Chapter 10: Bringing Transformers to Life
A single Transformer is made up of thousands of separate pieces that combine to make a living machine. That is a fair assessment of how Michael Bay put together the film "Transformers." The famously meticulous director laid out his grand vision, assembled its many thousand pieces and kept his eye on each and every one of them as he moved through the development process during which the pieces were manipulated by hundreds of technical experts under Bay's masterful command.
Then, once he had his mass-production factory set up just the way he liked it, he proceeded to guide his troops toward creating the ultimate action fun ride - a giddy, transcendental process of blowing things up on an epic scale.
When word got out in the CG community that Bay was going to make a live-action epic out of the concept of the early '80s action figures, legions of long-time fans turned FX workers migrated to ILM to be a part of the process. Some, like Scott Benza, the film's animation supervisor (“I'm responsible for a team of animators injecting life into the digital characters in the film”) were Transformers fans as preteens when the toy line first hit the shelves. Getting to play with these toys for a living became the realization of his particular kind of “American Dream.”
“As a kid I definitely thought there really wasn't anything cooler than a vehicle that could transform into a robot,” he says. “So, when I heard that Michael Bay was going to be making a movie adaptation of the original property, I definitely wanted to be involved, as did a large group of the animators here at ILM. Many of the animators came to ILM specifically with the goal of working on this feature. So I was happy to see that a lot of them also got to live out their childhood dream to be a part of this project."
And what do these “dream-weavers” actually get to do? There were several different divisions to Bay's army, with the animators coming into play around the middle of the process. First there were phalanxes of conceptual artists who thought up the mechanisms - how these man-made “characters" would look and move. Then there were virtual mechanics who fabricated the machine parts and figured out how those parts would fit together. And then came the animators, the computer-generation "Gepettos" who actually breathed life into them.
“If you want to relate it to real-world terms,” Benza adds, “it's like there's a group of people who build the puppets, and then we are the puppeteers, only in this case it's more of a virtual sense in which all of it happens in the computer. There's nothing tangible to touch. Everyone works through a computer screen; a group of people build it, then we make it move and make the digital characters act.”
From a performance standpoint, how does one deal with the mechanical film stars' facial expressions and make them move believably through the film's intense action sequences? Well, one way was to get into Michael Bay's head and find out who these characters are. Bay communicated his wishes by citing characters or performers from previous movies who embodied characteristics he wanted for his Transformers characters, then filtered their personas through his vision of what the original cartoon and the original Transformers property dictated. According to Benza, “Michael J. Fox in `Back to the Future' was the character Michael modeled around Bumblebee. Liam Neeson, in several of his movie roles, was a good fit for us to start thinking about Optimus Prime. And there were a few other examples he gave us that he thought would be a starting point in the development of the characters.”
From that beginning, the animator's job was to consider the laws of physics - mass and weight - in determining how the characters would move. And then, after that, to throw out the laws of physics and make them move the way Michael Bay thought they should. In Bay's vision these 50-foot-tall behemoths moved through space with the agility of martial arts masters - agile warriors who travel in a very fluid, elegant way. Bay was very specific that the robots had to be large warriors who weren't constrained by their size.
The animators discovered that the closer things got to the camera, the faster they could move, and when they got further out, “we had to really kind of slow things down and keep them contained into a reasonable amount of speed to help sell their weight,” Benza said.
The kind of realism that Bay's team of techno-geeks achieved would not have been possible as recently as three years ago, prior to the advent of the ultra-high resolution functions that are the hallmark of today's 64-bit supercomputers. Hilmar Koch, ILM's TD Supervisor, worked on the effects and lighting of the robots after principal photography was completed. His task was to make the action look super-real by replacing the images in the computer with details that were created digitally.
“Michael is very focused on the realism of the scene,” Koch says. “A lot of effort goes into rebuilding the scene in pretty much the identical way it was when Michael did his photography on set. We have a number of people from ILM who go to set - where they take not only measurements but record everything that is important to us in the scene. And then they bring the data back to us. From this, one thing we found out about our Transformers was that they were just not of a high enough resolution. So we took them from what was maybe 500 pixels to 8,000 pixels -- 16 times higher -- in resolution just to build up the environments. And that was an absolute necessity in order to get the robots to look the way they do in the movie.
“We're at a stage now where we can mimic real-life lighting well enough and the computer offers us some additional controls on top of that,” Koch continues. “Or exactly the type of realism that Michael calls `pings' -- reflections of light sources in car panels or on little bits of chrome. We can just say, `you know what? I want a highlight right there' - and it's done.”
The level of sophistication that Bay's technical crews have achieved -- iridescent, lacquer-coated car finishes, colossal explosion scenes with robots that do their thing in previously unrealizable settings such as sandstorms, big hulking machines that interact with humans as if both species had equally compelling personalities - has set a new benchmark in what is possible in movies.And that could prove to be the film's major drawing card.
“People in the special effects community have taken notice,” says Farrar. “They have been very flattering, saying that this is maybe akin to a new level of advancement for the type of work we do, similar to what `Jurassic Park' was in its day. A big part of what we had to think about was if these guys were real, then how would they move? What would they look like? Animation and physics automatically came into it. But Michael Bay is the type of guy who also wants to make it look good at the same time, which I fully subscribe to. So if it doesn't look cool, and it doesn't look great in the shot, you have to do it differently. You might start with heavy robots, but we've all seen heavy robots -- that's boring. We wanted to make something that was much more elegant. That means you're not always gonna abide by what a big heavy object would do because we wanted to have fighters that could maneuver in ways no one had ever seen before. It's a lot like the way we think of Hong Kong-style filmmaking in which you have the actors moving on wires.”
