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.

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.

A pro­mo­tional newslet­ter released by Dolby for this year’s ShoW­est con­tains a list of upcom­ing 3D fea­ture films in 2009 — at the very bot­tom is Trans­form­ers 2, amongst Avatar and Tintin.

Via Comics2film

Moviehole are report­ing that Teresa Palmer, for­merly part of the trou­bled Jus­tice League movie. No infor­ma­tion as to what her role shall entail, we’ll have to wait and see.

In a Star Trek ques­tion and answer ses­sion with Roberto Orci, a small tid­bit about the Trans­form­ers 2 script was revealed,

Orci and Kurtz­man were released from ‘Michael Bay Jail’ (which turns out to be a lux­ury hotel on the Pacific Coast) on Fri­day, after fin­ish­ing the first draft for Trans­form­ers 2

There is at least one Star Trek ref­er­ence in Trans­form­ers 2

The Greater Philadel­phia Film Office have recently con­firmed, via KYW radio, that Trans­form­ers II will be shoot­ing their in the near future,

That’s just a pos­si­bil­ity still. “Dream of the Romans” has been shoot­ing. ‘Tenure”, “Happy Tears”, and “Marly and Me” are upcom­ing as is Trans­form­ers II. But won’t giant robots wreck the place????

“Ha, ha. Let’s just say the destruc­tion part is going to be dig­i­tally enhanced.”

The Philadel­phia Inquirer have hinted, giv­ing weight to some ear­lier rumors, that the Trans­form­ers sequel will be film­ing in the Beth­le­hem PA area:

Neat twist sur­round­ing the action movie Trans­form­ers 2, whose pro­duc­tion will be based in Philly for the bet­ter part of June. I hear that direc­tor Michael Bay and crew also will shoot in Beth­le­hem, Pa., which will dou­ble as a city in the Far East. (A twist in the notion of send­ing Amer­i­can jobs overseas.)

Given the recent end to the Writer’s strikes, Roberto Orci has spo­ken out on Don Murphy’s mes­sage board about the sta­tus of the Trans­form­ers movie development:

So we got back to work this week and we find out Bay and pro­duc­tion has been prep­ping the entire movie off of our pre-strike out­line! The very one we turned in the night before the strike.

We had two weeks on the out­line. We’re still going through the prep sched­ule to find out what has been prepped so far down the road that it can be changed and what can’t.

[Michael Bay] essen­tially trans­ferred our out­line into screen­play for­mat and came up with some really fun gags and a few descrip­tions of the kind of hard­ware he will need for production.

As far as I am con­cerned, this is pretty bad news. Looks like the stu­dios and Bay him­self are rush­ing out a lower qual­ity screen­play to meet tar­gets rather than spend some qual­ity time fine tun­ing the piece. Hope­fully Bay’s tom­fool­ery will not be too destruc­tive to the film’s sto­ry­line quality.

Michael Bay — “I’ve been writ­ing Trans­form­ers 2. We’ve got our char­ac­ters all designed. I always write all my scripts, my movies any­way so at least I’ve got some­thing to give the writ­ers. It’s like a tem­plate. We have a really good out­line so I worked on that. […] We had to because I want to make my date. I’m not going to let the strike take me down.”

Posted in the dark recesses that are the forums on Michael Bay’s offi­cial site, Shoot for the Edit, the admin recently spoke out about the sta­tus of the trans­form­ers sequel in regards to the expected delays caused by the strikes:

Bay just indi­cated to me that Trans­form­ers is still on sched­ule. The movie is still in heavy prep and “will be released JUNE 24th 2009.”

This came as a rebut­tal to the com­ments from Trans­form­ers writer Roberto Orci,

As you know, all screen­writ­ers are engaged in a labor dis­pute with the major stu­dios and media con­glom­er­ates that sub­si­dize much, but not all of the media con­tent that we con­sume. It may go on for a very long time. All the other writ­ers I’ve talked to on every level are ready to hold out FOREVER, all the while fig­ur­ing out ways to make a liv­ing out of the inter­net with­out studios.

So now the hard part for me and Alex and Ehren and all fans of Trans­form­ers is that the movie may suf­fer (unless of course you hate the first one so much that you feel our inat­ten­tion is a bonus). It may be pushed back or a host of other thing may hap­pen to it. For that we apol­o­gize truly.

will keep you posted…