Feb 2008
And the fat lady sings!
02/16/2008 06:47 PM
From the NYTimes:
HD DVD, the beloved format of Toshiba and three Hollywood studios, died Friday after a brief illness. The cause of death was determined to be the decision by Wal-Mart to stock only high-definition DVDs and players using the Blu-ray format.
Michael at the beginning of this year:
HD DVD, the beloved format of Toshiba and three Hollywood studios, died Friday after a brief illness. The cause of death was determined to be the decision by Wal-Mart to stock only high-definition DVDs and players using the Blu-ray format.
The announcement by Wal-Mart Stores, the nation’s largest retailer of DVDs, that it would stop selling the discs and machines in June when supplies are depleted comes after decisions this week by Best Buy, the largest electronics retailer, to promote Blu-ray as its preferred format and Netflix, the DVD-rental service, to stock only Blu-ray movies, phasing out HD DVD by the end of this year.Last year, Target, one of the top sellers of electronics, discontinued selling HD DVD players in its stores, but continued to sell them online.“The fat lady has sung,” said Rob Enderle, a technology industry analyst in Silicon Valley. “Wal-Mart is the biggest player in the DVD market. If it says HD DVD is done, you can take that as a fact.”
Michael at the beginning of this year:
Blu ray is just better. HD will die a slow death. It's what I predicted a year ago. Now with Warner's down for the count with Blu Ray. That makes it easier for Wal-Mart to push Blu Ray. And whatever Wal-Mart pushes - wins.
Verizon FIOS: Awesome!
02/14/2008 08:49 PM
Verizon Taps High-Octane Filmmaker Michael Bay for New FiOS Advertising Campaign
02/14/2008 05:00 PM
NEW YORK, Feb. 14 /PRNewswire/ -- Celebrated filmmaker Michael Bay will be the first celebrity featured in a new advertising campaign for Verizon FiOS TV and FiOS Internet services. Themed "This is FiOS; This is Big," the new campaign -- created for Verizon by McCann Erickson, New York -- showcases the groundbreaking services delivered over Verizon's advanced fiber-optic network straight to customers' homes.
"Michael Bay is a larger-than-life figure because he's a powerful game-changer," said John Wimsatt, senior vice president of marketing for Verizon Telecom. "Verizon FiOS is the best and first choice for home entertainment because the power of our fiber-optic network delivers the best picture quality, fastest Internet and most-innovative interactive services. Michael Bay is the perfect choice to help portray the big, powerful experiences that FiOS creates in home entertainment and broadband."
Bay -- who is famous for directing cutting-edge, high-octane blockbusters like "Transformers," "Pearl Harbor," "Bad Boys" and "Armageddon" -- stars in an action-packed, 30-second TV spot for Verizon FiOS Internet service that begins airing Sunday (Feb. 17). In the ad, Bay deftly spoofs his own super-charged Hollywood persona as he blows up things throughout a super-contemporary home to show how Verizon "blows away" cable Internet service with upload and download speeds that are up to 25 times faster. While a Verizon technician installs FiOS Internet service in the home, Bay uses a remote detonator to blow up a barbecue grill and swimming pool. He also shows off his pet cat -- a Bengal tiger -- and a 20-foot-tall Transformer to underscore how "awesome" -- a word he continuously repeats -- he finds the Verizon fiber-optic technology.
Source: PRNewswire.
View the ad here.
Mike speaks on Blu-ray
02/14/2008 04:59 PM
Michael Bay Relishes Blu-ray's Victories
Author: FRED TOPEL
TransformersWhen Paramount Home Entertainment decided to support HD DVD exclusively, Michael Bay was vocally opposed. Since the decision came just as his Transformers would debut on high-definition home video, Bay threatened to back out of the sequel.
He took back his drastic comments and is hard at work developing Transformers 2, but now that Blu-ray is the format that is gaining momentum, Bay cannot help but remind us he told us so.
“Blu-ray’s better, and I told everyone,” Bay said at the Visual Effects Society’s sixth annual award show, where he presented the award for animated character in a motion picture. “I was very vocal about it. I knew HD [DVD] was not going to make it.”
With HD DVD being edged out of competition by sheer volume of product moving to Blu-ray, Bay is all but gloating.
