"I think everybody likes the idea of taking something that you're familiar with and turning it into something that you're not as familiar with, like a 1 8- wheeler semi into Optimus Prime, and so that was the beginning." "I joined Hasbro in 2000, and the company was in some degree of difficulty." "So we were focusing back on our core brands and Transformers was one of those brands that we began to really rethink about." "And how do we reignite this brand or future generations?" "I was aware of the TV show." "I used to watch it with the kids, and I thought, "This is a movie waiting to come out" ""and be dusted off, and to be reinvented as a live- action experience." "I'm going to end your hunger once and for all!" "We were initially really resistant to the idea of doing it, because it's something that we had cared about as kids and that's always kind of a... lt's on the one hand, really exciting to take that challenge" "and, on the other hand, you go, "l don't want to screw this up." "The first thing that I sat down with the writers was an idea to make this a story about a boy and his car, because that's something everybody can relate to." "Bumblebee, head for the underground parking entrance." "Transformers were always about robots in disguise and "more than meets the eye." "And that "more than meets the eye" could mean more than just the robots." ""More than meets the eye" could mean something about the human characters." "But there were very few humans that we could draw from, so it meant coming up with characters that didn't exist before." "In the original cartoon there was a mechanic character who was kind of the basis for Sam." "We looked to movies like E. T. for the way that Elliott became the audience and how we were experiencing the wonder and the magic of E. T. coming to Earth." "Our first draft, actually, was just focused on the kids." "That's awesome!" "Steven Spielberg called me right when I was finishing The Island, and he said, "Like to do Transformers?" "and I'm like, "Okay." "All right, I'll think about it, hung up. "l'm not doing that movie." "That's what I said to myself." ""l'm not doing a toy movie." "I thought about it, and I went to Hasbro in Rhode lsland, and they put me through Transformers school." "This is the classic G1 Optimus Prime, very much like it was made in the '80s." "He had a very simple transformation." "Very easy to get from vehicle to robot." "We did the full pitch." "Robots are not all equal." "They're alive, they're sentient men." "They have feelings, they have allegiances." "You know, there's back- story, there's a conflict." "You know, that they are fleshed- out characters, and that we've had so many eras, and there's so much potential that they could pull from to make whatever kind of movie they wanted to make." "Something in Transformers just struck me when I was sitting there." "I said to myself, "lf you can make this really real and edgy." "And I saw a couple of images that were towards the direction they would like to take this, and I'm like, "That's really interesting." "So, I think, right then and there I was kind of sold on trying to make this idea work." "Michael Bay was born to direct Transformers." "He was the perfect fit for this concept." "I hired a team of probably about 25 artists, different people from different kinds of expertise and we were starting to design robots." "There was apparently a script, I hear it was way too kiddie." "No one wanted me to read it 'cause they thought I would quit right then and there." "Michael has incredible instincts about what will please an audience, and so as we were developing the script, we would run ideas by him." "We'd say, "What do you think about this?" "I knew I wanted to make it very credible and serious, and I told these guys I wanted to broaden it out and make it so that it had a little more global impact." "Much like Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "Richard Dreyfuss's story is clearly the centrepiece as Shia LaBeouf's story is the centrepiece of our movie." "But then we have two other groups of humans that we follow quite closely." "I kept putting in things of different action stuff that I saw, and what we'd do is that we'd sit down, we'd bat it around, and they see what I'm really liking and not liking." "Once he got into the rhythm of it, he started imagining these incredible sequences and a lot of what we ended up doing action- wise was very collaborative." "He is the sickest action director on the planet." "That is something that he is." "He's not Elia Kazan, and Mike'll tell you that." "Oh, that's funny." "Wasn't that funny?" "Robots there with a missile coming right down that street down there." "It's gonna hit that truck right there, the robots are holding it up." " Okay, roll cameras!" " Roll them out!" "Okay, speed!" " Ready?" " Ready?" " And..." " And..." "Four, three, two, one!" "Michael staged huge, logistically complicated scenes of massive destruction and explosions and even when I was watching those dailies without the actual Transformers there, it was just eye candy." "In this movie, Michael is the star, and Michael is so much fun." "We line everything up with the football." "Ready and hike!" "And three, two, one, bam!" " Does that work?" " Yeah." "That's perfect." "Three, two, one, and bam!" "Action!" "I think "Bayhem's" a good word if you're working with Michael." "I mean, we have to be prepared to go in any direction." "Fifteen over." "Cut!" "Might show up and say, "Today, I want to flip a car." "You have to be three steps ahead of Michael." "Smells good." "You hear on the walkie when I'm walking in, "Bay's coming in." ""He's coming in hot, he's coming in hot." "Here we go, ready?" "You know it's all wired 'cause I'm ready to go." "When I come in to the set, I want to start shooting." "Come on, on cameras!" "Let's go!" "He's got a tireless kind of energy, and I understood that that's how he gets into it, and then he's into it just like an actor getting into character." "Jim, lift him up again." "Do it again, do it again!" "Keep rolling." "Ready?" "Oh, God!" "Oh, God!" "Oh, God!" "Please don't kill me!" "Please!" "Keep moving up, moving up, moving up, moving up!" "Okay, okay, okay!" "Jim, lift him up again." "Do it again, do it again!" "Keep rolling." "Ready?" "Mike needs people who can accommodate his needs, and you need to be able to adapt." "You can't be the guy who's got the script notes and the ledger and..."No, I can't do that 'cause in the next scene I..." "You can't be that guy." "Michael will eat you alive." "This ain't gonna... lt ain't gonna..." "Trust me, I saw it. I'd sit under it." ""Trust me, I said." " Ready?" " Three, two, one, action!" "Cut!" "What he is, is he's very honest." "He's very blunt, he's very direct," " he's very opinionated." " Give me a shot, Dave." "And he has an amazing visual sense of film." "Yeah!" "He likes to use the megaphone once in a while." "Ready and rolling cameras!" "Three..." "Two..." "One..." "Stay there!" "Behind the car!" "No, you're going the wrong way!" "The other way, other way!" "God, he doesn't pay attention to what we're shooting." "The thing about it is, it's never personal." " Yeah, buddy." " Really?" "Here, Randy." "Watch." "I've worked with a crew, many of the same people, for 1 0, 1 5 years." "So they know my style, they know my pace." " Hey, Mike!" " Michael!" "You guys pulled that well." "I was, like, over here distracted." "There's a lot of success attached to what Michael does and a lot of careers have prospered by being part of the films with him, so he attracts a lot of actors." "How do you know you're getting a good shot?" "I've been doing this for a long time." "One of my producers, lan Bryce, said to me," ""You should get this kid Shia."" "And I said, "l thought he was older."" "So he came in and he actually looked like a 1 6- year- old." " Now, tell me what happened." " No, no, you said you'd pick me up, no questions asked." "I know that was the deal." "Pop, remember how Great- gramps pretty much flew over the cuckoo's nest?" "Do you think it could have been passed on to me like a mutant Witwicky gene?" "First, I was like, "Wow, I'm making a Transformers movie."" "It's insane, you know." "They're gonna mess that up completely." "Screw that up so bad." "But when I first sat there with Mike, it was never the discussion of," ""Let's talk about the robots."" "The first thing he wanted to talk about was," ""How do we make this real?"" ""How do we make these characters come across as honest?"" "Gentlemen." "Bobby Bolivia, like the country, except without the Hershey squirts." "How can I help you?" "My son here is looking to buy his first car." "What I like about Shia is he's the everyday dude but he's great at improve and he's got a great comic wit." "Nice, right?" "It fits me." "Shia's one of the funniest people, just naturally." "It's hard to get through scenes with him sometimes because he's so good at improv and he gets funnier and funnier as he goes." "I just didn't recognise you." "Yeah, well, I mean, that's understandable." "You know, I just got back from fat camp." "I lost, like, 80 pounds." "Oh, you know what?" "Good for you." " Yeah." " That's good for you." " Yeah, yeah, I learned a lot." " lt makes you a stronger person." " Yeah, physically and mentally." " Yeah." " And so..." " Did you make friends?" "Yeah, I mean some of them died 'cause diabetes is really chronic there, but I mean, like, there's three or four that I kept in contact with and they're really good people." "You know, 'cause fat people aren't bad people, and that's one of the main things they teach you there." "It's hard for me to try to not laugh 'cause I get in trouble 'cause we won't ever make it through a scene." "I just put the light in." "Most importantly, I think he can keep up with Bay." "Bay is constantly evolving the characters, is constantly throwing something different at you." "My first scene actually was with the dogs." "It was like, "Welcome to Michael Bay's set." "Release the hounds."" "You need to stay hidden until I tell you, okay?" "Yes, yes." "The trainer is worried about your ass." "But we are insured." "DreamWorks, through Paramount." "You know, it's your first day." ""Hey, welcome."" "And the whole crew's like, "Hey, nice to meet you,"" "and "Action," and you're running." "Dogs sort of get smart after a while." "And instead of stopping at camera, the dogs kept chasing Shia." "Don't chase him!" "Don't chase him!" "Fortunately, Shia ran past me about 30 miles an hour, and I was able to grab the long chain that was attached to the dog." "Thank God, Shia's a fast runner, all right?" "Because that thing wasn't stopping." "It was gonna clamp down on that poor kid's ankle, I'm telling you." "That would have been the end of me in this film." "It would have been the first day." "No, no, no, no!" "Bay talked about how hot Mikaela was gonna be." "We talked about finding, literally, the most gorgeous 1 8- year- old there is out there, which I think we did." " l think we did." " l think we did." "And action." "Oh, God, if Trent could just see me right now." "Yeah." "Wait, what?" "If Trent could..." "Trent." "Yeah, if Trent could see me right now." "This is crazy." "We interviewed a lot of different young women for this, and Megan, I don't know, I just liked her look, I liked that no one really knew about her." "I think Shia helped her out." "I think that energy between them, I think it kind of works." "I hope I didn't get you stranded or anything like that." "No, it's fine." "So, I was wondering if I could ride you home." "I mean, listen, I was headed this way, I figured, you know, I'd ask if you want a ride or not." " l'm just putting it out there." " All right, let's go again." "Yeah, don't say, "lt's fine." Just kind of a nod." "The only thing Mike asked me when I was reading with him and auditioning, he just asked me if I could run." "He's like, "Can you run?"" "I was like, "Yeah, I think so."" "And the other thing he asked me, he goes, "Do you have a nice stomach?"" "And I said, "Well, in my opinion, yes, I do."" "So I figured I'm gonna be running, hopefully not naked, but I'll be running in a belly shirt maybe." "Go!" "Megan did good." "With all the running and jumping and car skidding and everything else going on, I think Megan really hung in there." "And drop!" "Just from filming, I've put on, like, almost 1 0 pounds of muscle." "Hey, guys, give me a 30 pad right here." "Coming at 'em." "All right, we're off, and roll camera." "All right, here we go." "Look back..." "Here we go." "And cut!" "That's good." "That's good." "Let's go to lunch." " My wife on?" " Yes, Captain." " We needed a leading man." " Yeah." "We needed a leading man." "There were lots of great actors out there, but a leading man is very