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Transformers: The Art of the Movies March 1st, 2009

A new list­ing for “Trans­form­ers: The Art of the Movies” has appeared on Ama­zon, the blurb reads:

Trans­form­ers: The Art of the Movies

The first book about the mak­ing of the movies!

The live-action Trans­form­ers movie finally hit the big screen in 2007, and proved to be well worth the wait: a crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial smash hit, it grossed over $700 mil­lion world­wide, and amazed audi­ences with its jaw-dropping spe­cial effects. June 2009 sees the release of an even big­ger sequel: Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen.

But how did Direc­tor Michael Bay and his team pull it off, and make audi­ences believe these giant alien robots were real? Begin­ning with a con­cise his­tory of Trans­form­ers, from toy to movie fran­chise, the book looks in depth at the mak­ing of BOTH movies, with exclu­sive inter­views and over 200 stun­ning images.

Packed with pre­vi­ously unpub­lished con­cept and design art, this is a must for all fans!

It’s official, Megatron Returns February 22nd, 2009

“Mega­tron returns… keep it quiet”, quipped Roberto Orci on the TFW forums. This is our first offi­cial word that Mega­tron will in fact return in the sequel, although we have had an abun­dance of news, rumors and toys to sug­gest this is the case.

And just to back this up, here are some images of the Leader class Mega­tron Revenge of the Fallen toy, which come via Seib­ertron and The Arker.

The bio reads:

Rebuilt with parts can­ni­bal­ized from other Decep­ti­cons, Mega­tron rises once again to lead his army. Though the AllSpark destroyed him once, he can now feel its power cours­ing through his cir­cuitry. It calls him to seize his right­ful place as ruler over the puny planet on which he was impris­oned and destroyed, and from which he will launch his con­quest of the uni­verse. Opti­mus Prime is all that stands between him and vic­tory, and the Auto­bot leader has done a poor job of hid­ing him­self. At long last, Mega­tron knows exactly where his enemy is, and he has power enough to destroy him.

GM releases ‘Autobots Rollout’ website February 21st, 2009

GM have released a web­site ded­i­cated to the new Auto­bots, “Auto­bots Roll­out” — it comes with Bios that do not reveal any­thing, some new images of the vehi­cles in the sand, each of the released trail­ers and a video show­ing a team putting together the Bum­ble­bee model.

Demolisher Bio Revealed, on sale at eBay February 21st, 2009

An eBay auc­tion has been spot­ted sell­ing the Demol­isher toy boxed, com­plete with an image of the packet and the character’s descrip­tion. View the orig­i­nal auc­tion, view another live auc­tion to pur­chase Demol­isher.

Demol­ishor isn’t very bright, but he knows when to fight, and when to run and hide. Arriv­ing on Earth to find Mega­tron destroyed, hid­ing seemed like the best option. Since then, he’s taken a few smaller Decep­ti­cons under his pro­tec­tion, and built quite a lit­tle com­mu­nity. It hasn’t been easy hid­ing among the humans that creep like a dis­ease over this planet, but he and his com­pan­ions are con­tent until a new Decep­ti­con leader emerges to guide them back to glory.

Via Seib­ertron

Michael Bay handpicked GM concept cars February 19th, 2009

After build­ing up some rap­port on the first movie and pro­vid­ing GM with pub­lic­ity and aware­ness of their newly redesigned Camaro, for Trans­form­ers 2 Michael Bay was given the oppor­tu­nity to pick and choose from GM’s array of con­cept cars:

“I didn’t want to share with him Camaro unless he told me more about the movie,” Well­burn said. “There was a lit­tle nego­ti­at­ing, and then there it was.” The suc­cess of the Camaro’s appear­ance, which helped GM by rais­ing aware­ness of the newly redesigned car, lit­er­ally opened some big doors for Bay in “Revenge of the Fallen.”

“When it comes to the sequel, it was dif­fer­ent because the rela­tion­ship had built quite a bit,” Well­burn explained. “Michael came to Detroit, and he and I just walked the stu­dios. He was look­ing for one, maybe two new vehi­cles. He came here, and he pretty much had it in his head what the sequel would be. I’ll never for­get it. One third of the way through the tour he said, ‘I need a notepad. There are just too many designs that we may want to use in the movie.’”

Some mod­els, like the Beat and Trax, which will appear as the Auto­bots Skids and Mud­flap for “Revenge of the Fallen,” even affected how the char­ac­ters functioned.

“That day that he vis­ited us and walked the halls of the stu­dios, the movie devel­oped and in some ways changed,” he revealed. “[Bay] was inspired by things like the two small cars that maybe could work together in some way. That’s all I can say right now.”

Source: MTV

Q&A from Toy Fair 09 February 18th, 2009

The Trans­form­ers Collector’s Club have tran­scribed (read: para­phrased) the Q&A ses­sion at Toy Fair 2009 where Michael Bay and oth­ers were quizzed about Revenge of the Fallen.