“Am I thrilled? It really wasn’t my fight, but remember what I said in the press? I was kind of saying HD [DVD]’s going to lose,” he said. “No one believed me.”
Many of Bay’s films were produced by studios that have supported Blu-ray from the beginning. The Rock is already available on Blu-ray from Buena Vista Home Entertainment (now Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment), with Pearl Harbor and Armageddon possibly on the way. Sony’s Columbia owns the “Bad Boys” films.
Bay personally supervises his Blu-ray transfers and says he loves his preferred format.
“It’s just sharper,” he said. “It’s just [that] the tools are better. I just think it’s closer to what it should look like.”
Should Armageddon make it to Blu-ray, there may be even more work in store. Original materials were destroyed.
"Believe it or not, we have to remaster Armageddon,” he said. “The Armageddon [master] was burned in a fire apparently, so we’ve got to re-master the whole movie.”
With many of Bay’s films 10 years old or more, it is possible that Blu-ray editions will reveal flaws just by bringing them into sharper focus.
“I’m sure that’s going to be apparent, probably in Armageddon,” he said.
The Rock, Bay’s second film after Bad Boys, was released in 1996. The Blu-ray edition appears grainy in certain shots, but Bay likes it that way. He uses it as an artistic choice, even in his more recent film.
“Yeah, there’s some grain, pushing film, shooting at night,” he said. “There’s actually some grain in Transformers. We pushed it just a little too much. I don’t mind grain. Grain has a vibe.”
Source: homemediamagazine.com
Author: FRED TOPEL
TransformersWhen Paramount Home Entertainment decided to support HD DVD exclusively, Michael Bay was vocally opposed. Since the decision came just as his Transformers would debut on high-definition home video, Bay threatened to back out of the sequel.
He took back his drastic comments and is hard at work developing Transformers 2, but now that Blu-ray is the format that is gaining momentum, Bay cannot help but remind us he told us so.
“Blu-ray’s better, and I told everyone,” Bay said at the Visual Effects Society’s sixth annual award show, where he presented the award for animated character in a motion picture. “I was very vocal about it. I knew HD [DVD] was not going to make it.”
With HD DVD being edged out of competition by sheer volume of product moving to Blu-ray, Bay is all but gloating.
“Am I thrilled? It really wasn’t my fight, but remember what I said in the press? I was kind of saying HD [DVD]’s going to lose,” he said. “No one believed me.”
Many of Bay’s films were produced by studios that have supported Blu-ray from the beginning. The Rock is already available on Blu-ray from Buena Vista Home Entertainment (now Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment), with Pearl Harbor and Armageddon possibly on the way. Sony’s Columbia owns the “Bad Boys” films.
Bay personally supervises his Blu-ray transfers and says he loves his preferred format.
“It’s just sharper,” he said. “It’s just [that] the tools are better. I just think it’s closer to what it should look like.”
Should Armageddon make it to Blu-ray, there may be even more work in store. Original materials were destroyed.
"Believe it or not, we have to remaster Armageddon,” he said. “The Armageddon [master] was burned in a fire apparently, so we’ve got to re-master the whole movie.”
With many of Bay’s films 10 years old or more, it is possible that Blu-ray editions will reveal flaws just by bringing them into sharper focus.
“I’m sure that’s going to be apparent, probably in Armageddon,” he said.
The Rock, Bay’s second film after Bad Boys, was released in 1996. The Blu-ray edition appears grainy in certain shots, but Bay likes it that way. He uses it as an artistic choice, even in his more recent film.
“Yeah, there’s some grain, pushing film, shooting at night,” he said. “There’s actually some grain in Transformers. We pushed it just a little too much. I don’t mind grain. Grain has a vibe.”
Source: homemediamagazine.com
Bay Hosts Transformers Tech Show
02/14/2008 07:20 AM
From Variety:
Transformers director Michael Bay returned to the scene of the crime Thursday night at the Cary Grant mixing stage at the Sony lot to revisit the Oscar-nominated achievements in VFX and sound. The place was packed with filmmaking geeks eager to hear and see the behind-the-scenes machinations that go into a formidable FX epic like Transformers.
