this giant bat­tle so peo­ple will be won­der­ing ‘Hey, where did that guy come from?’”

This is reit­er­ated in an inter­view with Simon Fur­man at CBR,

“I’ve never really had the chance to lay down the defin­i­tive story around [the 13] and what role they played in what came after them. Over the years for var­i­ous pub­lish­ers in var­i­ous pub­li­ca­tions, I’ve laid seeds of this group called The 13 and hinted about who some of them might be and how they play into the big­ger mythos. I think this is where we’re find­ing answers to all the big ques­tions. We’re work­ing very closely with Has­bro in this series so that what­ever we do in ‘The 13′ is very much tied in to the whole Trans­form­ers Uni­verse. They want to get all of their irons in the fire ready and in the right order for 2009, which is the 25th anniver­sary. We’re all work­ing hope­fully to get a defin­i­tive, cohe­sive Trans­form­ers Uni­verse in terms of the back story.”

The writer added that the threads intro­duced in “The 13″ will even­tu­ally pay­off in cur­rent series and plots and pos­si­bly else­where within the Trans­form­ers fam­ily of media. “It’s inter­est­ing that the sec­ond movie is using this char­ac­ter called the Fallen, which is a char­ac­ter that we cre­ated back in the Dreamwave days for this big series called ‘The Dark Ages’ which tapped into what had gone before. So these names and insti­tu­tions like The 13 are rolling on into dif­fer­ent incarnations.”

For those not in the know, from Wikipedia:

Although the Fallen’s ori­gins are only sug­gested in his comic book appear­ance, they would be fully explained in Dor­ling Kindersley’s Trans­form­ers: The Ulti­mate Guide. One of the orig­i­nal thir­teen Trans­form­ers cre­ated by Primus, the robot who would become the Fallen betrayed his cre­ator by sid­ing with Primus’s dark twin, the malev­o­lent planet-eater, Uni­cron. In the final bat­tle between Primus and Uni­cron, the Fallen fell vic­tim to the same fate as his mas­ter, sucked through a black hole into another dimen­sion. How­ever, while Uni­cron emerged into another uni­verse, the Fallen was not so for­tu­nate, find­ing him­self trapped in the “under­space” between dimensions.

The Fallen made his only appear­ance in the sec­ond vol­ume of Trans­form­ers: The War Within — the Dark Ages. Around 6.5 mil­lion years ago, a test of the exper­i­men­tal “space bridge” matter-transport sys­tem on Cybertron lib­er­ated the Fallen from his prison, and he mate­ri­alised on Cybertron, where he quickly recruited the Chaos Trin­ity, three mystically-inclined Decep­ti­cons — Blud­geon, Mind­wipe and Bugly — into his employ. Abduct­ing Trans­form­ers that he iden­ti­fied as pos­sess­ing “genetic poten­tial” within their sparks — Grim­lock, Blitzwing, Jet­fire and Hot Spot — the Fallen planned to use their ener­gies to awaken Primus from his self-imposed slum­ber, thereby alert­ing Uni­cron to his loca­tion, allow­ing the world-eater to renew hos­til­i­ties with his old enemy. An attack from com­bined Auto­bot and Decep­ti­con forces led by Shock­wave and Prowl dis­rupted his plans, and Primus him­self reached out and promptly destroyed the Fallen.

These great videos come from Philly­Film­Girl, the first shows Megan Fox and Ramon Rodriguez stretch­ing on the pave­ment, noth­ing too fancy. How­ever the sec­ond video is really inter­est­ing — here we see a pup­pet like crea­ture attack­ing the wind­screen of a car, which also has a whole punched through it. This is clearly a small Trans­former, most likely the return of the fre­netic Frenzy.

The IESB have thrown out their Trans­form­ers 2 robot roll call, and with it they state that the Decep­ti­cons shall have the help of the Con­struc­ti­cons in the sec­ond movie.

In the car­toons, their names were Scrap­per, Bonecrusher, Scav­enger, Mix­mas­ter, Hook and Long Haul. And what do we get when they all com­bine and form one huge ass robot? That’s right boys and girls, we are going to see DEVASTATOR on the big screen!

… I’ll re-iterate that. Dev­as­ta­tor is big.

Here’s a pretty awe­some fan mock-up of what Dev­as­ta­tor may look like in the movie, cre­ated by Rise Stu­dios. A cin­e­matic adap­ta­tion of this char­ac­ter shall prob­a­bly appear a lot more com­plex than this, to fit in with the style already set out by the first movie.

As for the human side of the argu­ment, IESB have posted up a prospec­tive char­ac­ter list which is now wait­ing to be cast:

[CHUCK] 19–25 yrs., Sam’s room­mate at Prince­ton. He runs a con­spir­acy the­ory web­site. Funny in an irrev­er­ent, edgy way, he is shocked to see his con­spir­acy the­o­ries come to life. (2nd Lead)

[U.S. MILITARY LEADER] Late 20s/early 30s, African Amer­i­can with a great sense of humor and a tough mil­i­tary pres­ence. (Sup­port­ing lead)

[UK SPECIAL FORCES LEADER] British, in his early to mid 30s, smart and capa­ble. Can be Cau­casian, Black, East Indian. (Sup­port­ing lead)

[GALLOWAY] Early 40s-early 50s, male, National Secu­rity Advi­sor and pres­i­den­tial liai­son. A curt man who is tightly wound. (Sup­port­ing Lead)

[PROFESSOR COLAN] 40s, Sam’s physics pro­fes­sor at Prince­ton. He’s a self-satisfied intel­lec­tual who com­pares him­self to Ein­stein, and is arro­gant enough to wear leather pants to look cool. (1 Scene)

[THERESA] Early 30s; she’s Sgt. Epps’ wife, has 4 kids, sassy and sexy, good with com­edy. Sub­mit African Amer­i­can actresses only

[MOMMA SIMMONS] This NY Momma is in her late 60s / early 70s. She runs a deli/ butcher shop with her son in Brook­lyn. Tough and sar­cas­tic. (1 Scene)

[MASSIVE DYNAMICS CEO] 50s, male, this Cor­po­rate CEO appears in front of con­gress to tes­tify. (1 speech/scene)

[TEXAS CONGRESSMAN] 55–65 yrs., on a Con­gres­sional Com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the pur­pose of the “Auto­mated Defen­sive Ini­tia­tive” devel­oped by Mas­sive Dynamics.

[FBI DIRECTOR] Mid 50s, male, giv­ing a press release assur­ing the pub­lic they will be safe against attacks. (1 speech/scene)

[CNN REPORTER] Report­ing on mis­sile strikes and bomb­ings in var­i­ous cities. Sub­mit male / female, all eth­nic­i­ties (1 speech)