Trans­form­ers 3 pro­duc­tion has moved to Trump Tower again, this time shoot­ing at night and using “flame and smoke effects” on rooftops, accord­ing to Chicago­B­reak­ingNews. It was more than just smoke and flame effects, this was “Bay­hem” to its fullest, with ten or so rooftop explo­sions at mul­ti­ple build­ings. The action was filmed from a heli­copter (and pre­sum­ably from below as well) whilst police vehi­cles drove away from the action down below.

Trans­form­ers 3 has also been spot­ted on the south side, film­ing along­side the rail tracks, includ­ing Auto­bot chase scenes, scenes of pedes­tri­ans run­ning away scream­ing, and a video show­ing all the vehi­cles lined up, includ­ing what’s pre­sum­ably Skids and Mud­flaps new look.

Trans­form­ers lined up on south side

Almost a full cast of vehi­cles here, includ­ing the Nascars, Bum­ble­bee, Skids, Mud­flaps and Jolt.

Auto­bot chase

The next video shows the Nascar vehi­cles hotly pur­sued by the Auto­bots from an angle right in the thick of the film­ing, by johnnyism13 who hap­pened to be in the right place at the right time:

This video, from the same loca­tion, shows peo­ple run­ning away scream­ing whilst a shiny blue car calmly dri­ves past.

Explo­sions closeup

This is another view of the explo­sions we’ve seen already, but from a ground view, much closer. Thanks to ReidCollins.

Film­ing con­tin­ued on Sat­ur­day, and the ’72 Dat­sun sport­ing Bum­ble­bee colour­ing was spot­ted along­side Shia and Rosie in Chicago, prob­a­bly con­tin­u­ing from the scene in Mil­wau­kee. The auto­bots were also out in full col­ors and a truck sport­ing the word “NEST” has shown up, spark­ing rumors that it’s a mobile HQ unit.

Read the rest of this entry »

Trans­form­ers 3 pro­duc­tion returned to down­town Chicago and the Michi­gan Street Bridge. This time the destruc­tion sets and props went up a notch. Scenes included Sam and Carly run­ning to escape in Bum­ble­bee and more run­ning, this time across the bridge with some soldiers.

Videos

Seib­ertron
WGN TV

Image sets

All Spark
TFW2005
TForm­ers
SHH
Seib­ertron
TLive

First up, some videos of Opti­mus Prime and the auto bots avoid­ing explo­sions and large piles of rub­ble at intersections:

Seib­ertron have posted 20 or so videos and a huge set of pic­tures from the day’s action, includ­ing close-ups of the auto­bots and “stun­ti­cons” (Nascar vehicles).

Image Gallery
Stun­ti­cons and Auto­bots
Stun­ti­cons in action
Destruc­tion on Chicago’s streets
Wacker drive

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?

As hinted by Nel­son on Michael Bay’s Shoot for the Edit blog, Empire and USA Today do indeed have the first offi­cial pic­tures from Trans­form­ers 2 along with some juicy scoops and rumor con­fir­ma­tions — SPOILERS herein: Dev­as­ta­tor con­firmed. Dev­as­ta­tor made up of mul­ti­ple robots con­firmed. Sound­wave con­firmed. Jet­fire crossover confirmed.

USA Today

Arti­cle 1: LaBoeuf, Fox Really under fire in Trans­form­ers 2

Juicy spoil­ers and plot synopsis…

This time, the story finds Sam and Mikaela under attack by the evil Decep­ti­cons because of some­thing Sam has learned about the ori­gins of the Trans­form­ers and their ancient his­tory on Earth.

To acquire this knowl­edge, the invad­ing Decep­ti­cons need to cap­ture Sam instead of kill him. Mean­while, the U.S. mil­i­tary and an inter­na­tional coali­tion has united with the good-guy Auto­bots to fight back the vil­lains’ attack.

