TF08 have posted their sec­ond batch of images for the week, this time show­ing Skids and Mega­tron in their boxes, along­side the new blue motor­cy­cle char­ac­ter, ‘Chro­mia’.

The packet describes Chromia’s char­ac­ter as a female friend of Iron­hide (part­ners — aka a love inter­est) with sis­ters, pre­sum­ably two given the three dif­fer­ent bikes. This char­ac­ter pro­file matches the out­line of Chro­mia given on Wikipedia based on the first gen­er­a­tion ani­mated series in the episode, “The Search for Alpha Trion.”. There appears to be no men­tion of Chro­mia com­bin­ing with any other robot/toys to form what was thought would be Arcee.

Chro­mia is tough as nails, and always spoil­ing for a fight. She’s […] friends with Iron­hide for cen­turies, and their reunion on Earth […] one of the high points of the war for both of them. Now they […] side-by-side, hunt­ing and destroy­ing Decep­ti­cons. nei­ther of […] has ever been hap­pier. The two robots make great part­ners, and […] along with her sis­ters, are an invalu­able part of the […].

As seen in the trailer:

A plot syn­op­sis and the first chap­ter of Alan Dean Foster’s Trans­form­ers novel enti­tled “Trans­form­ers: The Veiled Threat” have been posted to Del­rey Online.

The book can be pre­ordered on Ama­zon.

The descrip­tion of the book reveals the mean­ing of the NEST acronym seen on the Iron­hide toys, on the leaked call sheet and some vehi­cles on set (Hum­mers) — it sat­nds for the some­what cheesy — “Net­worked Ele­ments: Sup­port­ers and Transformers”.

Life on earth has changed for­ever as humans and their coura­geous robotic allies, the Auto­bots, must work together to pro­tect the planet from the destruc­tive forces of the evil Decep­ti­cons. At the head­quar­ters of NEST (Net­worked Ele­ments: Sup­port­ers and Trans­form­ers), tech sergeant Epps and cap­tain Lennox both guard and assist cyber­neti­cist Yoki Ishi­hara and the brood­ing Russ­ian AI genius Petr Ivanov as they explore the dif­fer­ences between organ­ics and bots. In the mean­time, all around them, alliances fray, dis­trust grows, sus­pi­cions mount, and trai­tors come out of the shadows.

Opti­mus Prime, the pow­er­ful leader of the Auto­bots who is also part of NEST, is on the defense as bat­tles flare up from Aus­tralia to Zim­babwe. But esca­lat­ing Decep­ti­con attacks will cul­mi­nate in a final con­fronta­tion from which no one–man or machine–will emerge unscathed.

Via TLAMB

Roberto Orci has answered another round of fan’s ques­tions over at TFW2005 — answers are often vague, cryp­tic or one-liners, but a num­ber of answers are inter­est­ing. The new set of answers start around page 226 of the thread (all Orci posts — need to be logged in).

Some of the high­lights are listed below, as col­lated by TLAMB:

Will Barricade’s dis­ap­pear­ance be explained in ROTF?
Explained is a very spe­cific kinda word… implied may be more like it

Will you guys seri­ously rethink about stay­ing on?
Time for fresh blood!

Just to be clear, what is your rea­son for not writ­ing it? If the other main play­ers comes back and they don’t see a need for fresh blood, then why would you?
Not clear who is com­ing back yet, but the main rea­son we would move on is because we risk get­ting stale and com­fort­able. If you only sing one song for too long, you miss the oppor­tu­nity to sing news songs. We’ll see.

who thought of the name for the movie? you, michael bay, alex, or some­one else?
Alex.

how many fans do you think saw past Michael’s “no Mega­tron” announce­ment? And sec­ond, is he aware that his com­ment about Megs only appear­ing in a flash­back kind of con­tra­dicts Hugo Weaving’s hint that the Allspark shard has some­thing to do with Megatron’s res­ur­rec­tion?
god love him

Did the fallen enslave the Egyp­tians to build the pyra­mids (which actu­ally are space bridges)?
Hmm. Get­ting warm

Did the Egyp­tians seal the fallen within his own design?
Also very warm but not quite.

Did you ever intend for Black­out and Brawl to speak?
Yes.

Would you con­sider a giant bat­tle in the Grand Canyon?
We actu­ally had a giant bat­tle in the Grand Canyon in the very first draft of the first movie.

