ILM Singapore delivers 235 VFX shots for Transformers: Dark of the Moon

ILM Singapore added the new Transformers movie to its credit by delivering 235 VFX shots for the movie along with ILM San Francisco providing 340 VFX shots. The team utilized the full ILM pipeline across all disciplines- layout, animation, digital matte painting, creature TD, rotoscoping, as well as lighting and compositing.

© 2011 Paramount Pictures Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Hasbro, TRANSFORMERS and alll related characters are trademarks of Hasbro.
© 2011 Hasbro. All Rights reserved

Work consisted primarily of shots including robots, vehicles, FX and set extensions and enhancements. Of the 235, 135 were animation shots – 35 of which were fighter variations, plus 8 transformation shots. Out of 36 sequences, Singapore was involved in 19 – the two studios collaborated closely and communicated regularly to accelerate the pace through the ILM pipeline.

© 2011 Paramount Pictures Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Hasbro, TRANSFORMERS and all related characters are trademarks of Hasbro.
© 2011 Hasbro. All Rights reserved

Talking to Animation Xpress Asia Pacific Brennan Doyle, Singapore VFX Supervisor for Transformers: Dark of the Moon shares, “For ILM Singapore, Transformers: Dark of the Moon was a major step forward in the complexity of work, completing shots from beginning to end. This is also the first film where ILM Singapore has replicated every department/discipline in the VFX pipeline”.

© 2011 Paramount Pictures Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Hasbro, TRANSFORMERS and alll related characters are trademarks of Hasbro.
© 2011 Hasbro. All Rights reserved

Academy Award-winner Scott Farrar was the on-set VFX Supervisor for the film, who’s worked on all 3 Transformers movies. Scott Benza was the Animation Supervisor. At ILM Singapore, 156 people worked on the project- 135 artists, 16 production staff, and 5 tech support staff. The team took 12 months to complete the production of the film.

ILM has worked across all the Transformers movies. However, Dark of the Moon was the largest project to date for ILM Singapore. The Singapore work was spread across 20 sequences in the film, so they touched just about every kind of challenge the show had to offer. There were a large number of digital matte painting environments for Chicago. Singapore team also had some big simulation and FX numbers, since many shots had all these elements combined. For example, the robots interacting and destroying buildings or blowing up Decepticon fighters in Chicago battle scenes. The team was also involved in transformation shots. One notable sequence is a transformer shot of Bumblebee, flipping to rescue Sam in the alley. This sequence even made it to the trailer.

About the challenging part in the movie Brennan asserts, “We had many challenges to overcome in completing our work on this film. First off, this is a stereo movie which makes it even more complex than a usual Michael Bay film. Secondly for ILM Singapore, this is the first film where we replicated every department/discipline in the VFX pipeline. An example of one of the more difficult shots is where Sentinal Prime stands atop a building watching the battle. He then sees Optimus Prime and decides to jump down and challenge him to a fight. As he jumps he turns, piercing the building with his sword to slow his descent”.

“For this, every department had to work seamlessly for the shot to be successful. Simulations of falling brick match to simulations of falling dust. The damaged interior of the building needed to be painted and rotoscoped into the shot. Sentinal Prime needed to be animated and interact with all of the simulated damage. All of this was done in stereo. For us in this business, the hardest and more challenging shots are usually the ones we enjoy the most” he added.

According to Brennan every film has unique challenges and requires specific tools to be written to help complete the work. For Transformers: Dark of the Moon, a lot of their development was spent dealing with stereo issues and overall working efficiencies. Adding stereo to a VFX film adds a very large amount of work to any project.

Having an in house team to write tools to help solve these problems and to develop their stereo pipeline was a real key to success for them on this film.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a 2011 American science fiction-action film. It is the third film of the live-action Transformers film series, directed by Michael Bay and produced by Steven Spielberg. It is the sequel to Transformers and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and was released on June 29, 2011.
The film stars Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and John Turturro. Peter Cullen returns as the voice of Optimus Prime and Hugo Weaving returns as the voice of Megatron.