WC: Michael, the first movie was such an amaz­ing suc­cess how is Revenge of the Fallen going to be different?

MB: From learn­ing the mythos, to fig­ur­ing out how to make the robots trans­form on the big screen, the first movie involved a lot of dis­cov­ery. In addi­tion, it was a story about a boy get­ting his first car and find­ing his first girl friend. The sec­ond movie is a com­ing of age story, encom­pass­ing global issues, and bring­ing the robots to a new level. If every boy in the world didn’t want a Bum­ble­bee in his garage from the first movie, they will from the sec­ond. All of the robots in this film are super­hero tough. I’ll tell you I am very pas­sion­ate about this film.

LdB: Yes, in the first movie, boy gets car, boy finds girl, but this one really explores the idea of respon­si­bil­ity as Sam leaves for col­lege. He thinks he wants to lead a nor­mal col­lege life but finds out some of his deci­sions don’t work out so well for not only him, but also the whole world.

WC: Brian, can you tell us a lit­tle about your jour­ney mak­ing the new film?

BG: What I dis­cov­ered is what a great part­ner we have in Para­mount with this rich fran­chise. We have been blessed with a great set of team play­ers from both sides as this mythol­ogy is very diverse and only with a great team can you explore all these dif­fer­ent lay­ers. For exam­ple in one of the early pro­duc­tion meet­ings Alex and Bob (writ­ers) were won­der­ing if the robots would take an earthly form and what we all agreed that we wanted, was for kids to be look­ing at the cars in the park­ing lot, after they left the movie, won­der­ing if one of these cars just might be a robot in disguise.

WC: Tyrese, how does your char­ac­ter evolve in the new film?

TG: Well, I’ll be call­ing in more air strikes, and I am now a Mas­ter Sgt. There was a ton of pres­sure from the first movie to get it right but now the pres­sure in the sec­ond movie was to get it right, but with a sense of urgency, to get this back out to the fans.

WC: Michael, the first movie was such an amaz­ing suc­cess how is Revenge of the Fallen going to be different?

LdB: Yes, there was a lot of urgency. You know some stu­dios would have wanted Michael to shoot more than one movie at the same time, but that’s just not right for Trans­form­ers. Trans­form­ers has really evolved from movie to movie and is now on a much big­ger scale, but with more intimacy.

MB: For this fran­chise, you’re right, pro­duc­ing mul­ti­ple movies at the same time is not the way to do it. We lis­tened to feed­back from the fans, and were able to put a lot of that into the sec­ond film. This is a big­ger film with a great sto­ry­line.
WC: Brian, how does this film evolve the mythology?

BG: We all know that every­one is hun­gry for the next level of mythos, so we really want every­one to won­der what Revenge of the Fallen means.

LdB: It is a very deep mythol­ogy and most peo­ple just don’t know how deep it is.
MB: Yes, this film will sat­isfy all types of fans as I have included my trade­mark humor, more inti­macy with the humans and robots, and Moms will think it is safe enough to bring the kids back out to the movies.

TG: The humor often times is cre­ated on the spot. Some­thing hap­pens on the set and Michael lets us keep it in the film. I know I still get com­ments from kids about my “left cheek”. I don’t know if that will ever go away and that was a spon­ta­neous com­ment that just came out when we were film­ing the first film.

I’ll tell you what has really meant the most to me, are the com­ments I got from real Mas­ter Sgts in the mil­i­tary. Some of the guys that were in Afghanistan told me that when they explained to their kids that their job was just like what they saw me do in Trans­form­ers, it made “them cool to their kids”.

WC: Brian, tell us what this brand has meant out­side of the US.

BG: In my trav­els all over the world, I have found that the expe­ri­ence has been the same. Retail­ers have said that their response was incred­i­ble with the movie prod­ucts. In China alone in 2008, the brand grew in dou­ble dig­its. We found that the Trans­form­ers story con­tains uni­ver­sal truths that peo­ple all over the world regard­less of cul­ture seem to get .

After the pre­view was shown, Direc­tor Michael Bay spoke exclu­sively with Rik Alvarez of the Trans­form­ers Col­lec­tors’ Club.

RA: How did mak­ing this film com­pare to the first? How did the fans reac­tion to the first film change what you did in the sec­ond film?

MB: The fans are very vocal and we lis­tened. I worked very closely with the writ­ers in order to dive more deeply into the mythol­ogy. We really looked for ele­ments that have never been explored and we dis­cov­ered some story lines that we wanted to elab­o­rate. This is a com­ing of age story for Sam but we also wanted to delve much deeper into the per­son­al­i­ties of the robots. There is much, much more robot inter­ac­tion in this film. This film has many more per­sonal moments but will also appeal to the hard­core fans as it can be wicked at times.

