Explaining the Special Effects Behind Transformers 208
ntmokey writes "Popular Mechanics has an in-depth look at the special effects behind the Transformers movie, including some exclusive shots from Paramount Pictures. Apparently, using real cars as models presented some interesting problems for the folks at Industrial Light and Magic, who had to figure out how a recognizable chunk of steel can fold into robot. In the end, the solution was the development team getting hands-on in the auto shop. And lots of grease."
They should've (Score:3, Interesting)
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The newest iteration of the Renault Twingo, however, isn't as charming as it used to be.
Pleeze (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, I wouldn't call a Camaro beautiful. Brutal & unsubtle maybe, but then that fits in with the Transformers ethos.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X7PAdSfHO8&mode=re lated&search= [youtube.com]
As far as cool I would disagree with you. The C4 (especially the 3 door one) cool.
Granted, it is probably the first cool looking car Citroen has put out for nearly 20 years. Otherwise the early Citroens used to be "the kings of cool" on European roads. Just ask anyone who is old enough to remember the flying Citroen out of the Phantomas movies and its
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Explain this! (Score:5, Funny)
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And hey, Camaros are cool.
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Sounds like a fabulous movie (Score:2)
Tag Marketing (Score:3, Funny)
the secret (Score:5, Funny)
Believe it or not, I think they used some sort of "computer" at some point to actually do the special effects.
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It may look just as good as CG in the theater, and you might never be able to tell the difference, but seeing the cars explode and fly everywhere really put me in the mood to want to see the movie, and I think the director really has the right idea in mind: mindless carnage.
Citroen (a french car manfacturer) did it first (Score:2, Informative)
Am I the only one who thought.... (Score:4, Funny)
*shrug*
I guess that identifies me as a geek, then?
What's really, really sad is... (Score:3, Funny)
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Well, in the movie, there was that brief joke where Sam's dad thought the mess in his backyard was caused by a falling power transformer.
The joke completely bypassed most of the audience, of course.
My impression. (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, anything with the Transformers was awesome. It was immensely entertaining watching them transform and battle. It was good enough that I came away satisfied despite all the crap.
I generally liked the robot designs, although not so much Megatron. And the small Transformer was obnoxious. Why they couldn't have Rumble or something is beyond me. My main problem with all the Transformers is that they were far too complicated. They all had these tiny moving parts and coupled with Michael Bay's penchant for twitchy cameras it made it difficult to sometimes follow the action. There were times where I couldn't tell if I was watching an arm, a leg or a head. And when the robots were intertwined it was even worse. This was particularly bad for the Decepticons because they were so monochromatic.
I thought it was funny when the small robot, made up of a good deal of very resilient steel of some sort transforms into a small stereo and this woman carries him around like it's no big deal.
The Popular Science article does little more than serve as an advertisement for this movie. "The Best Special Effects Ever?" That's what they imply every time they have an article on some new effects-laden movie. I agree, the effects were very good, except when an actor occassionally wasn't looking in right the quite direction or really acting at the right moment. But they were great.
However, for me, the best special effects are those that don't remind me they're special effects. And for that I'd probably have to go back to the earlier Star Wars movies, or perhaps 2001. Nevertheless, I did enjoy Transformers. I do think the story would have been far better had they just followed the story in the cartoons more closely.
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Why?
I think it's sad that cartoons are automatically relegated to children's entertainment, and even worse, that they are expected to be nothing but fluff. Many cartoons have depth, vision, and meaning; there's nothing wrong with challenging the mind of a child, or an adult, for that matter...though movies like this one seem to lower the bar across the board. Perhaps Devo was right.
Wow. Wrong transformers (Score:2)
Then I thought "Oh, the Transformers MOVIE. Duh. It should have said that."
I think an article about the first would have been more interesting.
Bumblebee an alcoholic? (Score:2)
When it came to breathing life into characters such as Bumblebee, the protective Autobot, ILM needed to think backwards to fill in the blanks (and the junk in the drunk) between finished robot sketches and real-life GM cars.
Oh noble Bumblebee, how I thought I knew you!
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Template effects PR (Score:2)
"Effects like these would be impossible 2 years ago".
"It took us hundreds of people to make".
"One frame renders in a week on a supercomputer".
"Each robot is made out of a milliard of unique polygons and pixels".
