Prior to the Isabel Lucas shoot we saw yes­ter­day and the Bum­ble­bee skid, shoot­ing was tak­ing place at the Cas­tle fra­ter­nity — on cam­pus, “where the party’s at”, or some such.
TFW2005 have pro­vided pic­tures lead­ing up to this, show­ing Michael Bay, Isabel Lucas and Shia LaBoeuf prepar­ing for the scenes and tak­ing time out with some fans. I espe­cially like the shot of Shia tak­ing some time out to sign a toy Bum­ble­bee. Bum­ble­bee, the real thing, can also be seen under his cover — rather indiscreetly:

Report­ing to Powet​.tv, Josh Landow was there later that day to cap­ture video of Bum­ble­bee screech­ing away and pro­vide a report of the events that unfolded:

The frat house is known as The Cas­tle because it looks like a cas­tle. Bum­ble­bee was parked out front and they made it look like he was parked in the bushes. There was a huge light­ing screen over the car, and 2 giant light bal­loons (not sure how else to describe them) float­ing above the set.

[…]

The first shot was a bunch of well dressed good look­ing col­lege coeds walk­ing around to and fro with some of them seem­ingly con­verg­ing on the BB Camaro, say­ing things like “Wow! Cool car.”

[…]

Next shot was the most involved and took about 3 hours to shoot from every which way, with dif­fer­ent light­ing, and with slightly dif­fer­ent lines even. Shia and a few of the bit play­ers were def­i­nitely ad-libbing or at least tak­ing some lib­er­ties with the script. This shot con­sisted of Shia run­ning out of the party because BB’s alarm was going off. Like I said BB was parked in the bushes which gets Sam into some trou­ble with the frat boys who came run­ning after him ask­ing “Hey Fresh­man, is that your car parked in our bushes?” Sam replies “uh uh no, it’s a friend’s car — he went to get a new shirt” (or some­thing dumb like that — they kept chang­ing that line). Frat­boy responds “How about I park my foot up your ass?” Sam says “I’ll move the car now.” He gets in and has (fake) trou­ble clos­ing the door because of all the shrub­bery. It was hard to hear, but when he got inside the car, I think he said some­thing about Decep­ti­cons. And yes it took 3 hours to shoot this.

[…]

Then they moved the crowd back a good ways to shoot some more extras walk­ing about before finally get­ting to the scene that I knew had to be com­ing. Bum­ble­bee backs up and dri­ves away (as seen in my video). This was shot using Bay’s cam­era rigged Porsche Cayenne. I think they shot this like 4 or 5 times with the cars back­ing up to reset after each take

Film­ing con­tin­ues at UPENN, this time it’s a frat party involv­ing Shia LaBoeuf and new­comer Isabel Lucas, TLAMB has pro­vided a set report which describes the in-doors scene via J Fuller:

I was in one of the party scenes. I had to get fit­ted with jeans and a but­ton down dress shirt, we all were and Shia was wear­ing dark jeans and a black but­ton down shirt. In the scene which they shot 3 times from dif­fer­ent angles Shia was sit­ting on a old wooden chair when this girl [Isabel Lucas] in a green short dress (who I thought was an extra) was danc­ing in front of him and kept lean­ing into him. That’s it for the scene I was in but there is a lot more to it.

Action then moved out­side, to a scene involv­ing Bum­ble­bee — Isabel (char­ac­ter named Alice?), leans into the car to speak with Shia, before stomp­ing away. It also looks like there is “green goo” involved, at least that’s the impres­sion you get from the pic­tures. A sec­ond scene with Bum­ble­bee in motion was also filmed — with the car per­form­ing a 180 degree skid to line up per­fectly with the build­ing entrance (Drexel main build­ing), Jszack got a great video of this scene:

These are some absolutely fan­tas­tic shots from zack­lur show­ing Michael Bay, Isabel Lucas and Shia up close:

From Kendall White­house:

From rhavener and Nikos G:

Film­ing has now started at the Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia and you can be sure reports and pic­tures galore shall start pour­ing in shortly, much as they did in Beth­le­hem, PA.

