Did Michael Bay actually do something right?

The Transformers trilogy is absolutely awful. Like most of Michael Bay's 'films' they are one-dimensional action flicks trying to disguise themselves as something more meaningful. Sorry Bay, but you're not fooling anyone. There's not a single Bay film that I have found cinematically pleasing, nor have I ever found a reason to commend the director, except for one exception.

While I do not necessarily agree with Bay's style of filming or directing, there is at least one thing he's done right all these years (besides managing to perfectly resemble Michael Bolton): hiring an excellent team of visual effects specialists. More specifically, I'm talking about the Transformers movies. While I find them to be terribly painful to watch, there is certainly something to admire about the films. The visual effects behind the absurdly complicated alien robots is simply breathtaking.

To start off, Destroyer, an enormously impressive creation found in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, took 72 hours to render...per frame! Pretty crazy, huh? Let's be honest, though. Anyone can make something that takes weeks to render. That's not the impressive part. The impressive part is that the single Transformer was put together by 6-8 individually created, incredibly detailed vehicles. Imagine how long that would take you to create. Now, imagine how long that would take you to create a second time once your director told you it wasn't good enough. I can only assume you'd be pretty upset with that news. Essentially, the animators were instructed to go back and make the machines twice as detailed as it already was, and THEN to reconstruct the final robot with all 6-8 individual pieces.

Another kudos for Bay goes to his ability to bring in practical visual effects. On the set of Transformers 2, Bay was able to bring in a sizable number of military vehicles (tanks, bombers, F16s, you name it) to fly over set, drop flares, and just add some level of believability to his otherwise ludicrous film. Bay is also a fan of on-set explosions. They're dangerous, yes, but they make for one hell of an effect. It also saves quite a bit of postproduction time and effort. Speaking for anyone who's ever worked postproduction on a film, we all greatly appreciate it.

Bringing it back to postproduction visual effects, the aircraft carrier scene of Transformers 2 is also quite an impressive feat. I never really gave it much thought, but much more than most people would ever expect went into this scene. The team shot actual burning miniatures and debris with blue screens that were later composited into the completed animations. The people on the carriers were a mix of animations and people who were shot tumbling and falling. The aircraft were created by the animators as well. Basically, thousands of pieces were created for this scene simply to be destroyed over the course of a minute. It's like being a kid again after taking hours to build a LEGO model just to have your younger brother completely and utterly demolish it.

Animation is a crazy field to go into. It's often the defining point between a film's success and it's downfall. In Michael Bay's case, it's really the only thing he was able to do correctly.

Sci Fi Nerd

Hey everyone,

 I am very excited (and terrified) to be in MG&A this semester. I've always been interested in Science Fiction films ever since I was really young and I've always wanted to have animation and VFX in my movies. In fact, my mom took me to see The Matrix at a theatre when I was 8 (even though it was rated R, she went and saw it first, just to make sure it wasn't too scary......thanks Mom!) and after I walked out, I pretty much knew I wanted to make movies, somehow, someday. It might seem a little old and cliche at this point since it became such a cultural landmark like 15 years ago........but right from the very first frame, they start off with my all time favorite credit sequence. I used to dream in the same shade of green. So iconic, so good....

The main reason I'm in MG&A this semester is because I was fortunate enough to help my friends Blake Horn, Zeke Spector, and Ally Cunningham make their thesis film last semester called ASH. Unfortunately, I can't post a link as it's being sent to film festivals, but if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend you snag a copy of this year's Best of Park DVD and give it a watch. It's a fantastic beautiful film.

Anyways, on ASH I worked as a grip on the set and saw the process of building the sets for the interior of a spaceship and then helped film all the miniature versions of the spaceships in front of green screens in Park. It was interesting because we would have to light each shot in relation to where the sun was and where the planets and spaceships were in relation to another. We also did lots of cool camera moves so the ship would move along the Z-axis with the miniatures hanging from C Stands, suspended by fishing line against an evenly lit green screen. Blake then composited all of this footage with matte paintings of Earth and space that Ethan Burnette made in Cinema 4D. And then I bugged Blake to let me watch him make holograms and zero gravity effects in AE and asked him what I should do to learn all of this stuff so I could make a Sci-Fi film for my Senior Thesis. He told me about Arturo's class, said he walked into MG&A terrified of motion graphics but worked hard and set aside time everyday to practice and eventually enabled himself to make ASH. I really hope to do something similar for a film I'm making called Nirvana.



Another big inspiration of late that I saw was a film called True Skin, very very VFX heavy short film....heavily inspired by Total Recall, Enter The Void, Blade Runner, District 9 (the type of films I'm obsessed with.) Check it out. I really hope I can do stuff like this in the near future. 10,000 hours right?

 Ok, just one more link. The title sequence for Enter the Void. Genius. Another example of something I'd love to make.

Enter The Void Title Sequence

I can't wait to work hard and learn as much as I can from this class and all of my fellow classmates. Cheers y'all!