Another fun aspect of a Michael Bay film is blowing things up, taking the little hobby-modeling pieces that were so painstakingly assembled and scattering them across the board. Bay likes to do things down and dirty, so he has his legions of painters and compositors go in and put some grime on a finish here, some dust on a chassis there. It's called realism, and that's the way he likes it. The job of the digital compositing supervisor Patrick Tubach was to oversee the actual layering of the shots. “We started with a background plate that was shot in production. And then we took computer-generated elements and added them to the shot,” says Tubach. “But you have to make them look as if they were shot together, and that's where the compositor comes in. They make it look photographic. They take the computer-generated stuff and create the illusion that everything was shot on the same day at the same time. And that these robots, who aren't even real, were actually there. Ultimately, the quality of the final shot falls on the compositor and the compositing supervisor.
“Trying to make things look real is what it comes down to,” he continues. “And adding that stylized look that, sometimes, the director is looking for. You don't get that until you get in there and start actually adding some artistry on top of everything that was shot.”
Tubach mentions one of his favorite scenes to illustrate his point. It's the sequence in which Blackout, in the form of a Sikorsky MH-53 Pave Low helicopter, lays waste to an Army base in the desert. Blackout arrives at the base and this is the first time we actually see him in contact with humans. “He's kind of a one-man army taking out the entire base by himself,” says Tubach. “And so our instruction on this shot was just that he has this weapon, we're not exactly sure what it is, but it's a really devastating weapon.
“At first we thought that maybe it would be something like an electromagnetic pulse that knocks out electrical devices. But when you think about that visually, that's not the most exciting thing to look at. So we said, `OK, how do we make it a little more alien and make it look really exciting?' So we started thinking about some sort of plasma wave that Blackout has. It's a pretty devastating weapon. He just fires into the ground and the thing mushrooms out around him. Visually we thought it looked very striking because it sort of vaporizes everything in its path.
“After looking at atomic bomb footage, we noticed that a lot of dust streams away from the center of the impact and kind of keeps going. So we added a lot of that into the shots. And then everything that he hits, everything that's in the scene ahead of time, ends up just crumbling. All that's left are the carcasses of the vehicles. The rest is kind of blown away and has a lot of energy. And that's one thing that, you know, Michael was excited about, that when Blackout lands and hits the ground it's just complete devastation from that moment on.”
Bay and his compositing team were only just beginning to wreak havoc. To achieve the mayhem that followed, they played with the timing of the footage they shot. “We ended up re-timing a lot of things to get the glass to break exactly when we wanted it to,” continues Tubach. “We re-arranged things on the ground to create a more pleasing composition. We had a shot in a tower looking out at vehicles on the tarmac and we back timed the explosion to hit exactly when we wanted them to hit. We also wanted to keep the charges that were going off in the middle because we thought they looked great. But we had to make the moment of impact with the ground meet them. So we compressed time on the whole shot until it fit and did just what we wanted it to do. A lot of the tents hidden in the back were elements we added just so we'd have more stuff to destroy. We wanted to see more things breaking apart and flying out of frame.”
According to Tubach, part of the joy of working on a Michael Bay movie is that it enables the effects crew to work on epic-sized shots. “We knew when we started this that we wanted to have this wave roll through and blow everything up. But still, that leaves a lot of room for interpretation. One thing we were excited about in that sequence is that first, something amazing happens and then something amazing happens again, and then something else even more amazing happens. It just keeps coming at you. You have this wave, and you're staring at it, and then there's another one and another one. We're really proud of all the work that went into it. The majority of those objects were there. And we were just having them to wipe them out and blow them to bits. Everything that happens after the pulse blast goes off is just completely fabricated all the way down to the ground plane.”
Building things up to blow them to smithereens with dash and panache could be called an aesthetic for the new era. Add to this brew the artistry of some real relationships, in which Shia LaBeouf displays some real acting chops and the animated machines match him riff for riff, and you have a cinematic energy force to contend with. All of it, says Farrar, is very purposefully achieved by an accomplished crew who keep pushing the envelope. “I've seen in my own career the different levels of progress that have been made,” he says, “and I come from a photographic background. A lot of the artists on my crew -- some 350 people now come from CG, as well as other kinds of backgrounds. It's taken a long time for the software and the artistic perceptions to get up to this new level where we are now. How do you make brass look like brass? How do you make a car part look like a real painted finish where it's got the metal flake finish in it and the clear coat on top of it? We've got all that. That takes a high degree of artistry and technical support. We have really hit a new high-water mark with this movie.”
“For a movie of this scale, scope and complexity, we completed it under a very tight schedule,” Ian Bryce says, “which doesn't take away from how richly textured it appears. Between the sets, the vehicles and the extraordinary ground breaking technology of the effects, it will be an exciting adventure for audiences.”
“I'm nervous for my grandmother to see this film,” LaBeouf laughs.“I hope she doesn't have a grand mal in the middle of the theatre, there's so much going on in this movie. But beyond the hardware, it's about the story. 'Transformers' really is a classic American tale.”
“Michael Bay doesn't make small pictures,” states Spielberg. “There's even more production value in this one than in `Armageddon' and `Pearl Harbor', in my humble opinion. It's scary and dark when it has to be, and it's surprisingly humorous in all the right places.”
As for Spielberg's favorite Transformer, it's a toss up between “my father figure, Optimus Prime and Bumblebee,” he says, “but Bumbleebee wins out because you can drive him and sometimes he takes a turn and drives you.
“I'm really proud of `Transformers,' and the contributions of every person who worked on this film,” Spielberg says. “I hope “Transformers” is the first in an enduring franchise.”
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