"It was very hard for actors to talk to nothing".
But actually we know all this. Yes it was complex. Maybe this is why they took something like 100 million dollars for it.
I prefer to enjoy the work they did, versus read the same retired "look at how complex it was"
A GOOD "how hard it was"- (Score:2)
"Effects Pollution!" (Score:5, Insightful)
NOT special effects. Visual Effects (Score:3, Informative)
A special effect is a car being rigged to explode on set. A visual effect is a giant 4 story CG robot kicking that car.
We're two entirely seperate industries. Thanks for your interest however!
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Eh, whatever. That's a distinction that's only important to the people whose names are in the credits crawl. To the audience, though, it's all just "effects". Special, visual, foley, whatever.
We're to the point where film m
Not a fun job (Score:3)
Some years ago, when morphing was new, I was over at Pacific Data Images. An unhappy young woman was seated at a display, with a picture of a car's front in one window and a tiger's face in another. She was trying to come up with a set of control points for the morph. It just wasn't working.
You can morph anything to anything; no matter what points you pick, the start and end states will be the input images. Keeping it from looking stupid is the hard part.
The trend today is to do the tough morphs behind the scenes; the parts in front are moving around without too much distortion, while the stuff that's changing in blatantly unrealistic ways is obscured. This is a cheat, but that's how Hollywood works.
Right now, effects technology is ahead of screenwriting. With a big enough budget, you really can do anything on screen. But look at the action movies coming out: Spiderman 3. Pirates 3. Shrek 3. Die Hard 4. Harry Potter 5. And last year's Rocky 6. Not much originality there.
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Re:Guerrilla marketing (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yea, you can't blame the guy: he had just something like around $200 million to make this movie. With such a scarce budget, last thing you wanna do is think about whether there should be a love story in it or not. Love stories are cheap and don't involve CGI, so that's good to thrown in, just in case.
I'm sure if they keep giving him movies, few billion later he'll eventually lea
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In this case, that would be John Rogers, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.
It would be interesting to get a hold of the screenplay and see what if anything was changed.
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The movie was almost 2.5 hours long, and although some scenes were a bit too long, overall the movie was very enjoyable (I l
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"OMG ITS NOT LIKE THE OLD CARTOONS THAT I WATCHED WHEN I WAS 8 BACK BEFORE INTERNETS AND BEFORE I SPENT ALL MY TIME ONLINE BITCHING ABOUT HOLLYWOOD HAS DESTROYED MY CHILDHOOD OMG"
pfft. It's a fun movie. It has cars, robots, boobs, car chase & explosions. What more could you want.
Get over it.
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Whoa
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Dutchy here
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Umm... a plot? Ya know, back when I was young, movies used to have them. It's kinda like the cheap filler scenes you have today between the action parts, but they made sense and actually fit into the movie.
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Not that I don't love Camaros or anything, but would it have been so hard for them simply to use another character, such as Hot Rod (who also wasn't a Camaro, but at least he was a sports car), so they can whore themselves out to GM and still stay somewhat close to what we all know and loved about the original?
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Humor? Ahah that's okay, it had that, too. As a matter of fct, that's why my girlfriend liked the movie. (Color me surprised, she won't typically go to scifi movies.)
Re:Guerrilla marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
And yes I made up the word actionny. We're talking about Hollywood here.
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The camera is only a part of the problem. I can't figure out why movie robots always need to have so many spinning and twirling parts. these guys alway had some 10-20 appendages twirling about when they transform or try to cause impact upon something.
Maybe it's somewhere in the backstory that they evolved from household blender robots but I'
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Then there's the camera shot length. If you keep switching the point of view around, make it last at least 3 or 4 seconds so we actually know what we're looking at, and from where.