different from just a good actor, and Josh encompasses that." "I'm thinking I might win an Academy Award for this role." "No, I don't want a premium package!" "Come on!" "Go on!" "Fall back!" ""Best Screaming in a Movie."" "Lennox!" " Oh, water, thank you." " Give me chocolate." ""You got chocolate?" Say, "Give me chocolate."" "You got chocolate?" "I liked him as a person 'cause he was, like, very American, kind of no BS, kind of just a nice guy." "Colonel Moore offered me the opportunity to go up in a T- 38 today." "A lot of these military guys were very much like Josh, so I thought it worked really well." "Yeah, I'm with the top dog." "You'll be fine." "I had to go through about four or five hours of training and, you know, they basically tell you," ""Okay, this is what's gonna happen if you have to eject from a seat."" "I had to change shorts after I left training." "I get to fly in a T- 38 today" " Not too snug, but not too loose." " Okay." "Pull them tight." "And that snap rolls from bottom to top." "Take a breath and hold it, please." " There you go." " And that's how it sits." "I am happy if I get a chance to show what we in the Air Force can do and what great airmen we have." "It was one of the most exciting things I've ever done, and he let me actually fly it a little bit." "He was, like, "Okay, turn to 1 0 degrees, and we'll go down to 1 ,500 feet."" "I didn't throw up once." "Starneisha, Taneisha and Keisha." "You all laughing at my daughters' names?" "Yeah." "Damn, get me home." "All right, cut." "All right." "All right, good." "Tyrese, he paid me to be in this picture, so I took his money." "Michael Bay keeps everybody on edge, so we can all stay sharp and on top of our game." "'Cause he's on top of his game." "And, you know, if you don't step up, you get left by the wayside." "Ready?" "Action!" "Hello?" "Do you hear me?" "You hear me now?" "Hello?" "Hello?" "Hello?" "Hello?" "Hello?" "No, I got no bar!" "I got no bar!" "I had a little situation right before I started filming." "I just got sick, really sick, and I ended up missing, like, the first three days of filming." "So to get back on the set after all of the warnings and precautions my doctor hit me with and to be in Alamogordo was just crazy." "Hundred and twenty- some degrees, white sand bouncing the sun." "Bam, can't even look at the sand 'cause it was so bright." "Just hot." "Hot for no damn reason at all." " Cut." "All done?" " Mark it." " ls that good?" " Good." "I've always wanted to work with John Turturro and I'm really glad I did." "And I was intimidated the first day of working with him and I got on with him very well." "Rolling!" "Ready?" "And action." "Your son's the great- grandson of Captain Archibald Wickity, is he not?" "It's Witwicky." " Witwicky?" " Witwicky." "May I enter the premises, sir?" "Don't laugh!" "I've definitely been enjoying myself." "I feel like I've been able to be a little creative and imaginative." "Sometimes you don't get a chance in a really big film." "Get that thing to stop, huh?" "Looking at us." "Looking at us." "Get that thing to stop!" "I love working with Turturro." "He's a funny guy." "And he does phenomenal impressions of people in the business." "And he knows everyone." "He does a Scorsese imitation that'll just bring the house down." ""Every film he ever made was flashing through my mind." ""Silver Chalice, The Hustler, this, this or this." ""So, I'm out of my mind." "He's Paul Newman," he goes." ""How am I going to direct him?"" "She did it!" "She did it!" "She's the one you want!" "She's the criminal, okay?" "Okay, look, I'll wear a wire." "I'll turn state's evidence." " l'll do whatever you need me to do." " What?" "Glen!" "Hey!" "No, no, look, I'm not going to jail for you or for anybody!" "Michael will come in and tell us what he likes and what he wants conveyed and that." "Let's just try to have some fun with it." "Come on, come on, focus, Glen!" "Then the thing's going to whiz by." "Ready?" "And..." "What was that?" "Oh, I got a family history of heart trouble." "He gives us the freedom, and we have fun." "And Steven Spielberg was on set and said that he had been watching dailies." "Hello." ""Who wrote that?" l did." "I did, Steven." "You know. I didn't even charge you for it." "I'm gonna charge you on the next one though." " l'm Sam Witwicky." " Maggie." "Hi." " Did you say "Witwicky"?" " Yeah." "Both girls needed to be drop- dead gorgeous." "And there's gorgeous with the right persona, too." "In this film, I wear, like, six- inch stilettos." "And I have been running away from aliens, keeping up with John Turturro, Jon Voight, Anthony, the whole gang." "In heels, I might add." "I challenge Michael Bay to direct for one hour in those things." "Point it away from her just a little." " Rotate the gun." " Rotate the gun." "There you go." "Just, like, not too far." "Okay, ready?" "I'm kind of a pacifist, you know." "Like, I don't really like the whole action- movie- gun thing, I'm kind of very anti- weapon." "But, God, it was fun." " l'm a signals analyst!" " Then send a signal then!" "Come on, you punk!" "I love Jon Voight 'cause he's a great actor and he's a great guy to hang around with." "And he's just a passionate guy." "I like working with passionate people." " Okay, so I'm gonna do this here." " Yeah, yeah, yeah." "I'm gonna come in here, and then I'm gonna come in here." " Then I'll jump in and..." " Sure." "I'm a little old to be playing this kind of game with the kids, but I love the physicality." "There you go, and action!" " Get down!" " Down!" "Down!" "I do a roll and tuck, with a gun in my hand and, it's funny, everybody says, "Did you see what Jon did?"" "And I say, "Hey, fellows, I'm not gone yet, I'm still in the game here."" "Take that moment and make it a moment!" "NBE One chamber now!" "Jon Voight's fast!" "He outran me and he was in, like, penny loafer shoes." "I don't know how he did that." "I'm doing this documentary about Jon Voight." "There he is in all his glory." "There's the creature in his natural habitat." "The man's a legend." "Do a little wave, Jon?" "A little wave?" " Little wave." " Little wave for the camera?" "Would you be so kind?" "Both Johns." "You talk to both of them and..." "Geniuses, you know?" "The guys know how to do this." "Cut, cut, cut." "Thank you." "I've had a good relationship with the US military for many years, and I was dead set on getting the military to cooperate." "We went through basic training for three days at Fort Irwin just outside of Barstow." "Good morning, gentlemen!" "You have a set call with the Army." "Sweet." "is everybody happy?" "We took the guys out to the .50 calibre machine gun range, and some of the guys, I don't think, had ever even seen a weapon fire, and certainly had never fired one." "We were fortunate enough to let them observe the firing and we put them through a safety course." "Your round will get into place, you let it forward, and one shot at a time." "Gotcha." " Put the first link in like that." " Right." "Close the feature." "Yeah, pull it to the rear, then let go." "Let it go." "And then do it again." "All right, you're ready to rock and roll right now." " Good shot." " Nice." "All right." "In Vietnam, Carlos Hathcock once made a kill from just under two miles away with one of these." "He had a scope mounted on top." "He was a Marine Corps sniper." "Just under two miles, he made a shot." " Two miles away?" " Two miles away?" "Dead on." "The bullet will travel a maximum effective range of about 7,000..." " 200." " 7,200 yards." "They used to shoot down aeroplanes with these in World War ll." "Check this out." "This is my first one." "Two, three, four and then five." " All right." " l got better." "Of course, they were fed in the field." "They got to eat the MREs and they got real food, too, but they got a little taste of what the military's all about." " Heat up." " Gourmet." "MRE is a meal ready to eat." " The entree is the main meal." " l can't tell which one's the main meal." " Probably the one in the cardboard box." " Okay." "We're cooking and this is the MREs, which are surprisingly hot." "What the colonel explained to me is that it's basically like Drano." "But you don't eat the Drano." "And then if you get the opportunity to ever do this, it smells like garlic farts." "The chemical reaction smells like garlic farts." "And at first when I walked over there, I thought it was Tyrese." "So I'm really glad it's not 'cause we're gonna be working together for a long time." "It's all right." "I'll trade you my jalapeno cheese for your crackers and jelly." "Now, that's a good deal." "I'll take that deal." "Look at this, Chicken Cavatelli." "Tastes like Spago." " What we call PPE..." " Yeah." "PPE is our Personal Protective Equipment." "This right here is called lBA, the individual Body Armour." "This is the standard weapon that we use right here." "It's called a standard M4." "We're gonna be going over a formation you use before you enter a room." "So could we play any Rolling Stones?" "Paint it Black?" "We don't have any music in here." "We went to a mock Iraqi village." "A unit was getting ready to deploy to Iraq, and we spent the afternoon with them seeing what they do to prepare." "They teach you how to stack and go into a room and clear the whole room." "Gotta get into some of this." "You know, that's what...say." "You're looking out this way, you're looking out this way." "And until they start to move, since you're the last man of the stack, you turn around." "All right." "Contact." "You want to meet them, all right?" "That way everybody knows they're all touched up." "Here." "All right, hold on." "Stop." "When you're coming in, just like this, all right?" " You're trying to jump." " Did I do this?" " Yeah, you did it." "You did a little hop." " l did, didn't I?" "All right?" "You come in." "Clear." "I did a little hop." "Does that feel more smooth for you, guys?" " Yeah, it does." " Better." " All right, I mean, 'cause that..." " Felt sexy." "Bullets travel down the wall six to eight inches, all right?" "If a bullet hits right here and it's travelling down the wall, due to the spiral of the round, it will travel down that wall six to eight inches." "So you wanna keep your ass off the wall six to eight inches, all right?" "Mother..." "I wish you would!" "Try me!" "All right, you scan the windows here, you scan the door." "Windows, door, windows, door." "Scan." "Scan." "Freeze!" "Nobody move!" " Status!" "One up!" " Two up!" "Three up!" " Four up!" " All clear!" "We worked our ass off, and sometimes between breaks, we would go, "Where's Tyrese?"" "He was in the van." "Air- conditioning." "Hurry up!" "Everybody is leaving you!" "People are dying!" "You are killing them!" "You really walked away with a respect for the amount of preparation that goes into being a soldier in the military." "Right over here." "Great." "Awesome." "Today is gonna be all about an insertion into this village, okay?" "I get involved in the training phase of the actors and making sure those guys at least are comfortable- looking." "Move!" "SAW gunner, you are no good to us back here!" "You must be up front!" "We wound up recruiting a bunch of active- duty SEALs." "So, they're current in their tactical capabilities." " See how my weapon is up here..." " Yeah." "...in front of my face?" "It's what we call "the bubble." Okay?" "I'm gonna have control of my weapon." "I can see my magazine well." " Okay?" " Yeah." "My weapon up here like this." "I can still track my targets, whatever." "It also acts as a bit of a shield, too, you know." "Shut up." "Michael really wants to bring as much military realism into the movie as possible." "A big part of that is to use military people to play military people." "Yeah." "The entire crew got speaking roles." "Michael liked them and wanted to change the scene on the spot." "We approved it, and they got speaking roles out of it." "Okay, let's send the AA- 1 0s." "Danger close situation, and make sure there's friendlies in the area within one kilometre." "Checking Switch One" " One to Hawk One" " One to strike." "The extras that we used from Holloman Air Base were off- duty, and they were paid extra's salaries." "The United States Air Force and Marines and Army." "Everybody." "I love you all dearly." "I'm so proud of what you're doing for us." "It's unbelievable." "Okay?" "Both here and over there." "So just keep it up 'cause you're well- loved and you gotta know that." "Typically, an extra would not have any experience with a weapon." "These guys are very experienced with weapons." "Mark." "Cut that!" "Cut that!" "I think I'm gonna open you up more." "Just go to your right." "Go to your right, right over there." "Probably had, like, 200 military and about 50 stunt people running and scattering, firing