The sil­hou­et­ted key­chain we men­tioned today and saw a cou­ple weeks back at Toy fair ’09 has been unveiled through a French mar­ket­ing sheet, sup­ple­ment­ing the Leg­ends toy com­bi­na­tion we saw earlier.

Prime con­tin­ues to look badass with gun in right hand and illus­trat­ing a more inter-mingled com­bi­na­tion of Opti­mus Prime and Jet­fire, the two char­ac­ters now appear seamless.

Michael Bay has today com­mented on the ShoW­est footage that briefly appeared on his per­sonal site, and has since been pulled from there and every­where else.

The Show­est footage was pulled down because it was just a 12-hour thing.

I just wanted the fans to get a taste of what we have been mak­ing for a year and a half because we have been so quiet. The piece was cut about a month ago for this Show­est thing I accepted this past month — so as you can see many of the shots were far from being fin­ished ren­ders. This dinky lit­tle site received over 1,500,000 hits and 550,000 down­loads in this short time. Any­way the trailer is being printed today and com­ing out on Wolver­ine and Star Trek. 64 days left!

Michael

This post con­tains spoil­ers, beware. The May edi­tion of EW con­tains a Trans­form­ers 2 arti­cle with excerpts from Michael Bay, it’s main focus is on Shia’s hand injury and the trou­bles of incor­po­rat­ing it into the movie.

To sum­marise the piece:

- To build Shia’s injury into the movie the screen­writ­ers added a scene show­ing Sam Witwicky being injured by a “Space Bridge“
– Shia was given a cus­tom made pro­tec­tive and pho­to­genic cast after delay­ing surgery
– The Pyra­mids in Egypt are the set­ting for the final bat­tle
– Bay likes to blow things up, noth­ing has changed: “A fish tank, a heli­copter, con­crete tubes. We blew up a library. This set you’re look­ing at? This will all be gone.“
– Using CGI to cover up Shia’s injury was too expen­sive and “a pain in the neck”.

Space Bridge

The bridge is from the G1 car­toons and was built by the constructicons:

The space bridge appears in sev­eral uni­verses. The exact prop­er­ties of the space bridge vary, but typ­i­cally they serve as a more con­ve­nient means of mov­ing Trans­form­ers from one planet to another than the tra­di­tional means of space travel. [e.g. Cyber­ton to earth]

Scans after the break…
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UPDATE: Final Trans­form­ers 2 Trailer released in HD (30th April 2009)
See also our in depth analy­sis of the trailer with high qual­ity screen­shots of all the key scenes, robots and Megan Fox.

Update: New Trans­form­ers 2 trailer leaked early (29th April 2009)

The footage from the Las Vegas ShoW­est 2009 is now online for all to see, pub­lished to Michael​Bay​.com. As pre­vi­ously described, the footage opens with Bum­ble­bee and Sam dis­cussing his leav­ing for col­lege and the already infa­mous cry­ing with washer fluid, before jump­ing into a mon­tage of robot awe­some­ness. Typ­i­cally this mas­sive news appears on the week­end I am out in the coun­try with­out inter­net access.

We get to see Dev­as­ta­tor, Jet­fire, Wheels, Chro­mia, Mega­tron smash­ing Opti­mus Prime across a field, The Fallen, Skids, Mud­flaps, Side­swipe, pos­si­bly Black­out, Scalpel, Bum­ble­bee and more.

Watch the ShoW­est Trans­form­ers 2 Trailer/Footage

The YouTube and Vimeo videos got pulled.

The Robots

Dev­as­ta­tor

Con­struc­ti­con

Chro­mia

Jet­fire

Jet­fire being old and moan­ing at the bone­yard

Side­swipe

Skids & Mudflaps

Note in this first image the paint­ing — back in Decem­ber we reported on a pos­si­ble Fallen scoop that looked to all extents and pur­poses to be a fake (see bot­tom of this post) — the pic­ture matches the one in the screenshot.

Orig­i­nal Fallen scoop images:

Black­out or Springer

Black­out, the first active Decep­ti­con in the first movie looks to now appear in Revenge of the Fallen, but the rotary blades are much smaller, some sug­gest this is instead Springer.

Mega­tron

Images cour­tesy of The Cin­ema Source, show­ing Mega­tron ham­mer­ing Opti­mus Prime, send­ing him air­borne and fly­ing across a field.

Ram­page

This one isn’t so clear but it appears to be Bum­ble­bee and pos­si­bly Ram­page duel­ing — judg­ing by the flail­ing tracks.

Scalpel

Wheelie

The offi­cial Trans­form­ers 2 video game site has launched today, con­tain­ing new screen­shots, the video game trailer we have pre­vi­ously seen and an inter­est­ing set of con­cept art for the game. Mean­while Kotaku have posted some addi­tional screen­shots of the PS3/360Wii and Nin­tendo DS ver­sions of the game.

