Then I asked a pet question, about how much magic tricks are part of what they do? “Always. Cheating, sleight of hand, tomfoolery, whatever, always. And misdirection. That’s a very important point. But that’s the great thing about Michael. He does something we advocate strongly. He’s always thinking about where the eye goes in the frame. It’s like a Rembrandt. We dig around for all sorts of references - how you light, and the contrast and color, depth of field. We do all these things to get people to look at the right part of the frame. And maybe over here isn’t quite so important. It doesn’t mean we can’t finish it off. But there are things you’re looking at all the time. Bay told us he likes to shoot his films dirty and messy. Most directors won’t do the time to get all the set-ups. With Skorponok coming out of the sand, he had primacord blowing up sand and carpet, and all those things are a tremendous asset, so we can use that to build upon. And he shot most everything that way, and even if we covered it later, at least we had something.”

Which led to a question about plate work. Are they doing less clean passes for effects? “We do a lot, we squeeze it in. Michael will have a fit cause he’s already setting up the next shot. It’s always like that. But that’s creative flux. He respects that, because we need what we need. We try and do as little as possible to impact him. You talk about what the shot is, you shoot it, and either he wants something different, or it’s close enough. It’s all about the relationship, and our job is to not disappoint, or break the sacred trust with the director.”

And what was the film that got you hooked on effects? “Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. I grew up in the San Francisco area so I didn’t see all the Harryhousen films, but that was the one I heard a little bit about and wanted to see it. That impacted me because Sci-Fi films cheated, and Ray didn’t cheat. It would be a long take, and he wouldn’t cut away all the time, and the shots were great. You have to have that love, cause there’s still a little magic involved.”

Next we moved on to Russell Earl, the Associate Visual Effects Supervisor, who wasted no time dispelling any illusions.

“There we some time spent worrying about the doors. Then we realized that worrying about that was fruitless. We played to the camera, we were doing a lot of what I call ‘break it til it works.’ The illusion is there that cars are turning into robots, but there was a lot of cheating going on. We started with the first transformation, Shockwave’s transformation (the first one in the film, with the helicopter), and after that we went ‘whoa’ cause if that was the starting point. There we started with a clean plate, with actors firing right at the actors, but in the final shot we added a big light in the back to add lens flares, and that’s all stuff you don’t get for free. You’ll do a shot like this and spend several days just getting the highlights just right, and that’s something Michael’s really cognizant of, and that’s stuff you’ve got to back in and do. And during the freeway transformation, it was real dirty, but it gives a great starting point. It’s difficult rendering-wise, because Optimus and Bonecrusher have to be rendered together. We added sparks in, but one of the most difficult things to light is a car. You see it in commercials, it’s all about reflection; how the environment is reflected in it. But as soon as it transforms… the highlights from the sun, smoke effects, sparks when they hit, sparks everywhere. We have a library of smoke, fire and debris, and we then say ‘we need to find some smoke that looks like that.’ But you have to find what looks right for the day. We exploded a Furby truck, and they really blew it up, and if you look carefully in that scene, they’re all real Furbys. We blew all the Furby’s out, and we did it in a real LA street. And Michael’s not afraid to blow stuff up, so he does, and everything looks great. And we were standing around, and we saw hundreds of Furbys lingering. And you see smoke rising off the ledge, and we were stuck with all these burning Furbys up on the sides of the buildings. You get the street littered with Furbys. We were lucky enough to get some of the Furbys. Real explosions, real fire, real smoke. Real Furbys.”

As for the original Transforming characters “If you take what everyone wanted to see, it wouldn’t have been interesting. The animation guys drove the performance, but there was a lot of collaboration. These guys were so much harder to light than dinosaurs. But with something like these robots, if the sun is where it is - because they’re so reflected - there’s so much concern about what’s reflected back. We have to go back and figure out what Michael Bay would do, and so we’d add reflection cards, and you sort of have to pretend what he’d do. We had really never done hard surface models that were so reflective, and so real. And by the end we could nail it. It got to be more fun. We knew what we wanted. And so much to add, so much bling. We were pretty close to the wire, I terms of the release date, because the models were so complex. Around Christmas time Michael came up for a visit, and we were intent on building the robots. But until shooting wrapped, Michael would be in a shooting car, and he’d look at it, but he was focused on shooting the movie. It wasn’t until he came up here that he really focused on what we were doing. We needed to Jazz up our robots. It compressed our schedule to the end.”

