[00:00] Did you know that the Transformers movies are at the point where they're hiring entire teams of VFX experts just to create single sequences and that for some shots they had to create entire environments down to the smallest detail just so they can blow them up in the movie?
[00:16] They've been a marvel of VFX wizardry for going on 16 years. So let's take a look at some of these movies with and without the amazing VFX. Okay, so director Michael Bay moves fast and that's a huge understatement.
[00:30] We got 150 setups in three days. He's known for being an intense dude and pushing the actors and the crew to their limits but part of that could be because Bay knows how long the VFX is gonna take.
[00:43] Devastator, the guy that tears the pyramid apart, took 72 hours of frame to render. So he's got to make sure the actual filming part moves hella fast so the VFX team can get to work. Of course that doesn't mean Michael Bay can have a little fun too.
[00:57] Check out this shot of him in the passenger seat of a truck as it gets run through by a transformer. We can see him and the driver act out their reaction on a green screen and then get added into the exploding truck. Speaking of how long VFX takes, another time consuming aspect of the process
[01:14] is getting the scale and the scope of these creatures to fit into the reality of the movie. Here's a great sequence showing how the VFX team from Age of Extinction put together assets of various sizes into a shot so that the huge ship would contrast with the smaller, though
[01:29] still pretty frickin big, transformer. And here's a sequence showing the way they put together in Age of Extinction scene, basically creating a huge room out of nothing. And of course they also added transformers into the environment, meaning almost everything
[01:43] you see in the shot was created by the VFX team. And while that was a more static shot, there are plenty of incredible sequences with tons of movement. Here's a breakdown that shows a chase between two transformers in Dark of the Moon, where they not only fight each other,
[01:58] but also as per usual, wreak havoc on the environment around them. In this case, it's cool to see how the VFX team and the producers first used a real truck smashing into cars on the freeway. Then once the aliens were rendered, they replaced the trucks so it looks like the
[02:14] CG creatures were the ones smashing the cars aside. It's also pretty fun to see the vibrant colors they used during the VFX process to distinguish between each CG element. Now sometimes they actually
[02:26] didn't want us to see individual characters, as in the case of the Mega Transformer Devastator. It was made up of six to eight separate Earth moving vehicles, so they needed to be able to create those individual transformers and then seamlessly integrate them into one huge creature.
[02:42] First we needed to build all the vehicles he was constructed out of, and then from all those parts we started to assemble this massive robot Devastator. Interestingly enough, Michael Bay wasn't happy with the lack of details at first when the VFX team presented it. We had to go back and almost double
[02:58] the model in terms of complexity. It wasn't just the characters like Devastator who were larger than life. The assets and the memory it took to create them were huge in the real world. They used more memory and computer space for revenge of the fallen than any other film ILM had ever made.
[03:15] They were so big we used up more memory in space than any other film in the history of the company. Speaking of sheer magnitude of VFX sequences, starting with the revenge of the fallen, they had to hire entire teams just for certain scenes. This was the case with the aircraft carrier
[03:31] sequence. They hired a squad of VFX experts who only worked on that sequence, and on screen, there were thousands of little people put into the aircraft carrier demolition sequence, and the VFX team created them from scratch. They also had to think about everything that would be
[03:47] on the ship and create those just so they could be blown up. So you have to replicate everything that would be in the real world just so you can tear all the pieces. Of course, the people in the movies weren't strictly ones created with CG. The movies are full of actors who have to first act
[04:01] in front of a green screen so that the VFX teams can integrate them into shots in post. Here's a great look at the bridge sequence in dark of the moon, where you get to see the entire sequence take shape. First, we see how the bridge was composited from scratch, and then how they
[04:16] started to fill in the background and the characters. It's a really awesome breakdown of each moment, as the actor is flung from inside the car as it transforms and then caught by the transformer and placed back into the passenger seat when it transforms back into a car.
[04:30] And of course, blowing things up or smashing them to smithereens is a big part of these movies. But when you start to pay attention to the sheer amount of detail they show in each frame, it's pretty mind-blowing. Like this sequence from dark of the moon, where you see both outside and
[04:45] inside the office building as it gets basically anaconda to pieces. You can see they were paying attention to each shard of glass and piece of the building, as well as the various parts of the transformer ripping the building to shreds. Okay, I'm going to go drive my car around and see
[05:00] if there are any buttons that secretly turn it into a speaking alien slash robot. You never know, maybe they hide that button. Have any thoughts about the VFX for transformers? Pop them in the comments.