and being chased by tumbling vehicles that were on cables." "Ultimately, zero is our key sweet spot." "Zero." "When I give you a "five, four," my guys will start firing and moving." "Right, I got you." "Five, four, three..." "Four, three..." "That was good." "Good job, guys!" "Even though it wasn't a real explosion, it certainly created the effect." "And, trust me, as a professional who knows all about blowing things up for real, we appreciate anything like this." "I like shooting stuff real on set." "It seems to be a dying art." "We put actors in situations where we know it's so safe, but it looks very dangerous." "We're good?" "Okay." "Weapon is hot!" "Full loads." "Everybody, here we go now!" "Take two." "Fire in the hole." "Guys, lock it up, clear it out!" "Ready and let's roll camera." "Rolling!" "Ready?" "And three, two, one, action!" "Action!" "It was good." "I think we can do better." "We try to put the audience inside the action, and the closer we get to it and the more movies we've done together, the more that we capture that for the audience." "I told Shia, "You know, you better get in shape for this."" "I was at 1 30 when I got the role, and it wasn't like I pulled a Christian Bale and completely transformed, but I put on 25 pounds of muscle and then slimmed down throughout the filming." "So, it's not reassuring that they put bulletproof safety on the camera when you're gonna be right in front of it." "And right there also, you see?" "Stop right there!" "They make sure they protect the cameras, but actors, expendable." "We had this scene where he's facing off against Megatron." "is it fear or courage that compels you, fleshling?" "And the producer, lan Bryce, he knows how I like physical stuff, and he says, "So we're gonna do that blue screen, right?"" "I said, "No, we're doing that real."" "He said, "Really?" "Really?" l said, "Yeah, we're gonna put him out there."" "They can build Optimus Prime, they can blow up the Pentagon, but they can't find a way to keep Shia off the ledge." "Right, Michael Bay?" "All right, ready?" "Yeah, well, since we locate." "I gotta tell you, it's scary going out there, 'cause you literally have no safety net and you just have these silly wires hanging on your hip." "And, mind you, I would never do this myself ever, okay?" "You're locked in, you can't fall." "See that?" "You're bolted to a steel I- beam and another pole." "What I could is I could fall and scrape off the side, then you'd have to pull me up." "That could happen." "I'm not gonna die, obviously, but I could get scraped." "You know, this is Fear Factor." "That's all it is. lt's Fear Factor." "It's Fear Factor." "People don't die on Fear Factor." "It's another episode of Fear Factor." "They do more hairier stuff on Fear Factor than this." " You're right, you're right, you're right." " All right, let's do it." "Oh, mother..." "Got it?" "Jenny, bring him around this way, too." "Come way out towards the other way, towards us, towards us." "Get the crane." "The crane." "Ready?" "Roll camera." "Ready?" "And action shot." "Wide movements." "You're not gonna get it!" "You're never gonna get this AllSpark, you know that!" "I'm never gonna give you the AllSpark!" "I feel like a fruitcake saying that, Mike. it's a..." "line." "Now you can see the robot in the sight." "Get the robot in the background." "Oh, no, no, no, no." "Okay." " Mike?" " Yeah?" "Are these just close- ups?" "No, they're wide." "We see your face." "We see your face and we're showing that it's you." "And we're showing that it's not a platform." "If it was just close- ups, we could do that anywhere." "That's lame." "Oh, no, no, no, no." "Okay." " l'm done, Mike." "My voice is going." " Okay, that's good." " Shia's good." "He's a good kid." " He's great, got a lot of heart." "Are you gonna back up?" "90% of the actors in this business could not do what we did on this film." "They just wouldn't do it, you know?" "There's action stars who don't get up on the roof and do what we do." "Oh, no, no, no, no." "Now!" "Transformers!" "I fight giant robots." " Way high, way too high." " Okay, a little high." "...deep breath of this toxic smoke." "I'll be right there." "The location department on this movie has really excelled." "I'm gonna say, "And fire." Okay, guys?" "You can hear me, right?" "And it required pretty extraordinary sized things, whether it's White Sands..." "Fire!" "Orange smoke, orange smoke, orange smoke!" "...or the Hoover Dam..." "We're gonna shoot something quick, then we're gonna go to lunch, and then we are going to go downstairs." "...or downtown L.A." "We finally saw what a 32- foot robot looked against a two- storey house." "Suddenly, you realise you've gotta find places that are enormous to make these things feel part of the environment." "Look, I escaped!" "We can't leave the trucks on the road." "That's what I'm led to believe." " What?" " On the side of the road." " Make room." " Because..." "Behind the dunes, so we can't see him, there's gonna be a mini base camp down there." "Yeah, we're working on that right now just to find out how we can make it firm enough." "It's a work in progress." "Every day is a rollercoaster for me." "I don't know if it's the same for every department, but, you know, I find myself on the verge of tears one minute and then hysterical laughter the next." "lit, a new guy I worked with. I thought I was gonna give the guy a heart attack." " l have a question." " Yeah?" "He says, "l can't get the observatory." ""lt hasn't been shot in five years." And I said, "lt's a big movie." ""You can do it." "Go to the Mayor's office." "You can do it."" "This is the path." "See right in there?" "This is where he's running, and the Black Hawk's gonna come right up on that edge there." "Leaving..." "Can we leave the helicopter running there?" " Like at Playa?" " Yeah, it should be okay." ""l can't get the bridge with four helicopters underneath."" "I said, "You could do it." "Go to the Mayor's office." ""lt's a big movie." "We're keeping this film down in California."" "We structured the budget in order to keep it in the United States, which is not to say that the movie couldn't be made elsewhere." "It's just, I think, easier and more comfortable for Michael to have, you know, a crew around that he's used to." " Hey, Dave!" " Yeah." "I think we'll let them fire this way so you can whip..." "You guys, hand- held, you're gonna be kind of like in here, lift it like..." "You know what I'm saying?" "I actually cut my fee so that I can shoot here with my crew that knows how to shoot fast and is good on the fly." "As soon as the plane hits the ground and it stops, we should pull the vehicles forward." "Michael likes to go hard and fast." "He has the shock and awe approach to scouting, which is supposed to be..." "Oh, no, that's not Michael, that's a Stealth Bomber." " Morning, Michael." " Hi, Jack." "So, Holloman Air Force Base is an extremely secure base with a great deal of secret goings on." "Yeah, yeah, I mean, this morning, you know, we had a guy with an M1 6 protecting the AWACS because even though they know that they're here for us, they're still very protective of their aircraft." "Slow- mo three to one, okay?" "If the American military is called on, they will fight enemies abroad or even alien robots, if need be." "You don't want scrub brush by it, you know, tumbleweed, whatever, okay?" "I can show you how to get some better shots." "What's that little..." "Driving into the centre of White Sands, which is 300 miles... lt's not literally sand, it's a crystal." "To see that for miles and miles..." "There's no other place like that on Earth." "White Sands missile range was created for the atomic missile tests in the '40s, and we had to make sure that there was no chance of somebody literally stepping on a landmine." "So we had to engage the services of a unexploded ordnance company to mine- sweep to a depth of four feet so that we could build our Bedouin village and then, ironically, blow it up." "When we got here and laid out the buildings, we realised that the dunes were moving." "So the valley was actually significantly smaller, up to 30 feet, because of the wind." "Very hot." "We had days, 1 1 5, 1 1 8 degrees." "That's the max so far." "It could get hotter." "That's compounded by the fact that the sand there is really just white quartz that's washed off of the surrounding mountains and it just reflected like glass." "God!" "Hot!" "I'm from Puerto Rico, so when I was told," ""Careful, New Mexico is pretty hot"..." "Oh, yeah!" "...I go, "l'm from Puerto Rico." "How hot can it get?"" "It's hot." "Almost had heat stroke yesterday." "That's kind of wild." "It was hard, 'cause they had a lot of gear." "Go!" "Go!" "Go!" "Go!" "And running and yelling and shooting." "'Cause on my sets it's like..." "Especially if you're doing military stuff, it's tough." "I'm not, like, a very cushy director in terms of if we're here, we're here, 'cause I shoot really fast." "Men did huge work here, bigger than anything I ever seen Hollywood ever do or ever will." "Look at these cranes up here." "We're heading from the top of Hoover Dam down into the turbine area where it's very, very cool." "When you see it you have no idea how big it is." "Hoover Dam is just massive." "We had to do some sort of remedial work because a film that shot there last year didn't endear themselves to the Hoover Dam by buzzing the dam." "It's a grave situation, gentlemen." "Thank you for being with us." "Cut." "Good." "Do it again." " That's okay, leave it." " Ready?" "Shoot it like that, huh, Mitch?" "Off camera!" "They really weren't into it at all, especially, you know, given Michael's penchant for blowing things up." "So we, you know, worked out with the Hoover Dam." "We'd get certain hours early in the morning where we could be up on the top of the dam." " Got to use the cam roller." " Okay." "Okay, here we go." "Okay, we're going down to time it." "Take those ramps down with us." " Push." "Push." " Come on, you and me right here." "And then as soon as the crowds came, around 1 0:00, we had to then go inside or down below." "So we just scheduled our way around it, and it actually worked out fine." " Both of you guys go on this side." " Give me 20." " Where's John?" " You're not puking, are you?" "The scale of the Hoover Dam was a tall order." "There's not many places you could do that because everything there is so gigantic." "I think we became very familiar with the architecture, which allowed us to build a set that tied in to it." "And action!" "What is this?" "When I looked at this Megatron hangar, this illustration, I'm like, "That's the vibe of the movie right there."" "And it's amazing if one or two illustrations can just set the vibe." "We used the Playa hangars where Howard Hughes built the Spruce Goose, and it's this great wood structure." "It's kind of narrow, but it's very tall ceilings." "You're able to build a lot of different sets so you can go back and forth, you know, in this kind of huge space, but it's kind of separated, and it's a great place to film." "Basically, we were sort of using the structure as it was and then embellishing and sort of making it look like a vintage facility again in a subterranean setting under Hoover Dam where Megatron was frozen in ice." "Even though Megatron had bee encapsulated in this space for many, many years, he's still being maintained, so it was a little bit of, like, new technology mixed with old technology, very much like Hoover Dam is." "When you go in, there are things that have never changed in there." "The first time I walked onto the Megatron set, I said, "Wow."" " Megatron." " l had my son with me that day." "When he saw Megatron up there, his jaw just dropped." "I was so impressed with it that on my weekends I would sneak onto the set with my friends just to see it." "You know, he was 30, 35 feet and he was only half built." "Like, I'd bring three or four friends, and be like," ""You're never gonna believe what they just built."" "I never do that. I mean, I never do that." "This baby is the first we found!" "And good, cut!" "You want just to lay that so you can watch?" " No, no, no, no." "Right." " Okay." "So I just do it but just louder and more off the cuff." ""This baby is the first we found." Boom and get out of here." "Okay, ready." "Here we go, guys." "Ready and five, four, three, two..." "The day that I saw that set, I suddenly went," ""Oh, Lord, this film is gonna be everywhere."" "That was the first day that it dawned on me that I was shooting a really big American film." "I had to shoot in Los Angeles." "Now, Los Angeles, they'd give us four blocks one Saturday, they'd give us three blocks this Sunday, they'd give us those other four next weekend from there." "And then we shot