Having been the underdog in the race to biggest movie of the summer, Transformers should be moving up the ranks swiftly following last weeks release of two awesome TV spots (which you can see here) and today's bow of three new shots from the film, including one of the metallic marauders knocking several shades of diesel out of each other on a busy highway. Click here to check them out at Yahoo! Movies.
Two things become clear from these shots: These could be the most amazingly photo-real computer effects ever (seriously, look at the reflection in that bus window) and these aren’t the clunky robots of the ‘80s cartoons we know and love. Some might still see this as a problem, but when Empire recently caught up with Michael Bay for an exclusive chat, he told us that this was the only way to do it.
“Look, the cartoons were so amateur, it would look stupid if you actually made that into a model,” Bay told us of updating from the more angular originals. “Our digital models have thousands of moving pieces – they’re spectacular”. And in order to get to the level of detail needed to make the idea of giant lumps of steel stomping around America not patently ridiculous, took a great deal of time. “They’ve never had shots that have gone this long in terms of rendering,” Bay says. In fact, the effects are so intensive that a single frame would take 38 hours to render (that means have all its bells polished and whistles tuned, in layman’s terms). “We literally couldn’t have made this movie three years ago”.
From what we’ve seen so far, we’ve got high hopes that the big screen ‘bots will be a little more spectacular than our seminal Optimus Prime vs Lego bus face off in the sandpit in 1985. And we’re very happy to be reassured that we should be seeing the Michael Bay car chase to end all Michael Bay car chases as the Autobots and Decepticons duke it out in their various forms while screaming down the highway. “Well,” he laughs, “I had to put at least one in!”
For more from Michael Bay and more of the Transformers cast, pick up the new issue of Empire on sale now.