ILM's Jason Smith & Rick O'Connor Talk Transformation SFX Techniques And Bumblebee: The Movie

Cartoon Brew has interviewed Jason Smith and Rick O'Connor of Industrial Light and Magic about transformation sequences! The art and science of animating transforming robots has come a long way since 2007's Transformers and has even had an effect on how ILM handles "rigging" - the process of creating an underlying moving structure for CG characters. Advances made for Bumblebee allowed director Travis Knight and the crew to more easily dictate exactly how many frames of transformation were required for a scene.

Also interesting is that early in the 2007 Transformers process, ILM considered handling transformations toy-style - determining a permanent set of transformation "moves" based on the structures of the two modes. But ultimately they went with the style most frequently noted with Hot Rod in 1986's The Transformers: The Movie, where the transformation was different every time as per the needs of the scene.

Click here to read the article!