at Universal backlot, and then I shot in Detroit, and I had to all make it feel like it's one place." "So you had to keep the scene in your head." "I mean, you just had to wrap your head around it." "Downtown L.A. is a venue for this kind of action stuff." "We'll go on five, four, three, two, one." "Blow up." "Go hot, please." "Go hot." "Here we go!" "He's right up by this building right here." "Ready, and he's right on top of you." "Go in three, two, one, action!" "Here we go." "Here we go." "Piece of crap." "Ready and roll cameras." " Rolling." " Hey, Rick, fire in the hole." "Let's go, guys." "Don't move too soon." "Ready?" "And three, two, one and action." "Not yet." "Up, up, up." "Hey, can you take that light right out there and light that thing up there?" "The toughest bit was flying the helicopters under the bridges," "for lots of reasons, not least of which is the Homeland Security thing." "If you fly helicopters under 500 feet, then the FAA makes you jump through a lot of hoops because of the, you know, the potential for crashing into neighbours." "What are you doing?" "We are..." "We're getting pissed on for the next three days." "You know, the helicopters flying low kick up all the water from the L.A. River." "Nobody knows exactly where that water is coming from." "You see all this water right here on the floor?" "It's all man piss, okay?" "And what happens is a science thing." "When you put helicopters over a puddle of man piss, man piss gets all over your man body." "Please, stop!" "So we all had goggles and face masks on so you don't breathe it or taste it." "Just piss all on my face, on all my features, piss on my arms, piss all over my own piss. lt's just nasty." " Right, Beaver?" " Oh, yeah." "It's been a location- heavy movie." "It's been a great challenge, and it's funny how, you know, the rose- tinted glasses effect applies." "I remember, I've been on other shows where l finished, I thought, "God!" "Thank God that's over."" "But as time goes by, you sort of somehow mentally edit out the bad bits and you remember the times when there were bombers flying over your head or just being out in the sand dunes late in the afternoon in the beautiful, sort of, evening light." "Well, the appeal of this movie, you know, goes back to my children's childhoods." "Because they would ask for these things on their birthdays and I would get them Transformer toys and then we would play on the floor." "And I remember my own experience with Transformer toys, how much fun it was for me." "And so this was a shared experience." "Transformers really gets its start in Japan with Takara." "And it was a series of robot toys that transformed and that's all they really were." "A couple of Hasbro executives went to Japan and saw this great idea and thought that there was something there." "And decided that this would be a really cool concept if we could wrap a story around it." "In Japan there was no good guy, bad guy." "They didn't have home planet, they didn't have personalities or stories." "So that came from those meetings in Hasbro." "And the characters that are weapons, or gear, let's make them the bad guys." "All the rolling characters, let's make them the good guys." "The name Autobots, Decepticons, came out of that." "After that, we started with the animation company." "Transformers came out in '84." "And we weren't quite into girls yet, I don't think." "So it was get home from school, Transformers, glass of milk, brownie, whatever, you know, your snack..." "I don't know what your snack was." "Not a glass of milk and a brownie." "But we saw it right when it came out." "Many millions of years ago, on the planet Cybertron, life existed." "But not life as we know it today." "Intelligent robots that could think and feel inhabited the cities." "They were called Autobots and Decepticons." "At the time, there had been new legislation that kind of opened up toy- related animation." "Decepticon rule, forever!" "So it was one of the first shows that what you saw as a toy was in the show." "Transformers has a passionate fan base." " Who is the biggest Transformer fan?" " Me." " Transformers..." " More than meets the eye" "A lot of people remember Transformers from the '80s which was when it was in its heyday, but it's actually been around ever since." "And since 1 984," "Transformers has generated over $3 billion in retail sales and that's, you know, one of the top franchises in history." "I have more than 1 ,000 Transformer at my house, fan since I was a kid." "I think it's just the mythos, I think that's what really got me into it after I was a kid watching the cartoon." "Strong characters and just a very cool toy line to support it." "I'm a pretty big fan. I got my first toy when I was two years old." "The first Transformer toy, I still have it." "About 75% of all adult men had had a major Transformers experience in their lives." "And that's true almost the world over." "So we've got this great group of people who all grew up with the brand and are now working on the creation of Transformers, the movie." "If it meant something to you as a kid and you had an emotional response to it, that's valuable and that needs to be heard, period." "So we kind of come at it from that place." "I was a fan, I mean, from..." "My childhood was Yogi Bear and the Transformers movie." "It's over, Prime." "Was I die- hard, like "G1 all the way," and..." "like these people on Ain't lt Cool News?" "No." "Do I have a Transformers tattoo on my body, somewhere?" "Probably not." "Was I a fan?" "Extremely." "I did a lot of research, a lot of studying on it in the past year and a half." "So that would make me definitely a Transformer head geek somehow." "From the very beginning, we knew we had fans following this." "From the first time that a piece of art got out to the fact that Michael Bay's computer was hacked and the script got up online." "So, I must say, so in fear of one of you guys stealing my computer to find out the real robot names." "I decided that it'd be better to tell you, this week or next week, the true names." "Okay?" "Because I like my computer." "It's got a lot of other secret...on it as well." "You could keep nothing secret on this movie." "And the designs started getting out on the Internet." "And people were saying," ""Oh, Michael Bay, you wrecked my childhood." "Damn you, Michael Bay."" "Like most Transformers fans, when I first saw the designs in the movie, I was, like, "What?" "They changed everything!" ""lt's completely different." "What's going on here?"" "I think a lot of the fans hated me for it at first." "After I read some of the posts that said they wanted to protest out of my office." "They actually picked the wrong office because I had moved." "They didn't know my real address, so..." "And then the few little talk- backs where they said they want to hunt me down and kill me." "I had, you know, I had a couple of those." "But generally, you know, I would take some of the constructive criticism of stuff they saw." "I actually changed Megatron's face when they opposed to it that much." "It was very important to get our teaser out there." "That was, like, more of a badass teaser to show that it's real, not a cartoon." "That teaser on Yahoo was the most downloaded teaser ever." "That's crazy." "So all of a sudden they see the head piece." "They're all like "Oh, wow...okay." "That's starting to look really cool."" "You have to totally respect what's been created and you can't deviate." "And I knew, if I were to put these characters in the real world, they'd have to fit in the real world and they'd have to be much more intricate." "We had kind of come to terms with the fact that we respectfully acknowledged what had come before." "But, you know, there was a lot of logic that I had a problem with." "On Cybertron, I mean, they all walked around like, with truck parts, you know, transform." "And that just doesn't fly when you're trying to at least make it credible for someone who's never seen Transformers." "So, on Cybertron, they have to have, well, I created all of them having this endoskeleton, this underskin." "Their technology, that is beyond our understanding, based on kind of a nano- molecular process, you know." "Each molecule, each cell, is a machine unto itself." "So when they come to Earth, they come in these weird pods." "It's the endoskeleton wrapped up." "They land, they unfurl." "And the notion is that when they arrive here, in order to truly just to exist on this planet in disguise, that they have the capacity to basically find a vehicle and replicate that vehicle based on their mass." "Alex and I decided we were going to try to avoid mass shifting, as we call it in the fandom." "When Optimus Prime transforms from a truck into a robot, you want it to feel like the same- sized truck is pulling into that same- sized robot." "And that there's no cheating going on." "Hasbro helped us select some of the robots." "And clearly we wanted that core cast of characters that people had known and loved." "And that's why we kept talking about it as a G1 - inspired story." "G1 is a fan term for generation one." "So when people think back fondly on the '80s nostalgia, gen one is what comes to mind." "The characters that we knew had to be in the movie without a doubt were, on the Autobot side, Optimus, Bumblebee..." " Jazz." " Jazz and Ironhide." "And on the Decepticon side it had to be Megatron, Starscream." "And we knew we had to have someone kind of related to Soundwave." "Frenzy's in there as kind of a representative of that." "I actually wanted more robots than we had, but it just ultimately got too expensive." "Actually, a few characters that we had contemplated that we'd design product for." "We had a character here, Arcee, who is one of the only female robots in the Transformers lore." "And she actually almost made it into the movie but for some reason, they couldn't quite get the plotline correct." "So maybe we'll see her in future movies to come." "Hasbro wanted to see what we came up with." "You know, they kind of left us completely alone for a long time." "They were really kind of, you know, let me do my thing." "You know, and where l veered off, like with Optimus we had to make the ears just a little bit bigger to get a little more of the samurai look." "If you think about where Transformers came from, the robot culture of Japan is in part based on the tradition of samurai armour." "We had some serious, I guess, Transformer..." "Just total head geeks that have been, you know, know the lore backwards and forwards that we would vet this stuff through." "Early on, the art department was working on for Optimus, you can see that he was a lot more blue." "And even the vehicle parts were kind of disappearing, particularly the tyres were uncoiling." "And those were just things that were gonna become issues for us to make product of." "One of the things that Transformers is not, is morphing." "They are transforming." "So pieces have to go somewhere." "On the product side, with real plastic, my team has physics to contend with." "That did present kind of a design challenge that we threw back to the production team." "And they realised that and I think we got to a happy place for everybody." "Autobots, transform." "Roll out." "Peter Cullen did the original voice and still has a great voice." "And then this one, give it a little bit more of a..." "You know." " "Take it easy, lronhide."" " Okay." "When Peter Cullen was announced as the voice of Optimus I thought it was fantastic." "I thought it was awesome." "And I thought it was the most unexpected nod to the fans." "And I think it showed a respect for how much that voice defined the character." "They deserve to choose for themselves." "Then you will die with them!" "When I was looking at faces, I said, I want Megatron to have an attitude like a Hugo Weaving." "You still fight for the weak." "Frank Welker, I kept putting his voice, cartoon voice to our gigantic Megatron and it just didn't fit." "You fool, Starscream." "You fool, Starscream." "You fail me yet again, Starscream." " Okay." " Thanks a lot, you did a great job." " Thank you, Michael." " l appreciate you doing this." "That was a pleasure." "Enjoy yourself." " Thanks." " Thank you." "The life- scale Bumblebee was only meant to be just kind of a see it for pieces, you know." "It really can't hold up to the detail of going up close." "What they'll do is they make that robot in the computer." "Then they give us that computer file and we'll make that part." "This piece is called the Bumblebee." "It supposedly transforms from a 2008 Camaro into this robot here." "How it's gonna do that, I have no idea." "There's 1 50 single parts on that robot." "The whole robot was sculptured out of foam." "We took moulds off of