Ian Bryce has once again posted on Don Murphy's boards, giving details of the crew involved with the production of the Transformers movie, as well as some other progress reports:
Start building sets on location in a week
Start building sets in LA in less than a month
ILM now starting to build our CG robots
Costume Designer - Deb Scott (Titanic)
Assistant Director - Simon Warnock (Lord of The Rings)
Stunt Coordinator - Kenny Bates (Pearl Harbor)
Cinematographer - Mitch Amundsen (Eight Below, lots of Bay films)
Our pre-viz supervisor is Steve Yamamoto and he is awesome....
Scott Farrar is the ILM vfx supe
There are two Jeff Mann's....one is a production designer and one is an ILM exec who used to be a model supervisor there...
Other key crew:
John Frazier - Special Effects
Allegra Clegg - Production Manager
No cast set yet....soon though....not accurate to say some faction of production wants celeb fest....think everyone wants good actors first - if they are celebs too that doesn't hurt...
yes, Deb Scott won an Oscar......fyi John Frazier and Scott Farrar have also won one...
Motion Capture
.....still figuring out what the robots movements will be but technology-wise our pre-viz team can easily give robots motion without needing motion capture....I think we will do some of it eventually for ILM but it's not as big a requirement as we first thought
ILM
Yes I did work there for a few months in 1988, when I worked for LucasFilm....helped run the place before I moved back to LA.....
General process on robots (which I'm sure many of you are familiar with - just answering some questions that I see as I can) is that we create the 2D art designs which, when approved, then get modeled in 3D at either ILM or our art dept....after that ILM gives motion, shading, lighting etc based on the different scene requirements....from the 3D models we can also construct any required live action robot's or pieces of robots (which we will be doing some of)
Can't be specific about which robots or designs unfortunately....everyone wants to keep a lid on it for now...
robot designs came first in this case...toys being designed to our robots designs....wouldn't worry too much about how they'll move...Bay will make them very exciting....
Ian Bryce has given yet another update on DonMurphy.net, giving a few more details on the production's locations and schedule:
Latest...
Will try to answer a few things:
# robot designs...how many do you think there will be?
don't think we will be leaking designs....
animatronic vs CG....large scale animatronics are hard to pull off...expensive and difficult to operate...we've identified several pieces we will build and investigating something full size....
face and mouth designs very important to us...been working on that as ILM begins body modelling...
location semi finalists: Califronia,Nevada,Arizona,New Mexico,DC,Florida,New York,Massachusetts,Illinois,Michigan,Texas,Alaska and Canada.
Vehicle inventory growing fast...
Casting will continue into shooting depending on the actor's scheules...
hopefully the main (human) parts will be complete in the next 4-6 weeks but it invariably takes awhile
DM.net member Relentless asked:
i was wondering about the mouth thing.. im guessing optimus prime will be the only easy one. using actual mouths seems hard to do realistically no matter how i try to think about it. i just hope you dont go for a static shaped mouth with glowing for speaking sort of like a gloriified light up PA system.
Thankfully Ian responded:
you're right...glorified light up mouth thingee not what's planned....!
Originally posted by Zisteau Er....you know who the director is, right?
Yes, but if we can mix it in with a different style, it might help lighten it a bit.
It's not about what other movies, it's that Mitch and Bay have worked together--hence they have probably developed that "style" together better than if Bay were working with someone else.
Anyway, I guess there's really no way to get around how this movie is going to look cinematically.
As for the visual effects, I'm not so worried about that. I dunno, I just have faith they'll pull off everything they need to in that regard.
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