A full length Trans­form­ers 2 trailer will be aired prior to the upcom­ing Star Trek movie, due May 8th 2009; likely to be the first full length trailer. That’s a pretty long wait, but /Film points out that this is a sim­i­lar time frame to the orig­i­nal, which saw its first full length trailer released with Pirates of the Caribbean 3.

Source: AICN

… then removed at the request of para­mount pictures.

Mem­bers on TFW2005 were treated to sev­eral blurry and small images which revealed the designs of both alt­mode and robot mode of the Chevy Trax, Corvette Cen­ten­nial and Audi R8.

Andy has informed us that there is a film­ing notice detail­ing the clo­sure of the Queensway Bridge for the film­ing of Revenge of The Fallen on 8/26 and 8/27 in down­town Long Beach, including:

“pre­ci­sion driving..with car stunts and EXPLOSIONS…”

There are also park­ing lots set up around Pacific and 4th streets down­town which could be the loca­tions for keep­ing the vehi­cles.

Thanks Andy!

Flickr user brux­hina also reports that Chi­nese signs have gone up around the area:

Day 6 (8/26): Sud­denly Long Beach has been trans­formed into lit­tle China, with street signs in Chi­nese. No wor­ries, it’s all Hollywood.

Roberto Orci took some time out to answer fan’s ques­tions over at TFW2005, with com­ments on Shia LaBoeuf’s hand injury as well as the inspi­ra­tion behind TF2, ani­mal modes and the mar­ket­ing push which is set to begin in Novem­ber (per­haps a trailer released with Quan­tum of Solace?)

The Injury

“Luck­ily noth­ing has to be reshot. Yes, we were on set last week to write it into the movie, not because it’s absolutely nec­es­sary, but more because we want to make sure Shia’s hand is pro­tected for the remain­der of the shoot…”

Inspi­ra­tions

“Back to the Future, Juras­sic Park, Close Encoun­ters and Ter­mi­na­tor 2.” “We were emu­lat­ing the style of movie from the old Amblin days, like Back to the Future and Grem­lins, which if you watch today are still very funny. Also, the car­toon itself was quite funny. Also, com­edy makes things more acces­si­ble to a larger audience.”

Ani­mal Modes

Will the Sequel have any Trans­form­ers with Ani­mal Modes like Scor­ponok? “All signs point to ‘probably.’”

Via FSR. You can also find a con­cise break­down of the ques­tions and their responses at /Film.

Fol­low­ing Shia’s injury, and Michael Bay’s com­ments that the pro­duc­tion of Revenge of the Fallen would not be affected by the inci­dent, the Trans­form­ers 2 first pro­duc­tion unit has been put on a four week hia­tus to allow Shia to recover, accord­ing TFW2005.

There have also been somre reports that Shia needs to have his lit­tle fin­ger ampu­tated — these are unfounded.

Shia LaBoeuf’s acci­dent has led to quick resched­ul­ing whilst the crew await Shia’s recov­ery. How­ever, as time now ticks on it seems appar­ent that pro­duc­tion can­not wait for a full recov­ery — either because they will be put behind or LaBoeuf’s injuries will take too long to heal. Michael Bay will be work­ing these injuries into the sto­ry­line, to facil­i­tate the movie mak­ing process.

It is also good news that Shia was not drunk. We can restore our respect for him.

“You’re gonna see — that’s gonna go away,” Bay said. “That’s fresh news… He was not drunk. He was drink­ing hours and hours before.”
Shortly before 2:30 AM, another dri­ver ran a red light, accord­ing to author­i­ties who con­firmed LaBeouf is now not being inves­ti­gated for caus­ing the crash.

“I spoke to him yes­ter­day in the hos­pi­tal,” Bay said. “His two fin­gers are pretty mashed, but we’re fig­ur­ing out a way to shoot around it, kind of write it in the story.”

“We had a lit­tle heart to heart the week before when he bought a brand new motor­cy­cle and I [said] ‘Dude! You can­not ride that motor­cy­cle! If you crash, you put 1,500 peo­ple out of work,’” the direc­tor recounted. “He said, ‘Ok, I won’t ride it, I won’t ride it, I’ll just drive my truck.’”

“The kid really has his head together and you know, he’s only 22,” Bay said. “He’s doing a great job on this movie. He’s really matured since the last one and I love work­ing with him.”

— Access Hol­ly­wood.

Thanks Leroy!

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.

Shia LaBoeuf is an idiot. Any­one that dri­ves drunk deserves to be called an idiot and made a pub­lic mock­ery of. Below is the best tele­vi­sion report I can find on YouTube that cov­ers the inci­dent — well, the least sen­sa­tion­al­ist and the most infor­ma­tive. It con­cludes that Shia expects to return to work within the month. Shia man­aged to flip his green Ford when he made a left-turn too fast, crush­ing his left hand in the process and requir­ing exten­sive surgery. Celebri­ty­Fix reports that the female pas­sen­ger involved in the acci­dent was none other than Isabel Lucas, unin­jured she has returned to the set for filming.