them, made fibreglass parts." "And when it stands up, it's actually about 1 8 feet tall." "That's too far, huh?" " Too far?" " So we'll cut." "Put this away and get it done." "A clincher will probably hold that." "This thing cost $75,000 to paint." "He required a special four- layer paint 'cause it matches the car." "Me and Bumblebee are starting to get to be real close." "When we got near the robot it was just like, "No way!"" "And you start walking, you're getting closer and closer and you start seeing the body and the torso and the head and it's just nuts. lt was nuts." "Silence." "The robot can't move on camera, but we can position it in any position that Michael needs them and so it's a really good guide for them." "I'll bring you your Bumblebee airbags for movie." " A camera, marker." " Scene one." " And action." " Action!" "No, no, no." "Stop, stop!" "My favourite Transformer is Bumblebee." "Always been Bumblebee." "My favourite Transformer now, I think, is Starscream." "Megatron is dead." "The humans have taken it." "I think lronhide is probably my favourite." "Stand back." "You feeling lucky?" "I like Optimus Prime." "What do we got here?" "What is it?" "We got a truck." "What character?" "This is Optimus Prime here, baby." "Good- looking truck." "As a kid growing up, I was into fixing my own cars and taking them apart." "So from cars and just being an automotive head," "Transformers, it just struck me as something fun to work on." "Watch out, get out of the way, I'm rolling cameras." "Ready and ammo guy, go." "Ready and seven, Tammy." "Michael Bay does know his cars." "He's pretty particular about the cars he wants." "He knows a lot more about cars than I do." "Not too fast." "We started last September, October, having meetings with Michael, trying to figure out what the Autobots would be, what vehicles we would use." "And we downloaded every picture of every car that was available." "We started addressing the major car companies." "When you're making a movie for 1 45 million, which sounds like a lot of money, it was tough to fit this movie in that box." "And you couldn't afford to do this movie without a sponsorship, and nobody can come up with what GM has." "For us, it is about the sexiness of their cars." "I went to GM and I got into their Skunkworks there." "It's a place, I can't tell you where it is but that's where they make their stealthy concept cars." "But I saw this car, and they didn't know what kind of car it was going to be." "But now it's a Camaro." "And what I liked about it, it kind of had a retro look, it was a muscle car and just, right then and there I knew it was Bumblebee." "Bumblebee was, in the '80s, a Volkswagen Bug." "And his role has always been the younger of the Autobots." "We knew that he was originally a Volkswagen and a Beetle." "But it was not really an option for Michael because it wasn't badass enough." "I just was never going to use the Volkswagen Bug for Bumblebee." "It just wasn't going to be in my cars." "It reminded me of Herbie The Love Bug." "But we do make nod to it in the movie because if you notice, in the parking lot, the Camaro's parked next to a Bug." "This is a classic engine right here." "I sold a car the other day..." "Oh, my God." "Bumblebee, we said, "As long as he's yellow" ""let's find some cues that will hearken back to what people remember," ""but let's not have that be as far as you can go."" "I think the old Camaro was really cool and, you know, it's a nice beater car." "The quintessential Camaro is the '69." "There's been a million of them hot- rodded." "So I wanted to find the cheesiest version of the Camaro that'd be perfect for this kid's first car." "He didn't have any money." "He would never go out and be able to afford a '69." "This is a Camaro, a 1 977 Camaro." "Nobody wanted them, nobody needs them, they're hard to find." "This one was pulled out of Palmdale, the other two were pulled out of Oklahoma." "We're gonna redo them, repaint them, new engines, everything redone, so that Kenny Bates can drive the heck out of them through his stunts." "So this was the perfect dichotomy for the new Camaro when he re- scans." "Why does he transform back into this piece- of- crap Camaro?" "That Camaro is really spectacular." "I wish they would bring it out earlier than they are." "There were only two Camaros that were hand- built by GM." "To fix that car is a big deal." "If you smash a fender, you just don't get another Bumblebee fender 'cause there aren't any." "All the parts were individually made." "It's a three- stage paint." "If you get a ding in the door you have to paint the whole door." "Pretty trick door latch." "No indent, no recessed area." "Everything's slick." "I mean, it's a $500,000 car." "So it's not like, "Hey, have..." "Go around the..." You know." "Didn't happen like that." "It's, "Wipe your feet off before you get into the car."" ""Keep your hands on the steering wheel."" "You push down at a certain rate." "You want me to go faster?" "I'm just nervous about the car." "I can go faster if you want." "You are not a stunt driver, okay?" "This is where we were parked, originally." " You can say everything you want." " Michael, oh, my goodness gracious!" " Let's go, come on." " All right, right here, in the centre." "If I crash into the wall, it's not my fault, because I'm an actor." "It should be like this, the transformation, one, two, three." "Okay?" "Hey, guys, transforming on three." "I'm gonna go, "One, two, three." Okay?" " Ready?" " Yeah, Michael." "Ready." "Three, two, one, go!" "Jazz is a character that was always a sports car." "Now he's not a Porsche 91 1 any more, he's a Pontiac Solstice, but he's still a cool sport car." "We had a little company do some aftermarket." "We made a hard top for it." "We put the little ground effects, fairings." "We put a little spoiler on the back and some louvers on the hood." "And we kind of just jazzed it up a little bit." "Ratchet, in the '80s, was an ambulance." "But it was more of a van- shaped ambulance." "It was more of a Japanese version of what an ambulance is." "Ratchet was the H2- based ambulance which doesn't exist." "So we designed and built it from scratch." "We started with a stock GM H2 Hummer which we gutted and took all of the existing components from the rear apart." "And then we're building the cages that will be sheeted to look as the search- and- rescue vehicle should." "Also applying all of the roll bars, roll cages, the heavy- duty bumpers to give it that beefy look, wheel and tyre packages, and the accessories that will fall in line with a search- and- rescue vehicle." "Ironhide was this big 4500 Series GMC." "They're brand new, they just came out, and they gave us three of them." "We got them from the factory, black." "I made that tailgate that had that Autobot logo embossed into it, added the stacks, and all the running board, and modified the bumpers and stuff." "That truck, unless you're standing next to it, you have no idea." "It's so big, it's crazy. lt's like the biggest thing you ever saw." "There's Optimus." "I saw a picture of a truck and it was lowered and it was blue and it had flames on it." "And I'm like, "That's Optimus Prime."" "With Optimus, literally, we got every car book, every car picture, I mean, it was just all over the walls." "We looked at the cartoon, thank you very much." "And then we just started pulling references of different big rigs." "Because this is what we were always..." "Everybody in this department was conceptualising how Optimus is masked, what he came out of." "This is the main dude." " We should go look at it." " Okay." "Instead of buying a new truck that's a $1 50,000 truck, we bought some older trucks, and they were pretty beat up and they were pretty ugly- looking." "I mean, this is like a redo." " You know what I mean, lan?" " Yeah." "How are they ever going to make this thing look like that?" "I said, "Just trust me." "This is the truck that should be Optimus Prime." ""Not a new truck." "This is the one."" "So we're gonna completely strip it, paint it, flame job." "New fenders, new sleeper, new bumpers, lights..." "And when it comes out, it will be beautiful." "There's been some debate about some of the changes that were made." "The flames on the side of the car and the fact that it's a long- nosed" " instead of a flat- nosed truck." " l like the flames." "And what the flames did when he was transformed, it kind of looked like ribs and to me it looked cool." "One of the things I've learnt is red doesn't photograph well for the feature films, the light being what it is, and it's a nightmare." "Michael Bay was nice enough to explain that to me." "So we made this compromise where we wanted a red chest, and we did that by the flames, so that we could still retain the essence of Optimus being a red truck while still making it easy to shoot." "Just a much more aggressive- looking truck, it's more Duel, more of an homage to Steven, looks better on a wide angle when it extends back. lt's just more of a badass- looking thing" "than a flat- fronted trash truck." "And again, it goes back to that thing of when you actually see it, and you see what's required of the transformations and the level of detail, we weren't going to be able to have as exciting a transformation with the flat nose." "Okay guys, let's stop admiring the truck." "Let's shoot, shall we?" "Let's set up for this, please, back to one, Jerry." "This movie, I had more cooperation from GM than any movie I've ever made." "They promised us they'd give us the flood- damaged cars, the non- saleable cars, the cars that Michael Bay needs to wreck every day on a daily basis for his food chain." "...four, three, two, one." "We burnt, crashed," "flipped..." "Three, two, one, fire!" "...probably close to 200 cars." "We had 30 or 40 cars sent to the shop and stripped the engines and transmissions out and put the pick points on them and the plates on them for us to flip and throw." "And we'd do that all on the day wherever X marks the spot." "We have this catapult and we'd just run a cable off, hook it up to the car and then with the use of high- pressure nitrogen we can fire..." "It's the same way, a plane is launched from an aircraft carrier." "We do the exact same thing, only on a smaller scale." "And it's all portable." "We'll take that anywhere on the set" "Michael wants to go and we'll launch cars." "It's screaming everywhere, it's screaming." "Ready, and roll cameras." "Ready and three, two, one, action!" "Screaming!" "Don't go in the building!" "Thank you very much." "No one does car chases better than Michael." "I mean, they're incredible." "They're at Mach three and you feel like you're right in the middle of them." "One of my shooting styles is using this little go- cart thing." "Where it goes very fast, like 1 00 miles an hour and it's a very small vibrating camera that's real low to the ground." "Looks like a suicide vehicle." "And we use that for anything from running down the street to chasing cars." "It's a very powerful tool for getting in and around and close to the action." "We use it quite a bit." " l'm scared." " Fun, huh?" " All right, let's not clip it, now." " Thank you." "Play that back again." "It's pretty crazy being in the go- cart because you're responding quick." "And any mistake and you could be in a lot of trouble." "Five, four, three, two, one." "I'll tell you, I'm never gonna be doing another highway chase again, because I've now done highway chases till the cows come home." "I want it to transform right under the on ramp." "All right?" "So the next on ramp is where we're gonna start the transformation." " Okay." " The highway chase is huge." "I mean, we have tumbling cars, we have crashing cars, we've got cars upside down hitting cars, we've got scraping cars." "But this one will top most of the ones I've ever done." "Because now, you've got robots transforming at 80 miles an hour on a freeway, and I don't know how you can top anything like that." " All right, let's go and try one, shall we?" " Yeah." "We tried to put the audience inside the action." "So they're actually eating cars, they're actually in the crash." "Come on, let's go." "Bay Buster follow me." "Watch out." "We used the Bay Buster, that crazy triangle car that can actually take direct hits from cars." "The Bay Buster is a pickup truck with the cage on the outside of it." "They mount anywhere from 2 to 4 cameras on the front." "And if we have flipping cars or cars being thrown off the top of car carriers, we normally drive the Bay Buster right into them." "That's great for the audience." "That's part of that "eat the action"" "that the audience gets to see, that's not cgi." "It's like most directors would have chose when we ripped that bus, which is an extremely dangerous stunt, I