First up, a local web­site, “Duel­ing Tam­pons” (I don’t know — best not to ask), man­aged to cap­ture a shot of Shia LaBoeuf up close and per­sonal, sport­ing a green “recy­cling” t-shirt:

TLAMB and Fade­Sil­ver­Screen have both posted pic­tures from film­ing yes­ter­day (at the Quad) and today (at the Cas­tle). One set of images comes via BP, show­ing the setup at UPENN, stat­ing that film­ing at the Quad lasted most of the day — almost exclu­sively with Shia LaBoeuf, though it has also been con­firmed that Kevin Dunn (Sam Witwicky’s dad) was on set — as pic­tures from Fad­ed­Sil­ver­Screen reveal. Images from today show Shia dressed in blue as he strolls past the cam­era as shoot­ing begins at The Cas­tle. Michael Bay shows up at the end to greet and sign HD-DVDs for wait­ing fans.

Braden has returned to get more shots of Opti­mus Prime and Bum­ble­bee in action, this time with a short video. The images clearly show that Bum­ble­bee has under­gone some mod­i­fi­ca­tions, with a wider front grill, new lights and rims — reported to be a 2010 Chevy Camaro SS. There is also spec­u­la­tion that ceme­tery film­ing means some­body impor­tant that we know dies in the course of the film.

Via TLAMB

John Von reports that a video shoot took place yes­ter­day at the Lau­rel Hill Ceme­tery near to Fair­mount Park, PA — he return with videos and pic­tures of the film­ing as well as the base camp. The green Chevy Beat con­cept car is vis­i­ble at the base camp, whilst the video shows the heli­copter used to cap­ture the scenes.

Via TLAMB

Thanks to Robo­quaker, we have a sec­ond set of images from the Smith­son­ian National Air and Space Museum near Wash­ing­ton DC.

These pic­tures show a small radio con­trolled car, rumored to be “Wheels” given the call sheet descrip­tions which sug­gest Wheels is fairly small. (Can you imag­ine it as a toy!?)

UPDATE: High Res­o­lu­tion images added. Repro­duced under a cre­ative com­mons license.

SHH have posted up a sec­ond set report to go with this:

I’m back one last time with a report about what I saw filmed at the museum on Sat­ur­day. Some poten­tially spoi­ler­ish stuff will fol­low, so be aware.

I arrived around 10 and stayed until they broke for lunch (around 2, 2:30). Got to see a lot of stuff filmed, it was really quite inter­est­ing stuff. Shia, Megan Fox, and John Tur­turro were all on set.

All film­ing pretty much took place around the SR-71 Black­bird today. When I first got there, Michael Bay was being pushed on a cart with a cam­era film­ing an RC car, an RC mon­ster truck to be exact. It would roll past the side of the Black­bird and stop at the front. After sev­eral times doing this, Shia and Megan would then run and fol­low the RC truck along the plan to the front (Shia was hold­ing what I can only describe as a plas­tic spoon prob­a­bly stand­ing in for some­thing dig­i­tal later). When he got to the front he would hold it up to the nose of the plane.

Poten­tially big SPOILERS may be here in this next part, but the next bit filmed was John Tur­turro and that unknown actor in the green hoodie from yes­ter­day film­ing a scene fac­ing the front of the plane. After some flashes of light, Tur­turro freaks out and yells “Decep­ti­con! Get behind the MIG!”. So it’s offi­cial, the Black­bird is a Decep­ti­con, or at least that’s what the char­ac­ters think.

After that they took a long time set­ting up and film­ing the RC car rolling straight towards the nose of the plane and stop­ping. They then placed a two foot tall cutout of a robot (what the RC car will trans­form into) in its place and took some shots to get ref­er­ences for the FX team. And finally, they had the car roll towards the plane and stop, then Shia crawled into view and held up his “spoon” to the nose of the plane.

The last cou­ple of scenes I saw before the broke for lunch was a scene with Megan Fox. It was far away from where we were allowed to stand and I couldn’t hear any dia­logue but the tiny robot cut out was stand­ing off cam­era and she was look­ing down at it while talk­ing. And lastly, Shia stepped in the scene next to her and was yelling at some­one off cam­era (though again I couldn’t hear any dialogue).

Seib­ertron have posted images of three iden­ti­cally dressed motor­cy­clists, sex­ily made up in leather and boots. Some rumors sug­gest they are Megan Fox stunt dou­bles, which frankly sounds a lit­tle absurd.

The call sheets with the char­ac­ters labelled “Arcee Rid­ers”, give two of their names as Jessie Graff and Melissa Hartman.