[IMG:L]Transformers proved to be the blockbuster hit of the summer, but it took more than meets the eye to bring America’s favorite robots in disguise to life on the big screen. Director Michael Bay turned to the gurus at George Lucas’ motion picture visual effects company, Industrial Light & Sound, to get the job done.
The team put special effects to the test with the action thrill ride that pits the peace-loving Autobots against the evil Decepticons in a race for the life giving Allspark hidden on planet earth.
In honor of the DVD release Oct. 16, Hollywood.com made a special trip up to the ILM Presidio facility in San Francisco to get the behind the scenes scoop from VFX Supervisor Scott Farrar, Animation Director Scott Benza, Digital Production Supervisor Jeff White, and Associate VFX Supervisor Russell Earl.
Scott Benza (Animation Director) on meeting Michael Bay’s vision:
“Michael knew he wanted these robots to be agile robot warriors. Coming from an animation stand point, athleticism doesn’t really mix well with weight so having 30 to 40 foot tall robots mixed with very agile motion was going to be very difficult to achieve. We started down the road of seeing how far we could push the athleticism of the robots. We were going down a path here that was new to all of us it was not something we had ever done before but we trusted what Michael wanted to see. We did it and it surprised most of us who worked on this initially.”
Scott Farrar (VFX Supervisor) on creating realistic parts and pieces:
“They had some basic straight forward simple goals on this picture that were actually quite difficult to achieve. One was just trying to make all the metallic shapes and all the paint materials look photo real like it is a real piece manufactured just like the car body piece or a painted panel. Part of it had to do with the layers of paint and the methods that lit the robots, but it also had to do with the sheer complexity of when you see the robots moving and you see how many parts and pieces there are. This little guy [model transformer] has 51 pieces, our Optimus Prime has 10,108 so with all those pieces, each one has to be built, modeled, painted, connected–there is basically an underlying skeleton so they all flow together so it takes a lot of computer power to do that and a lot of talent here at ILM to get the levels and complexities of the layers to look right.”
[IMG:R]Jeff White (Digital Production Supervisor) on skeletal animation:
“The process of doing rigging is like putting bones in a body. All the Transformers together had about 144,000 bones and that covered all the pistons, all the gears, all the wheels, it was really some of the most complicated rigging we’ve ever done. We wanted it so that all the pieces on the inside, so that it looked like the internals were driving the character when in fact the opposite was happening. The animators would do the gross motion and then our stuff would move based on that.”
Russell Earl (Associate VFX Supervisor) on fan expectations:
“[We] are seeing this robot from every where, so we would go ‘This area is a little boring, we need to put some pieces in there.’ This also speaks to a lot of the fan talk like ‘Oh, they changed the design of the robots,’ or ‘That’s not the Optimus Prime I remember,’ or ‘That’s not the Bumblebee I remember,’ but it is funny, if you actually go back now and look at the cartoon and compare one of our robots against the cartoon, had we just taken that cartoon robot that everybody remembers and everybody wants to see and put it in the movie it wouldn’t have made for a very exciting dynamic transformations.”
Jeff White (Digital Production Supervisor) on developing the look of the robots:
“There was a lot of vagueness in this art work that we had to try and resolve, which is difficult to do in 3-D…we thought [the first model we built] hit a lot of the elements that were in the artwork and Michael saw it and went ‘No, I need way more stuff in there.’ So the next pass, we stuffed it full of recognizable car parts. That was a big change actually because we were sort of filling it with alien material before and no one really knew what it was, but then Michael said ‘Nope, I want this all to be recognizable pieces that people would see if they lifted the hood of their car.’ And that made a big difference in terms of the realism of the characters.”
Scott Farrar (VFX Supervisor) on giving Optimus Prime lips:
“That goes back to the fan base. There was a lot of written things coming from the fans saying ‘You can’t do that, You can’t do!’ that but there is a big difference between doing an animated series or the hand drawn animation versus when you go to making this thing look real, I have to say it just looked strange when we used different mouths. We showed Michael every variety like the Jerry Mahoney style or when they spoke to just have a light, [it was] boring. I said to Scott Benza lets just put segmented lips, three pieces upper, three pieces lower so he can form an O and all the E’s, R’s all the different shapes that mouths have to make and try it. We showed Michael and he said ‘it looks great’–so emotionally we weren’t really keen on doing that but logically it was the only way to go.”
Scott Benza (Animation Director) on showboat animation:
“There is a term called a wedge. A wedge is basically a range of tests that start pretty subtly and end up more broad. What we did was think about how a robot would go from roof top to street level and wedge that out where we start with the practical straight forward way where [the robot] leaps down to street level to a showboat flip off the rooftop and let Michael tell us how showboaty and how athletic to go.”
Russell Earl (Associate VFX Supervisor) on creating the transformations:
“We were doing a lot of break it until it works. When you see it from that camera view and as soon as you pull the camera away–the illusion is there that this car is transforming into a robot, but in reality there was a lot of cheating going on. One of the early sequences we worked on was the helicopter transformation. Once we did this and we saw it, it set the bar for where we had to go. We sat down and we were like ‘this movie is going to be amazing, if we can achieve this. If this is our starting point we are in for a really fun time.’”
[IMG:L]Russell Earl (Associate VFX Supervisor) on blowing up a truck full of Furbys:
“You know Michael’s not afraid to blow stuff up, so he blows this truck up [on a real street in L.A.]. There is a massive explosion and we’re standing around and we start to look around and there is still smoke lingering and you look up on the ledges and you start to see the hundreds of Furbys that they shot off…then we are stuck with all these burning Furbys up on the sides of the buildings. It is something you don’t think about at the time but of course they have the fire truck standing by, you’ve got the street littered with Furbys, and they are dousing them down. We were actually lucky enough to get some of the casualties that were brought back. The practical effects guys had actually taken the guts out of all these Furbys, the batteries and plastic, molded it and then put it back in so they wouldn’t break the windows so instead they just smoldered. That we thought was kind of neat because it speaks to how stuff was done with real fire, real explosions, real smoke, [which] makes our lives a little bit easier here.”
