Mushy Invades ILM for Transformers!

Recently we were invited up to Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) in the Northern part of California's Presidio District to hear from certain Visual Effects people about the Transformers DVD. On tap to talk with us where Scott Farrar who served as the Visual Effects Supervisor and Second Unit Director on the film. We also talked with Associate Visual Effects Supervisor Russell Earl, Animation Supervisor Scott Benza and Creature Technical Director/Digital Production Supervisor Jeff White.The day began when we entered one of the ILM's many theaters and were greeted by Scott Farrar. He opened by telling us that the hardest part of the movie was making "metallic shapes look real." He then explained that there were 10,108 parts and pieces to the Transformers and that all of them "had to be built, connected and painted." In addition to this, director Michael Bay made it clear that he wanted these guys to look like "nimble, ninja warriors" and that he was inspired by a lot of Hong Kong action movies. Over the course of this rigorous production he talked about "never being quite sure if you're going to get there," and that it was the rabid fanbase (and Michael Bay) of this franchise who wanted the robots tFinishing up the day at ILM was Digital Production Supervisor Jeff White. He explained that they shot "tons of reference photos of cars" in order to create the Transformers in the film. For example with Bumble Bee, "Michael wanted the bodies of the robots to look like what you would see under the hood of a car. We would get static pieces and we would have to figure out how to make it move." After this, White showed us some shots of Megatron and explained that "the process of rigging is like bones in the body and each Transformer had 140,000 bones." To make their lives easier they created a process called Dynamic Rigging which allowed all the pieces of one area to move together. "There were a lot of facial transformations... making guns come out of nowhere." Was there a rule to how long each Transformer had to Transform? "It was all based on the shot. It was like solving a Rubik's cube where you pull all the stickers off and then put them in different locations." He then gave us some statistics on the hardware used to make Transformers. Apparently ILM used 5500 computer processors and 220 Terabytes of storage to house it all.o have lips. Farrar also explained that early on they realized that they needed people to understand that there was a difference between a "handrawn movie vs. something real on screen."