Though reviews have been less than kind to the human stars in Michael Bay's mega-budgeted Hasbro toy story, "Transformers," critics have raved over the realism and complexity of the computer graphically created Autobots and Decepticons.
"None of us like phony baloney CG fake stuff," says Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor Scott Farrar ("Cocoon").
For far too long, says Farrar, CG effects' artists and audiences have been too accepting of unrealistic looking computer-rendered special effects. "I kept thinking for a long time that we are dumbing down. There is a patina that's missing. That's why I think this is at least a higher water mark to do everything we can to make it look real."
One of the scenes he's most proud of comes when the Autobots arrive one evening at the house of hero Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf).
The gigantic robots, which include Optimus Prime and Bumblebee, are forced to hide themselves from Witwicky's perplexed parents. Along the way, the robots rip up the garden, stomp on flowers and even find themselves being attacked by the family's pet Chihuahua.
"There is acting involved" on the robots' part, says Farrar, who has worked for George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic for the last 26 years. "There is a lot of humor and very dramatic nighttime lighting."
That's no small thing. After all, these robots don't really exist, and the actors are playing to a screen, with the footage being layered in after the fact. The lighting must match up perfectly on both ends -- from the nighttime sky to the natural reflections off the robots' exterior -- or else it will become painfully obvious to audiences.
"These are all shiny robots and we were lighting these guys as if they were on the set," Farrar said of the robots.
Transforming the Hasbro toy line, which includes the villainous Megatron, into big-screen CG robots took 18 months, new computer programs and more than 300 people at ILM creating the 450 effects shots.
So to describe creating the robots for "Transformers" as complex, is something of an understatement.
"You have extremely challenging problems of manipulating thousands of parts in 3-D space inside the computer," says Farrar. "And at the same time know it has got to look essentially like real robots and real metal."
Farrar says that the robots look so real that audiences might find it hard to understand they were created in the computer. "There are no physical parts whatsoever made in our physical world," says Farrar.