Some of the most impor­tant new­com­ers are in the robot cast: Decep­ti­cons Sound­wave, a fear­some com­mu­ni­ca­tions expert, and Dev­as­ta­tor, whose arms and legs are built out of other Trans­form­ers. And on the Auto­bots’ side is Jet­fire, a vil­lain whose age and broken-down phys­i­cal­ity leads him to help the Auto­bots [see scratched out decep­ti­con logo on Jet­fire].

Arti­cle 2: ‘Trans­form­ers’ breaks out the big guns for sequel

The U.S. Depart­ment of Defense gave its offi­cial stamp of approval to the Michael Bay-directed film, not only allow­ing pro­duc­tion amid the pris­tine dunes of the Army’s New Mex­ico mis­sile range, but also let­ting film­mak­ers fol­low jets and fighter planes through the sky from nearby Hol­lo­man Air Force Base. More scenes were shot on the Navy’s air­craft car­rier USS John C. Sten­nis, and Marines fill the ranks of the strike team bat­tling the invad­ing Transformers.

Among the equip­ment the movie is using in this desert sequence alone: two A-10 Thun­der­bolt II “Warthog” tank-killing jets; six F-16 Fight­ing Fal­cons; 10 armored Humvees; the Army’s Golden Knights para­chute team; two Abrams tanks; two Bradley tanks; two missile-launcher vehi­cles; two armored per­son­nel car­ri­ers; and a quarter-mile of the mis­sile test­ing range, cleared of unex­ploded ord­nance and built into an Egypt­ian town and tem­ple. (Signs warn not to cross a perime­ter just over the gyp­sum dunes, because live bombs could be hid­den in the sand.)

The final bat­tle the mil­i­tary is help­ing Bay cre­ate is sup­posed to be an enor­mous fire­fight in Egypt, but much of it is being shot in the White Sands dunes in a town built over the roughly quarter-mile cleared span.

Empire

Spoil­ers from the Empire arti­cle pro­vided cour­tesy of Alien­bot:

- Bay and LaBeouf con­firm the Fallen is a sep­a­rate char­ac­ter.
– Egypt­ian hiero­glyph­ics …turn out to be depic­tions of Trans­form­ers who vis­ited Earth.
– Bay claims Mega­tron is not com­ing back and the tank is just a new toy.
– Around 40 robots.
– Bud­get is $200 mil­lion.
– Ramon Rodriguez is the one hold­ing on for dear life to a pole while cars are flung.
– Dev­as­ta­tor appears at the pyra­mid, he’s prob­a­bly 50 feet tall because that’s the height of the cam­era crane they used on location.

Note the hand injury in this image — prov­ing it has been worked into the movie.

Pos­si­ble Fallen images

With Fallen now cited as a sep­a­rate char­ac­ter in ‘Revenge of the Fallen’, it’s a good time to point out some mys­te­ri­ous shots found on Lin­ing up TV, which claims to have on set images of The Fallen. Behind an old pic­ture? Doesn’t seem to fit inline with the Egypt­ian plot arc we are see­ing, I’ll clas­sify as fake for now.

Seib­ertron are report­ing, despite the state­ment on Michael Bay’s blog that film­ing had wrapped, that TF2 has been film­ing aboard the USS John C. Sten­nis air­craft car­rier over Novem­ber 1st and 2nd.

Pic­tures from the set

These images show Shia LaBoeuf with ‘bat­tle dam­age’, Michael Bay film­ing shoot­ing a cat­a­pult launch, Josh Duhamel and Tyrese.

Set Report

Skalor’s Post­card
Greet­ings from San Diego! Just got back today from deploy­ment at sea on board the U.S. Navy car­rier Sten­nis and thought I’d fill every­one in on what I expe­ri­enced this past week with the ROTF cast and crew. It’s true, film­ing did take place this past week, all shoot­ing was com­pleted in a two day span, Sat­ur­day the 1st with the IMAX folks film­ing flight oper­a­tions, and Sun­day the 2nd with Michael Bay in action around the ship. Rumors flew around for weeks about what exactly was going to hap­pen with the movie so it was really cool to see it all go down.

