Watching Transformers the other day, I made a strange observation. It was the first movie in a very long time that had me gaping at the absolutely jaw-dropping visual effects at work. The first time I had that feeling of being overwhelmed by visuals on screen was probably Jurassic Park. That movie had revolutionary visual effects. Coming back to transformers, one of the most striking features about the visual effects that struck me was the painstaking detail that the guys at ILM had put in to make the visuals as realistic as possible. Granted it was all CG but it was also one of the most stunningly realistic CGs in a long time. So right after watching the movie I went to work to scoop some details about the visual effects detail behind this big screen behemoth. I found this absolutely amazing article in CGSociety.org ( a lovely site). 
The gears meshed perfectly when Alex Jaeger took the position of Art Director for the new film, Transformers. Take an education in automotive design and prototyping, add 12 years experience at ILM and a passion for anything made with a metal plate, and the fit is perfect to launch what is bound to be the next big franchise in film history. In spite of the impending success (and it’s not the first time), Jaeger is the most gracious and unpretentious of people who can still laugh at himself, and is a real pleasure to talk to.
Growing up in the small town of Clarion, Pennsylvania, Jaeger spent much of his time watching “really bad SciFi movies just to gleam what ideas they had; good ideas, just executed really poorly.” In high school Jaeger was known as the class artist, and his parents encouraged him to explore his talent. “My dad was a doctor growing up. I took a look at how long he went to school and said, ‘Eh, no thanks!’ Plus I didn’t want people’s lives to be at stake. If I mess up here, no one’s going to die… which I thought would save my hair, but apparently didn’t.”
After studying automotive design in Detroit for two years, he realized it just wasn’t all he had hoped for. That was when he learned about ILM and the FX industry, through Joe Johnston’s sketchbooks on ‘Empire Strikes Back’ and ‘Return of the Jedi,’ Syd Mead’s work on ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘2010,’ and the work of Ron Cobb. Jaeger transferred to the Art Institute of Pittsburgh where he made up his own curriculum to have the skills needed to work at ILM, including prototyping, taking an idea from a sketch to a physical three-dimensional prototype.
Jaeger’s creation process begins the moment he gets the script or even hears of the idea, “the gears start turning,” in his own words. “You start thinking, wouldn’t it be cool if these things could be driving down the freeway and transform while still having some wheels on the ground, so they can still be going 80 miles an hour while they are transforming?’ He would study his surroundings for more answers, and might note how a forklift has the axle bend around or the R-Model lamp, examining the movement. But frequently he would just start out with a piece of paper and a pen. “It’s not all digital these days,” he chuckled, “I just sketch out very simple ideas. Once you get the overall action or design feel you want, you can go in and add all the little details, the stuff that people go, ‘It was really cool the way that thing broke apart.’” The pipeline went from 2D sketches directly to 3D models. “Most of the artwork we got was just a front view and a back view, so I had to take the artwork and interpret what it looked like from the top and side so the modelers had a guide.”
To provide input on the robot faces and heads that would portray the bulk of emotion, Director Michael Bay sent Jaeger to the Los Angeles ART department where the robot bodies were created. Inspired by the original cartoon but not limited by it, Jaeger modified details such as the horns on Bumblebee, sticking with the general silhouette but exchanging the horns for fins. “We call those the emotional horns, because they pop up or fold back like a dogs ears.” It turned into a nice little design feature.
Bumblebee required the most emotional range, difficult because he didn’t have a mouth. “Initially, when I did the head design, I also did a series of emotion tests where I took pretty much the same artwork and reconfigured it to him doing different poses and different facial expressions. That was just to get the buy off, to prove this design could work.” Scott Benza and the animators would run the robot through its motions and together with Jaeger would figure out what pieces could be used where. “For example, we could use the piece just below the top of his faceplate as an eyebrow, or some of the pieces inside his cheek could swivel up and would replicate a smile. But a lot of it came down to the eyes. The eyes are really complicated on these robots, dilating in and out, getting bigger and smaller and brighter. Those things alone conveyed a lot of the emotion we needed.”
Bumblebee has the basic design elements of the cartoon with a silver face, yellow helmet, and the Autobot logo on his forehead, as well as shapes like the scoops on the side of his head resembling the ’74 model Camaro headlights. “Michael [Bay] didn’t want to see any stretching metal. He thought that was cheesy, a little too Terminator esque. The idea was we would have all these little mechanical pieces that would slide and move, little tiny pieces that fit together to create a face that you could connect with.”
Jaeger’s focus on detail also had a hand in the process of turning a car into a robot. “The LA art department had the cars and the robot bodies, and we were brought in to help them figure out some of the transformation stages. I also helped some of the animators up here. They would take a first pass, and I would draw notes on top of their animations and suggest, maybe, make this piece become the fender, and lets have it wrap around, and at this point in the transformation we can pull out the roof pieces and they can fold down in sequence.” Jaeger spent two years on the project in all, starting with basic geometry animation going from car to robot and then adding in details. He offered his insights with a smile I could hear through the phone. “It’s one of those things that have never been done before, so you have to take a first pass at it and see if it works.
WHICH WAY DID IT GO
In order to feed the illusion that the robots are plausible, the film design required some modifications from the cartoon. “There are different leaps that we have to take in going from a cartoon to a reality that have to come into play, like Optimus not having a trailer. In the cartoon it just magically disappeared and reappeared.” Jaeger also sought to maintain logical size comparisons from vehicle to robot, such as in the Pontiac Solstice, one of the shortest robots, and with Optimus, a semi-truck that mutates to 28 feet tall. “The difference is based on the size of the vehicle, so we’re not doing the huge cheats like the cartoon did, like Megatron turning from a 40 foot robot into a handgun.”
Jaeger pays attention to detail in a multitude of ways. Trips to auto shows helped to inspire the look of the shaders, in how paint reflects light and the variations of metal surfaces. Jaeger also collected photo and video references, and did breakdowns of the robots using arrows to show what texture went where. The initial robots were made up of many parts, and Jaeger found the designs to be rather busy. “We had to get some cohesiveness so they didn’t feel like walking junk piles, so we did a lot of posing the characters to try and tuck pieces in and get a cleaner silhouette, so that even at a quick glance you can tell what he is doing, what direction he is looking.” He started out with only three or four artists doing head designs, but once the movie got underway, the design work fell mostly to him alone, with a PA for a short stint and the other supervisors for the duration. It kept him busy and was certainly a challenge, but he was in his element - and having a lot of fun.
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