Transformers: HBO First Look

Just got done watching this... and getting away from the "is it good or not" discussion... MAN... The amount of stuff that is *NOT* CGI that you'd think would be in this film is amazing.

The shot that's been in most of the trailers with the bus on the freeway that gets split in half by Brawl (I think that's Brawl) is not CGI.  They showed it being filmed.  They had a stunt guy driving the bus and had set up two buttons for him to use in the scene.  The first button fires off the bomb that splits the bus in half, the other fires off a series of air cannons in the back that sends the back half spinning over.  All of the other cars that are on that side of the highway are also not CGI.  So those are the various stunt drivers reacting accordingly to what the bus did (as they had no idea what the bus was going to do).

The amount of stuff that they managed to blow up, throw around, etc, in downtown LA during those shots were crazy.  They were launching cars down multiple blocks.  Saw one scene where they launched a car and it looked like they didn't know where it'd go, and it ended up in side the 2nd story of one of the buildings they were shooting.

The scene with Scorponok in the desert when he pops out of the sand right behind the three Army Rangers running away from him... He was obviously CGI, but the sand wasn't.  They were using det-cord that they had buried to cause the sand to fire up like that.  Gave the actors something to really be scared about as they were running away from real explosives.

So I'm seriously loving how they didn't rely on CGI as much as it looks like they did.  That's a testament to both the guys who did the CGI (for blending it into the scene so well) and the people that did all the crazy stuff on scene.

I'm also seriously impressed on how much stuff the various actors did that would probably have normally been done by stunt people, etc.  Shia made a joke near the end of the show, "If I wasn't as fast as I am, I wouldn't still be around to have finished the film."

I believe it after seeing how frenetic it looked like the shooting was.  Simply amazing.

--
.ungawa

-Spyke