mean really dangerous." "Most would have just done it either miniature or CG." "And it just wouldn't look as good." "The bus sequence is something that we've never done before." "And I really had to push to get that to happen." "That bus, we have six exploding bolts holding the cab together in the centre, at the centre of the bus, and then we have big cables underneath pulling it together, holding it together." "We cut the cables, we blow the bolts, and the actual bus cracks in half like an egg in two pieces." "There's a stunt driver who drives the front away." "Because it's going to drop down on another set of wheels so he can still control it." "And then the back half has those same cannons in it that we're gonna fire at 1 ,1 00 psi, three cannons and the back half of the bus is gonna flip away." " Wow." " lt's gonna be really cool." "We're gonna pop the cable, which is the first cable pulling it." "Then there's another cable wrapped around him, and it's gonna take about three seconds for that bus to pull like that." "And then we blow the thing." "Once we pop the cable it's all automatic." "Richard, you have the bomb in your hand?" "I have the button on the floor, yes." " Okay, so Richard..." " Who else will be there?" "Releasing the first cable when the bus comes out from under the bridge and gets into the sun." "Come on, Dan, let's start your vehicle and have it started, 'cause we're moving into position, right now." "Move those cars forward, gang, please." "So we put Richard Epper in the bus and I drove the Bay Bomber and chased it with four cameras on the front end." "But no one really knew what the bus was gonna do." "Hey, Kenny, how'd it go, man?" "I think it went pretty good." "Cut in half, right, Nick?" " Yeah, I know." " You've got half the bus here and half of it is over there." "I think it worked out really well." "And I think it's because Effects did an excellent job on prepping that bus for us." "So it's like, those guys are the guys that made us look good on that one." "The main thing is, my good friend Richard Epper is safe and that's all I think about going down there." "In the end, it's just a movie." "But it's a Michael Bay movie and that's what we do." "You get the bang for the buck when you're with Michael." "Actually, no one was hurt on this movie." "We've had a really spotless track record for such a long time." "And knock on wood, because, by the way, it's just a dangerous business." "What we do, what they're doing is dangerous." "Which one of those do you think was a Decepticon?" "Maybe one, maybe none." "Decepticons are actually very fun 'cause they're just wicked." "It seemed to serve the story better to have military vehicles being the real theme of the Decepticons as opposed to too many tape decks, or a gun, or things that were clever and great in the cartoon but a little bit unfocused for our purposes." "Michael has a pretty good relationship with the DOD, and so it was kind of interesting that we were using..." "All the military in this movie in the robot form are bad guys." "I'll be honest. I had to sort of pitch this to my chain of command in that there's Air Force aircraft as bad guys." "All right, ready?" "And the first two, go!" "Go, go, go!" "Because of Michael's relationships in the past and, you know," "Armageddon and other films he's done, the thought was that ideally we'd get the help of the Armed Forces in the end." "You see, the Air Force cameraman, I keep trying to tell him..." "Turn, turn, let me show it to you." "We're trying to change the style." "See, he's a little rigid." "Everything is like this." "He looks like that, walks like that. lt's rigid." "Look, now we got a little MTV style going." "See, by lunch he's got a little MTV style going." "And he loves the military." "He knows how to portray the military to make us look good and so it seemed like a win- win." "And people love bad guys." "The fact is, I mean, what's cooler than Darth Vader?" "I've always been, like, some of the first to shoot military hardware." "And in Armageddon, I was the first to shoot the B- 2 bomber." "Then this movie was the F- 22s, which are the new $1 30 million, amazing stealth fighters." "Starscream was an F- 1 5 Air Force jet back in the early cartoon days." "And back then, the F- 1 5 in the '80s was the quickest and the fastest and the baddest thing around." "Well, fast- forward 25 years, the F- 22 is now that aircraft." " Rolling." "Ready?" " And roll cameras." "Roll cameras." "Ready and action." "There you go." "Look at that." "Let's do that again." "Reset." "Very good work, everybody." "Reset." "Let's do that one more time." "What the Air Force has done in this show is shown us all of the good toys." "Brandy new stuff that really hasn't even been put into the field yet." "is there any hand signals that the crew guys in the front give?" "Anything you give at all?" "Any hand signals?" "Yeah." "All right. I want to do some hand signals." "We're gonna come right by you." "Guys, go back to the crew." "What kind of signals do you guys give?" "That aircraft is just..." "It's just phenomenal what it can do." "There's war games they play where they'll send, you know, three or four of those things out against 20 or so current F- 1 5, F- 1 6s, and it's not even a contest." "Target Id." "And they can fire at enemies that are beyond the curvature of the Earth." "They can track and fire on things that are 270 miles away." "So they can..." "Those guys are dead before they're even within visual contact of that plane." "So it's just very fitting that Starscream, who is the Air Commander and second- in- command, takes that form of, literally, the baddest weapon system in the world right now." "We have Blackout, which is a MH- 53 helicopter." "It's a gigantic troop transport." "It's a mean- looking helicopter." "Just looks bad ass, you know." "The Cobras are kind of slight." "You know, yeah, they carry a lot of firepower, but as far as just looking big and menacing, the Sea Stallion was, like, the logical choice." "Yeah, I got my fire suit on, baby. I'm directing." "Ready!" "And..." " Seven, six, five, four..." " Seven, six, five, four... I can't think of anything remotely this huge that the Air Force has been involved with, not only in, you know, screen time, but just the amount of aircraft and people" "and shooting on bases and everything that we've done." "What we're gonna wanna do is, we wanna stack you guys up, so, with a long lens, it'll make you look very close." "You know what I'm saying?" "We'll put you kind of like this to each other." "A little over there and add a little bit." "We're stacked up with the sun." "All right?" " Coming over the tower." " ...three, zero, zero." "The tower is actually a good place to come." "Air Boss, Osprey 1 , sir." "Do you want aeroplane mode or conversion mode on this?" "Left." "Correction, right." "Right." "To me." "Come on." "Right, right, right." "To me." "Right, right." " Oh, yeah, baby." " That is the golden glow." "Lower, lower, lower." " Bring them down lower." " Send them away." "Turn them around." " Turn them around." " Bring them down." "Another pass." "Another pass." "Take it around." "All right, we don't know where you are, so... I was also the first to use the Ospreys, which are for extracting soldiers." "It's kind of like a helicopter plane." "It's like these gigantic helicopter blades." "Looks very dangerous, if you ask me." "And they actually rotate down and become gigantic propellers and go forward and go about 300- something miles an hour." " Move back, please." " That was awesome." "Warthogs were a very interesting kind of plane 'cause it's kind of eerie, 'cause they get very low and they've just got this whine to it." " Are they coming, Josh?" " They are." "Good." "Okay, come higher up." "Come higher up." "Right now, right now, guys." "And it's got a lethal cannon on it." "You know, it's a creepy plane." "If you're on the ground, you don't want to be there if it's shooting at you." "The military gave us the use of the Spooky, which is a C- 1 30, specially equipped." "It's got, like, 1 8 guns." "It's the thing they use to shoot Taliban in Afghanistan." "It's a vicious old plane, but it's very lethal." "The 49th Fighter Wing at Holloman is the home of the stealth fighter, the F- 1 1 7 Nighthawk." "Well, they scrambled the stealth fighter." "Like 50 of them staged there, so we had them all rolling around, and it was crazy." "It's still a very sensitive aircraft, the technology that is involved with it is still very top secret." "I don't want you filming from that angle, please." "We had to just, basically, make sure that certain protocols were kept in mind." "That you couldn't film it that way, you couldn't get close to it this way." "And once again, their production bent over backwards to make sure that they followed all the rules." "Our tax dollars happily at work." "One of the things that a lot of people don't understand that all military support is on a cost basis." "This cost the taxpayer absolutely nothing." "The movie pays for any costs of the aircraft and personnel that cannot otherwise be used in training missions." "If a helicopter is flying and it costs X number of dollars per hour to fly that helicopter, the production company reimburses it." "The technology that the government allowed us to be around and some of the tools they allowed us to use, you wouldn't be able to get anywhere else in the world." "These are target practise tanks." "What they do is, this one is a mock- up of a fake foreign tank, so that targeting systems could pick out friend or foe when they shoot them in the missile test range." "At Holloman they have what is known as a tank graveyard." "And there's probably 1 ,000 tanks and self- propelled artillery pieces and stuff like that." "And the first time I took Michael in there, he was like a kid at Christmas." "It was like, "Can I have that?" "Can I have that?" ""Can I burn that?" "Can I blow that up?"" "Absolutely, anything you want." "Set!" "Fire!" " Anything?" " Yeah, it was all right." " Peace?" " Peace." " Violent." " Yeah." "The tank was something that had already been modified by another show." "Somebody owned it, all right, so we modified it and came up with a cool paint job." "It was a cool, kind of non- radar detectible paint job that was based on some camo that we saw on this futuristic battleship image." "We found on the Internet this minesweeper that the military uses, they send to Iraq." "It's very cool." "It's called a Buffalo." "But we call it Bonecrusher." "How fast does that Bonecrusher go, by the way?" " Fifty." " lt must take forever to get there, right?" "The image that they used to promote this vehicle had this shot of this arm extended and this big multi- tined fork foreground in the shot." "And we finally get the data on this machine and it turns out that this fork is, like, 1 4- inches wide." "And they totally cheated the whole thing in Photoshop." "This giant thing coming at you, you know, that looks like it could lift up a bus, is, like, this big." "We were, like, what the..." "You know, so we basically made this appliance that goes over the existing one that more replicates the version of the machine that we had been reacting to." "Originally, the police car was an Autobot." "It seemed like to keep it with our theme of..." "All the Decepticons seem to take on the disguises of authoritarian vehicles, military jet, tank, police car." "It seemed like a good change." "So Barricade's in there as a police car." "Slide the headlight forward and then bring the other arm over." "Overtake the headlight." " The idea being to start..." " Spin its little eye a little." "Barricade is a really fun character." "He's wicked and mean." "Okay!" "All right!" "Okay!" "Stop, stop, stop, stop." "I'm sorry." "Oh, God!" "Oh, God!" "Okay!" "All right!" "Okay!" "Look!" "Look!" "Look!" "Stop!" "Stop!" "One of the first thoughts we had, of course, was to include Soundwave in the Decepticons." "And in our first draft, we actually did have Soundwave." "We started to realise that we were not really servicing that character in a way that was gonna make us or fans happy." "So we said, " Rather than doing it wrong," ""let's actually create a character who is a distant cousin of Soundwave's."" "And that's how Frenzy was born." "Frenzy, which is a boom box that transforms into this wicked little, three- foot- tall, vicious- looking robot." "This was something that I invented." "We did an animated Frenzy." "We wanted to see..." "I did facial studies on how its eye stalks moved and how his mouth moved and how his mask came out of this little boom box, you know, so we did some exploration with that." "We started with the computer- designed puppet and we had to go back and retrofit and make those things that