Arinn blog: movies

      I didn't have much interest in seeing Transformers, but watching the trailers, I've immediately realised it will have all sort of special effects. Some of my friends said they will skip this movie, so i conformed to it, and watched the movie all by myself at a late hour so no ray of light would penetrate my windows to reflect on my computer screen, and only because i wanted to enjoy the special effect of this movie.
The huge visual effects movie Transformers racked up the biggest July 4th single-day gross in box office history, $26 million, beating the $22 million of Spider-Man 2 in 2004. By the end of the week Transformers stood at a whopping $153 million.

      Some of the most important actors in any giant robots film are, of course, the giant robots. The alien robots hide in plain sight by transforming themselves into ordinary-looking machines. The conversion process, from cars and planes to biped robots, is mesmerizing and convincing. Director Michael Bay kept throwing the robots back to ILM demanding they look more real. He wanted the robots absolutely photo-realistic. The robots look amazing, whether flying through the air, burrowing through the sand, or running down the highway. While the robots had to be created digitally, Bay prefers using real tanks and airplanes over faking it using blue screen visual effects. The military gear is expensive and there’s lots of it, lots more than Apocalypse Now. It’s the biggest military coordination with a motion picture ever.

      From what i have read about this movie, it took approximately 38 hours for the animators Industrial Light & Magic to render one frame of the CGI animation to portray the Transformers. This breaks the record set by Weta Workshop for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), where it took 20 hours to animate a frame of CGI to portray the Ent Treebeard.
This definitely means something, but i am really curious if it was harder to render then the scenes with the Sandman from the Spider Man 3. I know for sure that it's is extremely hard to simulate sand on an animation. For example, the people working at Spider Man 3, they had a team working for 2 years on understanding the sand particles principles and emulate those on computer. Can't beat that !
      Even though it was supposedly written by Transformers fans, the script was lacking. Since the focus is on the humans, Optimus Prime & co. are little more than scenery; nice-looking eye candy of scenery, but scenery nonetheless. And few films have such shameless product placement as Transformers does; at least 30 minutes of the film could be removed and used as a car commercial. Most characters are poorly developed or poorly written to begin with, especially the Transformers themselves. Their dialogue is hopelessly cheesy; and not good action-movie cheesy, these lines are cringe-worthy.

      A friend asked me what my favorite part of the movie was and I said "Megan Fox." Few actresses today, of any age, have the looks that she does at nineteen. She was the cast's highlight, even among all of the big names like Jon Voight and John Turturro, because few of the actors, as talented as they are elsewhere, here just don't seem to want to put out the effort needed: we have the robots, right? Why act? The same mentality doomed the Star Wars prequels.

      Overall, I'd say this was one to miss. Nearly everyone involved has something better available on the table, and Transformers fans will always have the original cartoon and comic book series.

      The Tools

      Transformers uses six Meridian Avids on Unity with about 2 terabytes of storage. A Nitris is used for all screenings including their preview. There are three main edit rooms, a fourth system in a closet, the assistants have two systems, and director Michael Bay has one. There’s a Media Net hook-up used for daily transmissions between ILM and Bay.

“For 3d modeling ILM used mostly Maya, 3ds Max, Zeno and zBrush,” says Farrar. “For lighting and rendering we use Zeno with RenderMan and Mental Ray. For compositing it's all Shake along with our Sabre systems, and editing uses Avids.”

      The Visual Effects

      There are about 630 visual effects shots in the film. There are 430 executed at ILM, 91 at Digital Domain, 70 at the Asylum and the rest are 2D clean up and fixes done by CO3, ISolve and Ken Blackwell. Technical advancements were made in environments, lighting, and simulation of physical effects and integration of CG characters in a real environment.

      “ILM did the bulk of the 3-D robots,” notes Scantlebury. “Incredible work, given the pressure of turning in shots up to the last minute…hold on…we just ordered two more 3-D shots three weeks before final delivery. Digital Domain picked up the rest, including turning a soft-drink machine into a crazed aluminum
can shooting Robot.”
      “Overall, the most challenging shot is OH020 which is a 360 degree descending camera move on Optimus that rotating around to reveal all four Autobots transforming in an alley”, says ILM visual effects supervisor Scott Farrar. “The shot was filmed in two separate camera moves from two separate rigs: a Russian arm mounted to a camera car and a 50-foot Technocrane. The plates were combined and blended. The 768-frame-long shot moves from an overhead medium close up on Optimus finishing his transformation, into an extreme close up of all the moving parts, then widening out to reveal our hero talent. Shia and Megan watch all four robots individually transform with their own unique style.”

      Challenges in 5.1 Music Editing

      Quicktimes for the sound and music department were output via a firewire connection from a DVCAM deck into Final Cut Pro. “At a certain point we were called upon to screen the movie repeatedly and without notice, with a 5.1 soundtrack,” says Rubell. “We had a 5.1 temp but were making complicated picture changes around the clock. There was no time to get back to the stage to update the tracks. So I conceived of a way to make changes and screen 5.1 out of the Avid. We mixed down the 24-track stems into their respective left, center, right, surround, and low-frequency families. We then group-clipped the individual stems with their mixdowns. We edited with the mixdowns, and when it came time to screen, we expanded back to 5.1 by switching the grouped mixdowns back to their component stems. We then mixed the stems down into a 5.1 configuration and exported that to the Nitris. It worked flawlessly, except that after a few weeks of endless group-clip switching my crew threatened to kill me. I was forced to shelve the system until Avid comes up with a way to globally switch, from mark-in to mark-out, the clips on a given audio track.”