Sat­ur­day after­noon two trans­port planes arrived, the first car­ry­ing Shia Labeouf on the first and on the sec­ond were Michael Bay, Tyrese Gib­son, Megan Fox and Josh Duhamel. They arrived in cos­tume (at least Tyrese and Josh did) and began work­ing almost imme­di­ately. From what I saw, all of the film­ing with the cast was done in “closed” sets. The rest of the film­ing on the flight deck seemed to be flight oper­a­tions, of which I was there and will hope­fully make the final cut. We were told to just act nat­ural and con­tinue our jobs as nor­mal, which is easy to do when you’ve actu­ally got work to do. I did how­ever try really hard to get into one shot in which I just walked back and forth for about 20 min­utes.

The whole expe­ri­ence was a lot of fun and every­one in the cast and crew were really cool. Shia Labeouf and Megan Fox were really hard to find on the ship, I think they were work­ing just about their whole time there. I’m not sure which part of the movie was filmed there but it is prob­a­bly some­where toward the end, (Shia had “beat-up” make up on, and Duhamel and Tyrese were in dress uni­forms). Over­all it was an awe­some time.

Sorry if I didn’t give you any good spoil­ers or any­thing like that, but I think the sus­pense is more fun any­way. By the way, the crew work­ing on this movie have been bust­ing their asses to make a good film, that much I can attest to.

This should put to rest any of the rumors that they’ve com­pleted film­ing for now, although this may have been the last of the film­ing (I didn’t ask). […]

On the week­end end­ing 23rd Octo­ber Trans­form­ers 2 was spot­ted film­ing around the pyra­mids in Egypt, as reported by Wax­word and TLAMB scooper Dan:

Set report from Wax­Word:

A major mile­stone qui­etly passed last week­end: the first major Hol­ly­wood film in decades filmed in the heart of the Mid­dle East. “Trans­form­ers II” turned its cam­eras at the Pyra­mids in Egypt, and again in the upper Egypt­ian town of Luxor, near the famed Val­ley of the Kings. This is sig­nif­i­cant for many rea­sons but mainly because it rep­re­sents a rare move by two Hol­ly­wood stu­dios, Para­mount and Dream­Works, to con­nect to a coun­try and cul­ture that is per­ceived to be hos­tile the United States.

I say ‘per­ceived’ because my guess is you’d prob­a­bly find no more avid fans else­where in the world than those clus­tered around Shia LeBeouf, the star of the film, in this part of the world. But after years of anti-American images in the Mid­dle East, and years of entrenched mis­trust, this is the kind of inter­ac­tion – and pub­lic­ity — that makes a dif­fer­ence. I hear from sources within the stu­dio that Dream­Works was “pet­ri­fied” when pro­duc­ers got clear­ance to shoot at the pyra­mids and in Luxor, and that LeBeouf was hes­i­tant but decided to take the leap. (I agreed to hold this news until pro­duc­tion had been safely completed.)

In the end, “Trans­form­ers II” shot for sev­eral days, bring­ing together a crew of 150 Amer­i­cans and sev­eral dozen local Egyp­tians for an effort that pro­ducer Lorenzo di Bonaven­tura, who called from a cell­phone while stand­ing beside the pyra­mids, told me was “remark­ably smooth.”

Dan’s report:

Hi there, I’m not a fan of Trans­form­ers but I can con­firm after vis­it­ing the Pyra­mids sec­tion in Cairo last Fri­day (17th oct) that there was indeed a film crew film­ing on the third pyra­mid in the Giza area (can’t remem­ber the name, but for those of you that know, its the Pyra­mid with half of one side that looks like it’s been dug out. They were film­ing some scene late in the after­noon before sun­set (when the heat was less intense) and it was quite amaz­ing because my girl­friend and I sat on some rocks 20 metres away from it all and man­aged not to get sussed out by the secu­rity crew (who were all wear­ing T2 badges…one of the crew was tying up his shoelace behind me and con­firmed to me it was T2)about 40 peo­ple on site, the locals were try­ing to get their camels and don­keys in the scenes, which involved one of the cast climb­ing part of the pyramid.….