I asked if that’s the way F/X films are going “It seems to be. There are so many compressed schedules. The directors can’t focus on the F/X works until shooting’s done, and decisions can’t be made until the end. But by then we knew what we needed to do. We want good shots, we do. There’s a lot of time where you send things down and there’s thing to fix, but we have producers to make sure we get it done. We did a lot of CGI debris, we do more and more of it, though it’s mostly done practically. It’s not just to be able to pull really good blue-screen, it’s about getting the guys to interact with the shot. The roto crew really shined on this one, because there was so little blue-screen.”

In seeing demonstrations of what was shot, the crunches of robots was highly choreographed. I asked if they had to work around those real crunches with their fake robots. “I was shocked because they would shoot these… they’d shoot these plates thinking ‘how would we shoot these’ and a lot of times I would try and keep up. The animators did an amazing job… I was continually amazed how it all worked. And it was a lot of hard work. There wasn’t a lot of pasting. In some cases we re-timed or extended shots, but that was about it. Michael knows what he wants to see. But his and our mantra was ‘It has to be cool.’ We also put a lot of little nods to the fans. I have to say I wasn’t a big fan as a kid, but there are people here who are.”

And then on to Animation supervisor Scottt Benza. “I learned a lot about Michael on Pearl Harbor, but I didn’t know how creature animation would go. From that you could judge there would be different styles of animation, from Frenzy to Optimus. We knew the transformations would be difficult. We trusted what Michael wanted to see. We faced similar challenges on Hulk, but we had different challenges. Michael wanting things to effect the environment, but we also had slow motion. We were able to scale things. Michael eventually looked forward to shot ideas. He wanted to collaborate. He’d turn things over to us once we got started working on things. With Michael, it’d be ‘Put a robot in the frame in a cool way’ which worked and helped us develop character. I compare him to a really strict parent. If you get an A, no big deal, but if it wasn’t perfect… you get an earful. And you don’t want that. And so development got back on track.”

So how much, then, of someone like Jazz was the animators? “It’s not traditional. We went back to the original cartoons, and Jazz was originally street savvy. After that, we work to the voice actors, but then we try to match that while they put their own spin on it. In computer graphics, there’s a term called a wedge, and that’s a pretty broad term, so we go from something simple to something elaborate, and Michael would tell us how far we could go with showboating. He really liked long lenses, which worked for us. In motion it’s a lot better. We tested facial movements, to which I had discussion with Mike and they were pretty quick. He said he wanted lips. End of story.”

They then showed us Optimus with test moth movements mimicking Liam Neeson (from Kingdom of Heaven), Al Pacino and Robert De Niro (from Heat) and Peter O’Toole (from Lawrence of Arabia). “Scorponok, we didn’t have to show a lot of facial movements, but we did have to show movement. There we got rely on the computers. They would show movement. The computer was good at showing how to get to the finish line faster. Michael likes to shoot on the fly, and change things on location, and you have to make the best of what he shoots. Luckily we have a digital matte team that can recreate what wasn’t there. For most of the performances, the animators were called on to shoot their own footage. And it works for 90% of the shots, but stuntmen would perform out a lot of the actions. And to save time, Michael shot a lot of the references. But we were very shot specific. So having Mike there was very time-saving. We had to get everything to read, so slow motion was very useful to get things right. We had about 35 animators for about a year and a half. It wasn’t hard to get the crew. Everybody was a fan, so a lot of animators told us it was rewarding. A lot of people came in with preconceived notions about Bay but they left with respect. They don’t necessarily agree with his behavior all the time… but they left with respect.”