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A good comparison is Bourne Identity VS Bourne Supremacy, in the former he finds a guy in his apartment, swiftly breaks the guys arm and kicks the shit out of him. It's a great scene and despite being relatively short is quite well put together. In the
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Doing close up shots saved the CGI budget for just a few of the really expensive ones. There's a finite amount of money available, so they used the cover of "gritty" to cover the budget. There's nothing wrong with it, the way it was done looks more like a news camera trying to follow (like how in Battlestar ships bob in and out of frame all the time) In reality of war/news footage the "money shot" you don't always get.. they played the same games here. It wasn't bad, they pulled it off, bu
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Agreed. There's basicly two forms of shooting:
1) The "in persona" shooting
2) The "godlike" shooting
The first is great for movies where you're trying to sell someone's story. Doesn't mean you can't overview shots, but that's really more like setting up the scene. E.g. "Saving private Ryan". Here it's perfectly acceptable to be handheld and sh
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That's a major problem in a lot of recent movies. It's like some idiot in Hollywood is teaching that "if 95% of the screen moves, people will think it is more actionny."
The worst offender I can think of for this one is Bourne Supremacy. 30 minutes into that film I had my eyes closed because the constant shaky-cam was giving me a headache. Hell, I could give my baby brother a bottle full of red cordial and video camera and he'd shoot a steadier shot.
300, on the other hand, did their action scenes perfectly. The high-speed action interspersed with slow-motion scenes let you see what was actually going on, and at the same time gave a tremendous feeling of the pace of the b
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I think the guys at Penny Arcade have an idea or two [penny-arcade.com]...
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-matthew
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All of which means that my 9 year old son and his friends aren't going to go see it, which is a shame because they're bigger fans than I ever was. I guess we'll just ren
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I suspect they had a lot of trouble deciding that. Should they make a campy fun movie for people in their 20s who are nostalgic for the days when they played with the plastic toys? Or should they make a kids movie for people who may be fans of the toy line today? From what I've heard (though I haven't actually seen it), they tried and failed at both. Its rated too high for kids today (ok, I know theaters don't always honor ratings that strictly, but if you target audience is 10 year old kids, you need t
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I saw the movie, and the only plausible explanation that it would have been rated R is because of the usage of the word 'shit.' A lot of the actors end up saying that a good number of times, including one soldier saying (not verbatim, just off the top of my head)
"Man oh man, if you can see this shit.."
"Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!" - someone being chased by a Decepticon
"Oh..shit" - when one of the transformers dies - mostly for humor effect
There is no nudity, but there are some body shots that em
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Since when is "plausible" much of an issue for kids? Even today? Hell, ESPECIALLY today. The CG effects in movies today are ANYTHING but plausible. I can barely even watch them sometimes because they're just so over-the-top stupid.
The original Transformers was never
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sri
Re:Now, if only... (Score:4, Insightful)
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When you see scenes like this [transformersmovie.com] during a moment that was far from funny, I wondered where they were taking this movie. That scene includes (in the movie) a fantastic long shot of a gunship firing and circling on the robot, but to mix it with camp comedy is a tragic mistake for American cinema.
The portrayal of a top secret government agency as keystone cops and a FBI raid that might as well have inc
Re:Now, if only... (Score:4, Informative)
I get the impression that that scene is actually not meant to be as comedy value as it would seem - that actually happened during the US Invasion of Grenada in 1984 - ground forces were pinned down in the Governor-Generals mansion on the island, unable to contact the fire support aircraft overhead nor other units to request support. In the end, one of the soldiers placed a credit card call to Fort Bragg in the US in order to request a fire support mission and he got the same run around by the operator.
I had the exact opposite experience (Score:5, Insightful)
It was a mindless action movie and there is nothing wrong with that. Certain "critics" act like every movie needs to have some deep philosophical meaning.
I wanted to see giant space alien robots beat the crap out of each other and the movie delivered in spades. You claim that most of the action shots are already in trailers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Apparently you missed the last half of the entire movie.
To me it's as if you went to a fireworks show and are now complaining that they didn't take the time to explain the type and origin of each and every shell that was ignited.
Myself, I prefer to just enjoy the show. If I want the meaning of life I'll pick up Kant.
Re:I had the exact opposite experience (Score:5, Funny)
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Look! I can explain! I--
[smack]
JUDITH:
No! Let me explain, Mrs. Cohen!
MANDY:
Who--
JUDITH:
Your son is a born leader. Those people out there are following him because they believe in him, Mrs. Cohen. They believe he can give them hope-- hope of a new life, a new world, a better future!
MANDY:
Who's that?!
BRIAN:
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Isn't there some kind of middle ground? I suppose there's nothing wrong with just going to a movie to see things go "boom", but why can't it be a decent movie in addition to that? There's a lot of room between random sensory stimulation and "meaning of life", why must they all rush to the very extreme of that spectrum? (I'm guessing laziness, but I could be wrong...)
