TRANSFORMERS Dark of the Moon: ILM’s magic, in 3D

Industrial Light & Magic visual effects supervisor Scott Farrar and digital production supervisor Nigel Sumner discuss key scenes from Transformers: Dark of the Moon, including Bumblebee catching Sam and the Chicago battle, as well as working in stereo.

Catching Sam

Having delivered ground

breaking work on the first two Transformers films, ILM upped the ante in many areas of this third outing, from the complexity of the characters, the number of transformations, to the simulations, and then made it all work in stereo. No clearer is this evident than in the spectacular shot ‘SD160′. Here, a tumbling Bumblebee, who is evading Decepticons on the highway, ejects Sam from his front passeng

er seat to avoid a gas bottle truck. As the two heroes launch into the air, Bumblebee continues to knock objects out of the way and protect Sam, before grabbing his screaming friend at the las

t second and re-transforming into car-form and driving on.

Shooting for 3D

Dark of the Moon was shot partially with Cameron-Pace Group’s 3D Fusion camera rigs developed by James Cameron’s team for Avatar, and other film and camera systems. It was also partially post-converted. Scott Farrar, for one, embraced the detail and fidelity inherent in creating giant robots for stereo. “I did some tests with the robots,” he says, “where we were close-up on a robot – and you know Optimus Prime has 10,000 pieces – and if you get close-up you see all the details in the nooks and crannies of these pieces. It’s totally unlike a plain surface subject like a human head or an animated head. You see this detail and there’s truly not been a film that would not look as cool as what we’re doing right now.”