look mechanical in design actually be mechanical." "Take it apart and kind of work backwards." "What they'll do with the full- sized mechanical version of this is that when you bring it to the set under the lighting conditions it's also gonna help out with the cgi guys, so they could see how an actual, real item would react" "in that environment." "One, two, three." "Mostly, it's something to interact with the actors, 'cause they would have to be fighting against nothing." "It's from the Robot Spring Collection." "It's real nice." "It's a new scarf DreamWorks bought me." "I just put it on when I get cold outside." "That's all that this is." "I am Megatron." "There's more where that came from." "Megatron was represented as a pistol, a very realistic- looking pistol that, in Japan, actually shot little pellets." "That mechanism didn't work in the U.S., but that worked well for a villain in the '80s." "For us, A, we didn't want anyone shrinking, particularly the bad guy." "We realised that for him to do that would be the equivalent of Darth Vader turning into his own lightsaber and having someone else swing him around." "It's a movie." "You have to update." "To keep it in the '80s would be great for the 25 of you on the Internet." "But for the world, it's like, you cannot have Megatron as a gun." "Join them in extinction!" "Megatron transforms into kind of an alien plane." "And because he's the most arrogant and vain of the whole thing and because he doesn't have to really hide, he's one of the only Decepticons who actually goes from his protoform right into his alien jet protoform." "What came up was just designing this kind of alien craft." "It would hearken to what is happening on Cybertron." "So this was a way to show how truly foreign these guys are." "I want these robots to look like they fit in the real world and look like it's photo- real right now." "The only thing that looks a little winky is that thing. lt just looks like a..." "Too thin?" "Yeah, it just looks like surgery equipment." "All right, cool." "Okay, guys, that's about all the time. lt's 1 2:00." "It's time to go." "Time to go." "Time to go." " One more thing, right here." " l got a lot more...to do." "You can't abuse me." "You're abusing me." "That's abusing my time." " That was the plan." " You're taking advantage." "In terms of our effects, we had lndustrial Light and Magic that were heading up Transformers, and we had Digital Domain, which is an effects company that I recently purchased." "Both companies did the work for this movie." "It's a bad dream." "lim did three quarters, and Digital Domain did the last quarter." "For us in the visual effects world, having giant robots to animate had a lot of really great potential." "Something to really look forward to." "They assembled a great team up there." "I heard we were the show that everyone wanted to be on because..." "There were just tons of Transformer geeks, so it was like a mob session to get onto the show." "I thought I was a huge fan." "But some of the people I've met here since we got the project just blow me away." "You know, compared to some people out there, my collection is nothing." "There's people who have 1 0 times what I have." "I'd estimate I have about six or seven hundred, I think." "Working on this movie has been this great full- circle experience for me, going from playing with the toys as a kid to getting to be a part of the movie version." "Once we were awarded the job, we started developing what the robots really will look like, what are all the pieces gonna look like, and we start having modelers, here at our place, start modeling those things," "because it takes a good four, five, six months to build one robot." "Michael wanted a level of realism that required us to go much, much, further with the complexity of the robots." "For instance, I've got a little Transformer that's on my desk." "He has 51 pieces in him." "Our Optimus in the movie has 1 0,1 08 parts that all have to be hand- made." "It's in the computer, but it gives you some idea of the level of complexity." "They take photographs of real automotive parts and they kind of scale things in." "All the Decepticons and Autobots, together, were about 60,000 pieces that all had to move." "If the frame has three robots in it, it takes 38 hours to render one frame of film." "Nowadays I'm doing less and less storyboards." "Animatics are just becoming a better tool." "It is basically a Saturday- morning cartoon of the movie." "From that, they'll show us what's gonna happen." "You can work out some very complicated camera moves." "Especially when you're working with a height difference of 28 feet, 40 feet." "So you automatically start embracing ideas of animation and physics, and trying to incorporate that in your little mini- movies." "It's a different process of filmmaking." "This is the first film with Michael Bay that I've actually worked on where the animatics carry as much weight as the script." "Watch out!" "Michael is a genius at making these movies, and he knows when it's gonna be live, and he knows when it's gonna be visual effects." "He likes to split it up, where it's partially visual and a lot of live action." "Action!" "A lot of directors don't like to go that way because it's easier to go the visual- effects route." "The great thing about Michael is he tries to get so much in camera." "Five, four, three..." "Because what we like to do is take our visual effects and really supplement what's possible to film." "But the more real stuff that he has in each shot, the more believable it's gonna be." "And ready in three, two, one, jump." "The big challenge with Transformers is that we were working a lot with robots that weren't really there." "The robot's got 1 5- foot- long feet, you know, and 8 feet wide." "So you have these huge things that you have to tell the camera people about, tell the set people about." ""You can't have it that close." "He's filling this whole volume."" "You know, you try telling that to the guys when they arrive on set, and it's like, "What?"" "At first, everybody kind of in shock." ""What?" "He's that big?"" "But we had simple tools on set." "We have our blueprint, the animatic." "We have our cheat sheets, all the sizes of the robots." "They would bring these poles in, and everything else is acting and working around this pole that will soon be a robot." "We're literally using window- washer poles to act with, you know?" "And it's a tough thing." "You gotta be in love with the pole." "That's been the stretch for me." "It's a different form of acting." " Can you talk?" " XM Satellite Radio." "1 30 digital channels of non- stop, commercial- free music, news and entertainment." "So you talk through the radio, then, right?" "And a mighty voice will send a message summoning forth visitors from heaven." "We all became immediate fans of Shia LaBeouf, because our robots are worth nothing if the actors don't interact with them properly." "Every day, all day long, my dialogue was with the A- camera operator." "Okay, roll on them." "Go to profile." "And our dialogue is with Michael all the time, "Let's plan this,"" "and you work out what the move will be." " Yeah, you're right where Shia was." " So you're backing up, and we're gonna go, "Three, two, one," you're going, and the thing is that you're backing up like this on the ground because you're seeing it kind of go up in front you, all right?" "It was a learning curve, I must say." "And he got much better at it." "The surprising thing with the crew is how quickly they learn." "I'm trying to help them imagine the unimaginable." "Pretty soon everybody starts to believe that they're there." "And then you guys are gonna crawl back that way, 'cause..." "We wanna get out of the way." "Yeah, you don't wanna get squished." "Michael was very insistent about the robots being energetic and being able to do all these acrobatic stunts." "We wanted to have fighters and guys that could manoeuvre in ways that you'd never seen before." "We went into this development phase of showing how agile we could make the robots and still convey a sense of weight." "And we found that the closer things got to camera, the faster they could move." "But when you see the entire robot at a further distance, we had to really slow things down to help sell their weight." "I used real stunt fighters." "We'd do fight choreography with Kenny's guys, that were great fighters, a different type of ninja- type move." "What we did was create a fighting style that represented the characters of each robot." "We would video these fights, not mo- cap, and it would help the animators get their movements down and how we wanted to execute certain fighting scenes." "More than anyone, the animators are so involved in bringing these characters to life." "And the nice thing is, you know, Michael is open to feedback." "I'd give them a lot of freedom." ""So what do you think?" "What do you think Optimus would do?"" "And they all know Transformers, you know, forward and backwards, and, you know, you'll see things in the movie that reference the old cartoon, because they were such big fans of it." "Come on, Decepticon punk!" "We've learned Earth's languages through the World Wide Web." "We had to get into Michael's head about who these characters were." "And believe it or not, it's very hard to animate any type of emotion from a robot if you don't have things that move." "Michael stressed to us how important it was to get the performance to read in the eyes." "The majority of the performance is sold in the eyes." "The more we added, it just made it more real and felt like there's a soul in there." "My name is Optimus Prime." "We are autonomous robotic organisms from the planet Cybertron." "We have a lot of transforming robots." "I think originally we started with 1 5 transformations." "We have over 40 now in the film." "In the original cartoon, you could have robots kind of transform midair and you really wouldn't care about laws of physics." "This was almost too easy!" "Every single transformation in this movie is done as if these transformations were actually taking place in real space and in real time." "There's not too many people in the world that could've figured this out." "You know, it takes a real genius to be able to disassemble these things and put them back together in a different shape." "Yeah, we didn't want to have metal actually change shape." "We wanted to find a place for it on the vehicle, and find a place for it that corresponded with the robot." "We would really play to camera, like have all the important pieces show up, move, rotate and go back, while we were shuffling a bunch of cards behind the scenes." "In the Optimus transformation, this is the camera move." "And what we would do on set is we would put a pole representing Optimus's height." "And that's what we start with." "The next thing we do is we match the camera move on the computer." "So this is what Optimus would look like if he were just standing in the shot, on the ground." "So this is the transformation take." "So it's all happening right in front of camera, in front of the audience's eyes." "And you can see the detail." "We go to the final rendered take, you know, there's cast, car parts, there's engine pieces, there's gears, there's headlights, the trailer hitch, his tyres..." "They could do whatever they wanted to each individual part." "Friends of mine that are not in this business are always kind of nonplussed when I tell them that we have to, in a computer, completely recreate every single situation that we're shooting in." "What that means is our match- mover, he's got to be able to come back here, and completely reconstruct that in the computer, because the computer doesn't know where anything is." "We have spatial marks out on this area, and Duncan, of course, measures each one." "Later on, we know exactly where these spots were, 'cause we have to rebuild it wherever he makes contact with either the ground or the objects around." "So when you see these guys stand on things and sit on things, and bang against things, even the buildings that are, you know, 1 0 story's tall, all have to be mapped and measured on set." "There's a lot involved in making these vehicles and robots look real." "We would go out and take pictures of the tyre tread." "The treads on our Optimus are the same as the treads on the real truck, you know." "And the detail, down to the smallest bolt, or the engine block, all that stuff, we were very meticulous." "You want to see a car driving down the road, and see it transform, and watch it and say, "Well, those are real car parts."" "And to me, that's always the most fun and the most challenging thing, is, "Can we make this stuff look real?"" "We did huge packages of, like, texture