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Not every movie that walks the middle is good though. I don't think there's a % based formula that leads to a great movie.
It either works or it doesn't.
I was entertained by Transformers due to the sprinkling of lighthearted comedy on a base of pure action. The iconic nature of the film certainly helped, but regardless I was throughly entertained for 2 ho
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You can have both. I think it's an obvious example, but look at Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. One difference between your fireworks example and this movie is that fireworks shows are ephemeral. The movie, as opposed to being a one-off, is going to be around for a long time.
At the beginning, I was a little irritated by the guys' derision for Spanish. I put it aside and thought "ok maybe it'll come back and bite them in the ass later" but I don't remember that happening. What do you expect from this ki
Re:I had the exact opposite experience (Score:5, Funny)
Though as someone that has never seen that movie I'm only guessing as to the type of hot movie action you find satisfying.
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Were people clapping at the end of the movie? Is this normal where you live?
I don't know, maybe it's normal in some cultures, but I still can't get past people clapping after the plane lands -- if I though landing a plane was some work of art, I would never have boarded!
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Apparently you've never tried to land a plane before!
-matthew
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I cannot speak for the person that posted, but I've seen a number of movies and this is the first time I've been to one where the audience was genuinely entertained. Maybe it was because of childhood nostalgia or maybe it was because it was midnight and people were anxious to let loose, but the movie had everybody hooked right from the first scene. When the Blackout scene ended, people started clapping. More clapping when Optim
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Were people clapping at the end of the movie? Is this normal where you live?
I've been to a few movies where this happened, the latest one being spiderman 3. It's a pet peeve of mine. Every single time it happens I want to yell out, "the actors can't hear you clapping, you morons"
It's fine for people to like something. It's fine for them to be excited, and it's just dandy for them to show it. However, I don't understand how you do that by CLAPPING. Who are you clapping to??
And yeah, you can guess how I feel about people clapping when a plane lands...
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Because they're douchebags?
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I'll bet you're one of those bastards who doesn't applaud when his taxi arrives at its destination either.
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The first time I experienced the applause thing was after _Phantom Menace_, at which point me, my wife and our friends all wondered if people were clapping because the long nightmare was finally over.
And _Phantom Menace_ was bet
Your explanation for shittyness, sir (Score:3)
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Did anybody else notice the little dig on volkswagon
You just explained what's wrong with movies today (Score:2)
But it gets worse over the years, it seems. Another thing you said is a big problem of today's movies: All the good scenes are already in the trailers. You almost get the feeling that movies today consist of a handful of g
Re:You just explained what's wrong with movies tod (Score:2)
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So I stopped complaining about having to sit through trailers for 5 movies whenever I go to watch one. For the price of one, I get to see six!
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"So now Trekkies can have their fond memories assraped, too."
Already happened. I haven't been able to sit on a hard chair since Voyager. But thanks for the concern.
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Now that that's out of the way, the dialogue wasn't masked by the humour, because the humour was shit. It was bottom
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Re:Why movies suck so much now. (Score:5, Funny)
I think there's a similar problem in Hollywood: we have a group of people obsessed with drama (rather than telling a story) to the point that we end up with a bunch of scenes that are nothing but overly dramatic and annoying. They've got drama soaking their brains and all I can think is "sit on my face, bitch!"
Well, maybe that's more my problem since I lack a girlfriend currently. Still, I think the point stand: Hollywood needs to give out free women at movies.
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Oh, hush. You had me at "still".
Megan Fox (Score:2)
While oogling Megan Fox throughout the movie, this is all I could think of, too.
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That's what happens when you sit around and bitch, loser.
It's a movie, not a political dialog. Not a scientfic experiment. A movie. It's meant to be watched, and enjoyed, and possibly re-watched.
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No, in fact what I do is I just don't go to see these films anymore. Blockbuster profit margins are getting squeezed all the time. I wonder if it's because less people are going. I wonder if this is because they're not very good.
> It's a movie, not a political dialog. Not a scientfic experiment. A movie. It's meant to be watched, and enjoyed, and possibly re-watched.
I don't expect a political dialog. I do expect a film that doesn't suck. I enj
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Peter
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