Is there really still time to add stuff and how much stuff can be added at this point?
On the first movie, we were re-writing dia­logue until about 2 weeks before release!

can you let us know how many Auto­bots can fly in the movie?
very few

I know very early in devel­op­ment Mike Bay said that there would be a geri­atric robot. Was it already set there and then that Jet­fre would be that bot, or did you and the writers/Bay decide later that Jet­fire would suit that type of char­ac­ter?
We decided Jet­fire would fit after the idea came up to have a geri­atric robot.

Would you con­sider this movie the “Empire Strikes Back” of the Trans­former movie line (dark, feel­ing of hope­less­ness, crazy reveal/twists/turns)?
yes

Bay men­tioned in pass­ing that about 40 bots are in the movie. Sound about right or less/more?
sounds about right

Will The Fallen have any dia­logue?
Yes.

Can you name the 3 scenes that were filmed in IMAX for­mat?
Yes.

Will Prime sur­vive the movie?
Prime’s spirit can never die.

which of the 2 movies was more dif­fi­cult to get along with the story.
Movie 1 was the hard­est thing have ever worked on. Period. Nobody could imag­ine what it was, every­one thought it was just a silly car­toon or a toy com­mer­cial, the stu­dio wasn’t sure if the robots should talk, we had to come up with a story that would attract some­one like Bay, and we had bud­getary con­straints that made it nec­es­sary to gen­er­ate a sig­nif­i­cant human story which was coun­ter­in­tu­itive to some Trans­fans. By the sec­ond movie, the par­a­digm of the fran­chise was clear.

what are your feel­ings towards the idea of Leonard Nimoy doing the voice of the Fallen?
Would love it. I actu­ally talked to him about it, given the odd coin­ci­dence that he is Michael Bay’s cousin through mar­riage, but fan out­cry has also put Welker in the running.

Yes­ter­day Para­mount and Dream­works offi­cially announced that Trans­form­ers 3 shall be land­ing in cin­e­mas come Fri­day July 1st 2011, Vari­ety:

Para­mount and Dream­Works are forg­ing ahead with “Trans­form­ers 3,” dat­ing the movie for release on July 1, 2011.
It’s the first word of the three-quel, although Para­mount insid­ers down­played the impor­tance of the move.
They said the stu­dio wanted to claim the date before a com­peti­tor did, con­sid­er­ing that the 2011 sum­mer release cal­en­dar is fill­ing up.
No deals have been inked with direc­tor Michael Bay or fran­chise stars Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox. Nor has a writer been hired for the third installment.

In response, Michael Bay has posted on his forums:

I said I was tak­ing off a year from Trans­form­ers. Para­mount made a mis­take in dat­ing Trans­form­ers 3 — they asked me on the phone — I said yes to July 4 — but for 2012 — whoops! Not 2011!!! That would mean I would have to start prep in Sep­tem­ber. No way. My brain needs a break from fight­ing robots.

Michael

Looks like some­one messed up here. No date set for now — but we know Trans­form­ers 3 is def­i­nitely planned.

SPOILERS ARE IN THIS POST. Post­ing scans of kids col­or­ing books doesn’t seem like a suit­able past time, so I don’t intend to do it too often. But today there are some scans of the new Revenge of the Fallen col­or­ing book that have hit the inter­web. Within it there are the usual robots that can be col­ored in but, more inter­est­ingly, a much sim­pli­fied sto­ry­line for the sequel — includ­ing the pre­sumed finale.

Spoil­ers after the break…
Read the rest of this entry »

A reader at the Shoot for the Edit forums has posted a trans­la­tion of a French TF2 arti­cle that con­tains some spoil­ers. Specif­i­cally it appears to reveal the start and end of the movie in a very vague man­ner, before out­lin­ing a few scenes involv­ing Shia, Bum­ble­bee, Skids and Mud­flaps and Agent Sim­mons, John Tur­turro. The mag­a­zine sug­gests that Tur­turro also voices an old Trans­former that loses parts with every move — undoubt­edly this is Jet­fire, whilst Bay out­lines his thoughts on the bick­er­ing twins which come across like some sort of mechan­i­cal jar jar binks.

Set: Egypt, in front of Kheops Pyra­mid, stands an ancient 30’s palace built for King Faruk’s guests.