reference." "An abrasion reference for even the robots internally." "'Cause we didn't want them to be so squeaky- clean that they were uninteresting." "So on his hand, the surface was perfectly smooth, and then we add in these scratches and nicks and dings." "The hardest part about this film is we don't have real robots, we have real cars." "And the real cars, they're buffing." "You look at a real car that's just been washed and polished and shined up, and it almost looks like a CG car." "So the hard part was trying to find a balance of dirt and ageing to add to the robots that didn't make it look implausible that they could've come from this very clean car." "So all the car paints, I have multiple layers." "They have a colourful layer, which is right here, you see yellow reflections in here, but there's also a clear coat on top of it, which is supposed to protect it, but it also gives you a really white reflection," "so you always see a colorful reflection next to a white reflection." "Probably two years ago we couldn't do this movie because of lighting and ray tracing, which is a way you light things." "We've spent a lot of time getting the lighting right." "It's very complicated to get all the specularity." "'Cause I'm a lighting buff, you know, and especially shooting so many car commercials, I would give dissertations at lim of, like, "Okay, if you see a car, it's gonna have a hot spot," ""it's got flat here, it's got more hot spots," ""it's got a long highlight there..."" "And it's very confusing when you look at it." "It's not like just one soft light on the car." "So they had to really invent how to light these things so complicated to make them look like they're moving and it's like reflecting car parts in a real world." "And so we're always trying to add that in, and we're trying to give that sort of look to our robots, and adding glints, and what he calls pings, you know, where you highlight certain areas." "These tiny little lights that are being reflected in the surfaces is what he's after." "That was so interesting for us that I think most of us lighting people became road hazards, because we were driving around looking at other cars." "The robots are shiny." "They have glass." "They have metal." "They have painted surfaces." "The entire environment has to reflect." "So every single shot has an environment recorded for it that gets now projected onto the robot." "Otherwise it will look phoney- baloney." "We apply everything that we've gathered from set, which is really high- resolution environments, and everything is being reflected in the car panels." "And obviously these robots are moving around a lot." "So we're getting a lot of reflective play on the surfaces, since there are major, major light sources in here, from the headlights, there's the overhead balloon, there are the eyeballs in there, which have to be glowing," "the blinking lights, we have the blinker right here, and then the face, and his mouth talking is being reflected in the hood of the car." "And that is what really sells it at the end." "That's sort of the icing on the cake for us." "Go, fire!" "Our job, and our task, to create the illusion that everything was just shot on the same day, and that these robots, who aren't even real, were there." "lim is known for its really fabulous level of compositing." "And these guys just look at the shot as artists, all day long, judging whether or not that thing looks like it's really in there." "We start with a background plate, obviously, the shot in production, and then we take computer- generated elements and we add them to the shot." "Michael is the type of guy that wants to shoot things messy, which I love, 'cause you shoot the explosions, or all the debris or anything, on set." "It makes it harder for us, but it's real." "Let's say the bomb goes off next to the robot." "We have to model the robot, but then we have topull out that debris out of the plate and put him in there behind it, 'cause he's got to fit into the background, but behind that debris that might be gone." "It's very much a process for the compositor to get in there and make everything feel real again." "And that's what those guys do." "They attack the shot and take it to the point where it's finished." "Fire!" "We shot a plate of the real helicopter." "But in this case it ended up being easier just to remove that helicopter." "This is what the background plate was." "We essentially removed the real helicopter, and then replaced it with our own." "So here the compositor has actually added in the helicopter, layered the soldiers back over the top," "added in some bullet hits for when the soldiers actually fire and hit Blackout, and then enhanced muzzle flashes in some cases to try to just bring out the visual excitement of the scene." "And then in the background here, where we had, you know, previously a blank tarmac, we've added more soldiers and just more firing as a texture of excitement, just to make it look like they're hitting them with everything they've got." "My God." "Everyone is just amazed at what they've done with the robots, in terms of just how real it looks, how complicated it is." "When you finally achieve a look where it really looks real, that's it." "That's the biggest excitement of the day." "There are definitely days when we go in and we review the shots, and one comes up and you just think, "Whoa!" "That's incredible." ""lt looks like a real Transformer."" "That takes a high degree of artistry and technical support to make these things look that way." "There's this Decepticon called Skorponok that's tracking them, and he's tracking them under the sand." "It's Jaws, but it's in the desert." "And we were actually looking through one of the books of all the characters, and we kind of went through, "Hey, there's a scorpion in the desert."" "And Skorponok is perfect, too, because he's also sort of different than the other Decepticons." "He doesn't particularly turn into a vehicle, or whatever." "His form is very much about the environment." "The scorpion is great for the desert, and it's sort of a good shout out to the fans of, like, Beast Wars." "And some of the incarnations of Transformers that are a little bit more animal- based than vehicle- based." "In pre- production, they built all these animatics so they know anything that has a lot of actiony stuff or there's Transformers coming through, or, you know, you're being chased by one, or whatever it is." "They have these animatics built, the computerised sort of animation of the scene, before they even shoot it." "Skorponok was one of the ones that we, in the department, animated completely in 3D, you know, like, I wanted to have the notion of these components from the Sea Stallion helicopter, which is basically what he is birthed from." "So he has these kind of Sea Stallion helicopter components to him and the turbines for his hands." "And I wanted to see how these things could turn and how he could dig in and then shoot the sand out the exhaust." "All those things that we developed in the department, 'cause we thought it was just a bitching- looking scorpion." "It's more like these, but there was some that it didn't look..." "They were taller than that." "These are his target practice?" "Right now we're at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, New Mexico." "This is actually a very active military base because they do a lot of support work for the war effort in Iraq right now." "Since it's a missile range, everywhere you go there's a chance of live ordnance." "We go to this fence on the scout and it says, "Don't walk in," ""live ordnance could be possible, unexploded bombs, blah, blah, blah."" "And I'm like, "Okay."" "So we step over the fence, and it was weird walking." "And I kept walking, you know, but looking down..." "So we actually had a minesweeper clear, when we shot there, for a good five acres." "You see a little bit of go..." "And then the two mandibles..." "Kenny, move over this way." "Put it where he tells you." "But the idea that they bust through and then have the wire pull them away." "You know?" "Probably, no matter what, you want them on either side..." " Yeah." " Let's..." "You know, it would be nice, whatever he does..." "Whatever he does, it should be small and build, like a crescendo." "We are in Holloman missile range." "Don't pick up anything with a red tip..." " Yeah." " ...or that looks like a bomb." "I'm gonna light this town up, baby." "Ready!" "In New Mexico we all had a really good time." "We blew up hundreds and hundreds of pounds of black powder and thousands of feet of primer cord." "See, that is right where l told you about wetting it down." "The chunk." "You seen the chunks in there, Michael?" "We had primer cord, which can take down a tree or destroy a car." "It's a little, like, rope- like explosive." "I had them lay out like 200 of these strands so that they can fire it on a millisecond thing where it's like... lt makes it look kind of like a wave coming at you." "They put the high explosives on, then they put just carpet on top of it." "And then they put sand on top of the carpet." "And when this was ignited in a sequential order, the carpet just lifted up and it bounced the sand high enough and it gave Michael the exact look that he wanted." "Heads up!" "Cut." " How was that, Dave?" " Cut!" "Cut!" " Huh?" " Good." " Were you still on it when it was falling?" " Yes, sir." "There were a lot of bombs, a lot of explosions, a lot of strafe hits." "There were people flying through the air." "We had guys on ratchets." "Now!" "So what happens in this shot, besides me squinting like crazy, is Skorponok is running through the ground." "Of course, I'm not the smartest ranger, so I'm... I'm looking around, he's right behind me..." "Right through the chest." "And then..." "Takes me back and eats me." "Apparently Decepticons eat children." "Ta- da." "That was good." "The idea is we're trying to time the sand so the burst- out happens with Skorponok." "We're imagining where his entrance point would be in the sand." "At some point we might change our actor into a CG replicate of this guy to be able to manipulate him." "That was cool." "That was cool." "All right, let's go to the tail, please." "And action." "Go." "Follow it." "Michael wanted a Skorponok's tail slithering through the sand." "We just made a whole track right out of plywood, which actually had a groove in it." "They put a lightweight plastic down and then you put a razor blade in front of it and as the scorpion is going through it, it just cuts that path." "Get anything, anybody?" "You know, some." "A little piece." "All right, guys, I'm gonna show you an animatic of what we're doing." "It's a pretty cool shot." "It's a trailer shot we're doing right now." "Hey, watch this." "It's the one where he jumps out." "So I need you to run..." "He's right on you." "You know what I'm saying?" "So you got to have that on your faces, all right?" "All right." "Trailer shot, see?" "Trailer shot." "Which camera am I running towards, Mike?" "You're running towards that umbrella, guys." "That umbrella's where we're running, all right?" "The actors, they had to run, and I'm like, "Tyrese, don't trip." ""'Cause that's a real explosive." "If it goes off, you better run."" "All right, y'all." "This is it, Jack, the trailer." "Full throttle." "I mean, this is more heroic." "Action!" "That fear on their face was them being real." "What the...is that?" "I said, "Just remember at one point to look back and look up."" " Were you still screaming?" " Oh, yeah." "You better believe it." "That was great." "I think I broke my back." " Did you get anything?" " That's how we do it, baby." "In each of the shots that we set up we have to have a representative size for Skorponok." "We want to mark where this is, where the trench is?" "This is an lim sphere." "It's a lighting reference for every environment that we're in." "It helps the artists back at lim to correctly place all the reference lights and shadows and kind of match everything and make it look like it sits back in the plate." "Three, two, one, action!" "You can see in the plate, we had really good elements to start with, in this case." "And anybody that works in CG knows that sand is one of those things that you just..." "The minute you hear that, you start to think..." "You know, the particle work that's involved with sand can really drag out." "You can see in this plate right here, as these primer cord elements go off, we get this nice plume of sand here." "And what we've done is taken that same thing, left it in the plate, and added our robot inside there and sort of buried him in depth." "And as he comes forward, we reveal more and more of him." "Run!" "Run!" "Oh, what is that?" "You know, it's not a bad job."