Technology Behind “Transformers: Age of Extinction”

After the successful installment of the “Transformers: Dark of the Moon”, the forth part of “Transformers” which is named as “Transformers: Age of Extinction” is finally announced by the Paramount Pictures whose director and producer are Micheal Bay and Steven Spielberg. The plot of this film continues as a mechanic single father (Mark Wahlberg) and his daughter (Nicola Peltz) make a discovery, which will bring down Autobots and Decepticons in this world and also a paranoid government official on them. The plot and casting of this film are totally different from the previous sequel. That’s why this is the first film in franchise which won’t be featured the original cast of its predecessors.

Industrial light & magic (ILM) is the main visual effects company produced for Dark of the Moon and they will work for this film as well. ILM has been working on the pre-visualization before the principle photography started. Digital Domain also rendered in this film for many shots including some characters and the Decepticon protoforms concealed in the film. Scott Farrar, visual effects supervisor of ILM said that their ambitious effects for this film was not only made the Dark of the Moon, but also they would designed it in 3D. He also explained that they tried to make sure things as bright as possible, so Michael called up theatre owners to keep the lamps bright, made everything little sharper which would also apply in this film to make every character so much realistic. In the previous film, Farrar embraced the detail in creating giant robots in 3D; he explained that everyone would see all details in the nooks and crannies of these pieces which were totally unlike a plain surface subject. He also said that the style of Bay’s cinematography helped his team to integrate the robots in the scene. So in this film he will apply this strategy to make the film better than before.

 In the previous film, the most complicated effects involved the “Driller” which was look like a giant snake creature with an eel-like body and spinning rotator blades, knives and teeth. To make this destroying robot in CG technology, it took 288 hours per frame. ILM relied on its internal property physics simulation engine to depict the sequences including the destruction of the building which is combined with the breaking concrete floors, walls, windows, columns and pieces of office furnishings scenes. Nigel Summer, digital production supervisor of ILM said that they did a lot of tests early on figuring out the scene of breaking building because the floor would be made to be concrete which is difficult to see fracture in tears apart. But they had done a really good job. They looked at how a building would blow apart and then chose the best tool to achieve the properties. They hoped that they would apply the same strategy in this film for making this type of sequences realistic.

For the scenes in Chicago, ILM’s visual effects team used aerial plates of city’s actual buildings and destructions elements like smoke, fire, debris, fighter planes, war, battles and torn up streets. They ensure that they will do same in this film for these scenes. For making this type of scenes, they traveled to the location and photograph the buildings from top to bottom at different times of the day in order to create a digital model of the city which will be used in this film. As Bay shoots all his films in anamorphic format but Dark of the Moon’s representation were squeezed into distort the image and ILM added in the robots and un- distort the image. For variety of filming formats, he used single camera, 3D stereo rigs with two cameras, anamorphic and spherical lenses which proved to be a challenge for delivering the 2D plates to the companies for 3D conversion. For making this film Bay will do the same thing.

Paramount Pictures and Michael Bay are trying to deliver a new mechanical world to the viewers and show them new technology through the series of Transformers. According to this theme, they will show a new mechanical and 3D animated world through “Transformers: Age of Extinction”. The leading renderfarm will give them a big hand for their brilliant jobs. Fox Renderfarm with vray render farm is one of the leading online rendering service providers, which is equipped with the top-level hardware specs. We are not a production company, instead we are an online rendering service provider, which mean the production companies all over the world can benefit from the rendering services we offer. It is our point to make contributions to the development of CGI.