"If it looks cool, that's where we start."
Transformers is a movie that takes you back 'T - 20' years. It takes the cautious, conditioned Sapien out of you, and rockets the best of fiery armageddon into the forefront of your captive imagination. This movie is perhaps the most believable special effects achievement in movie history. And to whom do we owe all the pleasure to? Industrial Light and Magic (IL&M) of course.
Michael Bay's $150 million adaptation of the legendary 1980s cartoon and toy series includes nearly 50 so-called transformations. Hand-rendered metallic uncorkings of real-life cars, trucks and helicopters represented uncharted territory for the gooey-alien experts at ILM, each transformation taking six months to imagine and each re-engineering the way digital Hollywood does computer graphics imagery (CGI).
For a pivotal fight scene between Bonecrusher and Optimus Prime (two proponents of the cast), the layout team at IL&M used custom software to track a CGI version of the film camera, to continue with real-time, on-the-fly transformations, animators worked with lower-resolution renderers and coordinated with the creature development (bot) team to match up machinery and slot the digital wizardry back into the final cut.
The animation needs of the film were met, by moving the CGI production out of the hands of creature development and onto the desktops of animators. By allowing animators to get the first crack at rigging control — the way a computer-generated character is built, the way it walks and rotates — IL&M's IT team could develop software for custom transformations designed on the fly that might satisfy Bay's notorious flying camera angles. Click a button here, and a flatbed's brake light can pivot into an Optimus Prime punch. Set a control function there, and an alien jetfighter wing can cock into a Megatron claw for any of a half-dozen different scenes.
This is one sweet movie, with several great moments to hearken back to. Two of my favourties being - the desert-action scene where one robotic scorpion shaped character takes out the US Delta force. The second being the Indian call centre, where a bored call-centre attendant tries to talk form to a harried sergeant.
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