Video game con­cept art

One area found on the new site that is com­pletely new is a small gallery of con­cept art images. They show an inner city con­struc­tion site being looked upon by Bum­ble­bee and Bum­ble­bee fight­ing the huge two wheeled exca­va­tor con­struc­ti­con in Shang­hai. There is also an inter­est­ing image show­ing a beam of light com­ing down from the sky — the pic­ture is named ‘har­vester’ — per­haps the Sun har­vester men­tioned in Defi­ance #4 and pos­si­bly seen in the kids col­or­ing book.

Details about the game

Kotaku go into some depth about the game’s fea­tures, which I have surmised:

- Closely fol­lows plot of movie
– No lin­ear story, cen­tral hub from there you select mis­sions to play
– Can play as Auto­bot or Decep­ti­con and can choose your Trans­former
– Mis­sions are timed and com­plet­ing them quickly can earn you Trans­former upgrades
– You can climb up the sides of build­ings
– The demo showed that Side­ways (Audi R8) is a sniper robot, com­plete with rifle
– One but­ton quick trans­for­ma­tions are still in
– Each Trans­former has a spe­cial abil­ity when trans­formed
– Can attack an enemy by div­ing at them and trans­form­ing next to them
– Starscream has a hover abil­ity
– Lame chauf­feur­ing Shia mission

Video Game Screenshots

A selec­tion of the more inter­est­ing screen­shots as posted on Kotaku. Show­ing Starscream in fly­ing bat­tle above an air­craft car­rier, Bum­ble­bee attack­ing a pur­ple char­ac­ter and Opti­mus Prime doing bat­tle on the Wii:

Wall­pa­pers

1600x1280 res­o­lu­tion wall­pa­per downloads:

Screen­shots of the site

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Michael Bay recently screened his cut of Trans­form­ers 2, “Revenge of the Fallen” to exec­u­tive pro­ducer Steven Spiel­berg in an empty Sony the­ater. He has reported back via his Shoot for the Edit forums stat­ing that Speil­berg called it “Awe­some” and pos­si­bly Bay’s best. Work on a new trailer has just fin­ished and it is set to appear before the new Wolver­ine movie, due for release on May 1st in the US.

Steven Spiel­berg sat next to me in a big 100 per­son the­ater at Sony today. There were 98 empty seats. The lights came up after we just watched my cut of Revenge of the Fallen. He turned to me and said “It’s awe­some”. He felt this movie was bet­ter than the first — and prob­a­bly my best, who knows — at this point in a movie you start to lose your objec­tiv­ity. I just hope the fans like it. I’m going to start putting it in front of audi­ences in a few weeks — no you are not invited, yet.

We have 60 days left. Let me tell you it will be a race to fin­ish. It’s 12 at night and we are still work­ing here in the edit room. Every­one at ILM and DD are killing them­selves right now, they are doing a stel­lar job on the effects. We also just fin­ished our trailer which is com­ing out with Wolver­ine. Talk to you soon.

Michael

An adap­ta­tion of Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen is being cre­ated in comic for­mat, with issues released weekly. The first of four is set to appear on May 20th for ~$3.99. Things from Another World have the comic avail­able for pre-order and offers up some details and art­work from the comic (pos­si­bly one of the cov­ers). The comics shall pre­sum­ably delve into the movie’s sto­ry­line, no doubt spoil­ing the entire plot before the movie is released.

By: Simon Fur­man, Jon-Davis Hunt, Josh Nizzi, Photo
Type: Comics
Gen­res: Science-Fiction
Pub­lisher: IDW Pub­lish­ing
Pub. Date: May 20, 2009
Avail­abil­ity: Pre-Order
UPC: 82771400064100111

The offi­cial adap­ta­tion of Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen picks up directly where the Des­tiny movie pre­quels leave off with this weekly series-the TRANSFORMERS’ bru­tal war con­tin­ues on Earth as the noble AUTOBOTS work with their human allies to end the threat of the treach­er­ous DECEPTICONS.

Early in Feb­ru­ary Michael Bay reported that his cur­rent Revenge of the Fallen edit sat some­where over the two hour mark. Bay has since updated this fig­ure, stat­ing that the new movie shall be four min­utes longer than the orig­i­nal and that this run time will not be changed. The orig­i­nal lasts 143 min­utes which puts Trans­form­ers 2 at 147 min­utes in total:

“It’s four min­utes longer than the last one. […] So, go fig­ure it out.”

Bay goes on to elaborate,

“I don’t ever talk (to exec­u­tives) about run times. […] Stu­dios always ask, ‘What’s the run time?’ And I’m like ‘If you enjoy the movie, do you care?’”