At “Action”, Shia runs through the yard, stops at the doorstep and hits the door with his shoul­der. Megan Fox, John Tur­turro and Ramon Rodriguez come next and hurry inside the building.

Shia heads up, shout a few words at an imag­i­nary Bum­ble­bee, and gets in. Three cars, the Camaro, the red TRAX and the green BEAT, start quickly and stop a bit fur­ther away to look out. The three vehi­cles are dri­ven by black-suited (and thereby “invis­i­ble”) stunt­men behind the smoked glass.

At the end of the day, the crew moves to the third and small­est pyra­mid, Myk­eri­nos. John Tur­turro, back as always angry agent Sim­mons, has to climb up a few stones. This hasn’t been done for 30 years: Too many acci­dent occurred and Egyp­tians had for­bid­den it. Tur­turro will try to run from an imag­i­nary Decepticon.

Michael Bay says: “I had the idea of these two stu­pid Trans­form­ers, Skids and Mud­flap. They’re twins who can’t stop bick­er­ing, but they do heroic things at the begin­ning of the movie.

Bum­ble­bee, on his side, has become more seri­ous. He doesn’t want to leave Sam’s par­ents’ garage. There is also an old Trans­former, who loses screws and bolts at every move. And it’s John Tur­turro voic­ing him.”

The movie will start at Gyzeh, Egypt, long before pyra­mids were built, and will end at the same place nowa­days, with a huge fight between Auto­bots and Decepticons.

It’s said that we’ll learn in the movie how pyra­mids were built. Does it involve any Transformer?

Looks like Hugo Weaving’s com­ments were the last straw — Michael Bay has pub­licly stated on his forums that Mega­tron shall return in Trans­form­ers 2, although he does play down his role — sug­gest­ing its more of a cameo within a flashback.

“Okay cat is out of the bag. Mega­tron is back —- but you will only get to see him from the long lost past. We go way back in time as this movie explains the mythol­ogy of the Primes. He is not a tank like every­one sug­gests, but an alien vehi­cle. But sadly he does not has much screen time.”

Well it only took toys, images, Orci’s con­fir­ma­tion, Weaving’s con­fir­ma­tion and all the rumors for Bay to make a turn­around on his pre­vi­ous state­ment that Mega­tron would not be return­ing. Sadly, Bay’s new expla­na­tion falls into that pool of poten­tial ‘mis­in­for­ma­tion’, oth­er­wise known as lies. We’ve already seen Megatron’s bio from the back of the leader class toy pack­ag­ing. Mega­tron rises and leads an army, et al. Weav­ing also sug­gested that Mega­tron might be res­ur­rected using cube shards.

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.

Andrew Fen­ton of Aus­tralian pub­li­ca­tion, The Adver­tiser reveals in an inter­view with Hugo Weav­ing that Weav­ing shall return to voice the part of Mega­tron and that Bay asked him to keep it hush hush. He goes on to sug­gest that Mega­tron may be res­ur­rected from shards of the cube.

“Mega Secret
By Andrew Fen­ton
Film Writer, The Advertiser

In town to pro­mote his rather excel­lent new Aussie film, “Last Ride”, Hugo Weav­ing let slip he’ll be return­ing as the voice of Mega­tron in “Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen”.

Fans no doubt will recall that when we last saw Mega­tron, Sam (Shia LaBeouf) had rammed the All Spark cube into his chest, thereby destroy­ing him. Despite this cer­tain death, rumours have been cir­cu­lat­ing the vil­lain was going to make a come­back. Direc­tor Michael Bay went so far as to flatly deny the rumour, telling Empire: “He’s not in the movie”.

Turns out Bay was fib­bing. “I’ve already done it,” Weav­ing says, adding Bay had told him to keep the news hush-hush. “He’s over in LA and we were work­ing on the video split sort of thing and I had this strange con­ver­sa­tion where he seemed to imply it was all a big secret. So there you go — I’ve given you the secret scoop.”

So how is Mega­tron res­ur­rected? Weav­ing is coy about revealling too much, but does give a tiny hint.

“I think in the last one, doesn’t Opti­mus Prime pick up a lit­tle bit of, a shard of the cube, or the thing that’s left, and he takes it with him. Maybe there’s some­thing there… but I don’t know,” he laughs.

We’ll find out on June 25, the film’s Aus­tralian release.”

Via Seib­ertron