RA: Spe­cial effects soft­ware and cam­era tech­nol­ogy have made advance­ments since the first film. How has this empow­ered you to fur­ther real­ize your vision for Revenge?

MB: The devel­op­ments in tech­nol­ogy have allowed us to have the robots show emo­tion. This is a robot movie and this new tech­nol­ogy allows us to explore a greater depth of per­son­al­ity from these characters.

RA: No other direc­tor has the kind of rela­tion­ship that you have devel­oped with the US Mil­i­tary. What piece of hard­ware did you get access to that are you most excited about for this com­ing film?

MB: It’s like I have a direct line to the Pen­ta­gon. This is the first movie where actual F16’s have made a bomb­ing run on a movie set and coör­di­nated with spe­cial effects explo­sions. We were on a work­ing nuclear sub­ma­rine and work­ing air­craft car­rier. The mil­i­tary loved the first movie. It really helped with recruit­ing and pro­mot­ing a pos­i­tive image for them. Now they are happy to do just about any­thing they can for my films. We also found out that in Afghanistan the Buffalo(s) (Bonecrusher vehi­cle from the first movie) have all been nick­named dif­fer­ent Trans­form­ers char­ac­ters by their per­son­nel. We also worked with tanks fir­ing real rounds and you have not lived until you have heard an actual tank fir­ing. We have so much access — I am appre­cia­tive and excited about all the mil­i­tary vehi­cles we use.

RA: Film­ing at the pyra­mids must have been amaz­ing! What were the great­est chal­lenges you faced?

MB: This is the first time in 30 years that any­one has filmed at the pyra­mids and the first time ever any­one has filmed from the top of Petra. Steven filmed Indi­ana Jones and The Last Cru­sade from the base of Petra. It took 21 very heavy heli­copter loads to get all our gear to the top. We had all the access we wanted in Egypt as we found out that the head of Egypt­ian Antiq­ui­ties Dr. Zahi Hawass is a big Trans­form­ers fan and was very help­ful. We also filmed in the desert where Lawrence of Ara­bia was filmed. Very chal­leng­ing conditions.

RA: We know you love to blow things up in your movies, what is your favorite thing to blow up or demolish?

MB: Well, I don’t have a favorite, as I like to blow up a lot of things. The most expen­sive thing I’ve blown us was a $50 mil­lion dol­lar house that no one would buy in Bad Boys II.

RA: Is there any­thing else you would like to tell the fans about this great new movie?

MB: Fans should know that I really want to sat­isfy them by mak­ing an even bet­ter movie than the first one. Tonight was just a taste of what is to come. Not a scene shown was a “money shot” from the film. I really want to keep them a secret to give every­one a great sur­prise this sum­mer. Oh yes, and all the pre­views you have seen so far, you won’t get a bit of the final story from the trail­ers. The final movie will be so much more than what you “think” you have seen in the previews.

Thanks to Has­bro and Para­mount for allow­ing us the oppor­tu­nity for this sneak peek into the pro­duc­tion of Revenge of the Fallen! Watch for this movie com­ing to a the­atre near you June 24, 2009!

High Resolution Trailer #2 Screenshots, The Fallen & Arcee February 16th, 2009

Now that our 1080p high res­o­lu­tion trailer is out on Yahoo, it’s time for 70 odd high res­o­lu­tion screen­shots that pick out the key parts of the trailer:

The Fallen

Arcee

Screen­shots

Devastator toys, All constructicons revealed, Skids and Mudflaps Robot modes February 14th, 2009

With the 2009 toy fair comes images of new Revenge of the Fallen toys. So far we have two ver­sions of the Dev­as­ta­tor toy (one being a sim­pli­fied FAB ver­sion), all SIX alt modes of the con­struc­ti­cons, names for each of them (Ram­page, Scav­enger, Scrap­per, High­tower, Long Haul, and Mix Mas­ter) and images of Rampage’s robot mode, Skids and Mud­flap robot modes and toys (these are the Chevy Beat and Chevy Trax). The gallery fur­ther down also includes boxes for some of the toys, show­ing CG ren­der­ings of their heads (e.g. Demol­isher, Ram­page Bull­dozer, Side­swipe, Skids, Mud­flaps). There is also a rac­ing game enti­tled ‘Dev­as­ta­tor Show­down’ which shows a ren­dered ver­sion of Dev­as­ta­tor try­ing to eat Skids.

Dev­as­ta­tor, Constructicons

Com­pare with con­cept rendering

High­tower (the crane), Long Haul (dump truck), Mix­mas­ter (cement mixer), Ram­page (bull­dozer), Demol­isher or Scav­enger (exca­va­tor, names seem to con­flict), Scrap­per (loader)

Skids and Mudflaps

Other toys

Sources

Trans­form­ers Club, TForm­ers, TFW2005, TheAllSpark

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