Newsmaker: Oscar nominee reflects on making movie magic

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What were some of the biggest challenges on this film?
Benza: The transformations had us freaked out at the beginning. They were not designed ahead of time. The robots were designed and they knew what cars the robots transformed into, but there was no blueprint for going from vehicle to robot form.

It was scary, and we'd hoped we could pre-build transformations for each robot and design shots around them. But that wasn't practical, so we designed a different transformation every time you see one in the film. If the camera was focusing on the front of a vehicle transforming, a lot more attention had to be paid to the front than the back.

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We tried to make things look as cool as possible from any particular angle, which was very challenging. We tried to create tools to enable us to automate this process, but it became more of a brute-force task for animators to find a task for each individual part that had to transform on the vehicles. We had specialists that really focused in on getting the type of transformations Michael wanted to see.

How hard is it to blend visual effects seamlessly into a story?
Benza: It all goes back to planning: if you don't plan ahead with your pre-viz, with your animatics, then you're going to be in big trouble. There were a team of six or seven guys at Michael Bay's office who had the script in their hands and knew what they were going for. They were combining what they were reading in the script with what Michael was directing them to do and everything was as planned out ahead of time.

We filled in a lot of the blanks eventually, but to have that overlying layout of what the end goal was right from the start, rather than trying to make things up as you go along, is very important. You can end up being in big trouble with background plates that don't really fit the action and you're going back and doing re-shoots and then everything suffers because you're focusing on things that aren't as important as working on the characters of these robots and making them look as realistic as possible.

How closely did Michael Bay work with your team?
Benza: Michael is very hands-on; he did video conferences with us two or three times a week to look at the work, and then came up every two or three weeks to visit the artists in person. There was only one person we had to deal with on this film and that's Michael. Directors will sometimes look to other people in their camp to help with decision making, and it was a great experience to just have the one guy that we had answer to in trying to achieve his vision for the film.

What was one of your favorite parts of working on this film?
Benza: My favorite sequence in the movie is the desert highway sequence where Bonecrusher transforms and Optimus gets tackled off the upper level the freeway and down onto the lower level. The robots were moving very fast, maybe 80 miles an hour. So trying to get our heads around exactly how a 50-foot-tall robot can move at 80 miles an hour was a big challenge, but a lot of fun to solve.

Bonecrusher on roller skates was kind of the look we ended up with: One of our lead animators here at ILM came up with it, and we presented it to Michael and said, "What do you think of this guy skating like a hockey player, going in for the most brutal check you've ever seen?" And he was like, "What are you guys thinking?" But then he played it again and he was like "Okay, that looks kind of cool." And then he just fell in love with it from there.

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[VandelayIndustries]

Thanks!

Enjoyable interview. I had wondered whether the robots had been designed with their transformations in mind, and this helped to clear things up. Good luck to the nominee!