It was tough for Bay to go back, he admitted after the show, as he's already deep into pre-production on Transformers 2, which is set to start filming on June 2. Bay didn't let the strike stop him. "The strike was a drag," he said. "But I like to write myself. So I wrote 60 pages. I showed the writers something to look at. We'll get back to the torture chamber on Monday." Transformers 2 will deepen the different robot characters as well as the humor, he said. "There's a geriatric robot. If there's an actors strike we'll just stop and start again. We'll make our date." (The movie is scheduled to open June 26, 2009.)
After The Rock, Armageddon, and Pearl Harbor, Bay is tight with the Pentagon and thinks nothing of picking up the phone to get them to reroute a C130 gunship with Seals in it for a few hours. "We pay for the fuel," he says. "The military looks at this as a recruiting effort. The jargon is real. I told them what was happening, and that's what they said. I shot it like a documentary."
Bay, who has a reputation for being tough on crews, endured some good-humored riffing during the show-and-tell, from star Shia LaBeouf as well as his sound designers, editors, and mixers and special FX and ILM VFX artists. Bay was proud that he made Transformers "for a price" he said, in California and New Mexico. "We have the best crews."
For Bay, sound is "50 % of the movie, while the visual effects are a whole other movie unto itself." He shot as much of the film as possible in real locations with live (often dangerous) on-camera stunts and real FX supervised by the legendary John Frazier. In stark contrast to a Star Wars episode which boasts mostly blue screen shots, Transformers had only two days of blue-screen shooting (when the young leads climbed on the shoulders of the robots).
Even the famous shot of the bus that is split apart by a giant robot was a live-action bus blown in two going 60 mph on the freeway with a 30-foot CG robot added six months later. "There's one million details these guys put in the movie," said Frazier, who tried to keep enormous spaces open in the shots for the CG animators to work in.
For LaBeouf and the other actors, "acting without anything there is hard," said Bay. "It's so different when you don't have any environment to react to." LaBeouf described a P.A. holding a long big stick with a green ball on top and shaking it. "They're angry now, shake it faster," he described Bay saying. ILM VFX supervisor Scott Farrar showed the actors a pre-vis--"a cartoon of what's going on in the scene," said Bay, adding, "I always like to put my actors under duress." According to LaBeouf, hanging from a building 20 feet in the air to talk to Megatron or being surrounded by explosions while the cameras wore protective gear was the norm.
On the VFX side, "it's lighting," said Bay. "Everyone looks at light every day and when something looks fake it's not lit well to your brain. We worked on the light, that's why the robots look so real, these things sit next to humans." Bay flew up to ILM in San Francisco frequently, and communicated via satellite link with a pen pointer. He'd never dealt with animation before, which is about performance. "It was painstaking, like Pixar cartoons," he said, "a pain in the ass."
Scott Benza, the animation supervisor, was there to "bring life to the robots," he said. He worked with 30 animators on 16 characters and 47 transformations--each one unique. "It encompasses everything from subtle acting to a full on action scene with brutal robots fighting each other. We gave each artist the freedom to go to town." Optimus Prime has 10108 parts. All the pieces had 4 to 16 layers of information: details, scratches, and metal flake paint with a clear coat finish.
The robots were heavy and massive and athletic and nimble, all at the same time, like Ninja fighters. "They had to have weight and mass and be very cool," said Farrar. The transformations involved "clever people solving puzzles, fitting pieces from one form into another. It would take brute force on each shot until it worked."
The robots also had to act--with complicated facial rigs for the eyes, nose, and mouth-- and each one was different. They rebuilt Bumblebee's eyes three times, making the iris go up and down, until one day in dailies "we saw his soul," said Farrar.
The VFX team took the live-action shots and created CG environments to match them. Said Farrar, "it's about how to make the big guys who are not there look real. You have to go way beyond--the metals look metallic, they look like part of a scene, they fit in with buildings. We are there to put things in the movie that can't be photographed or are difficult or too dangerous to shoot."
Russell Earl did lighting and rendering. "We'd go back and recreate in the computer Scorpinox jumping out of the sand," he said. "We'd copy the scene and use a CG version to match." Adding reflections and highlights and shadow are a big part of making the robots' 20-foot height look real. And making the environment "dirty." Flying debris. Particles. Compositing all these elements is the other huge challenge.
Bay has worked with the same sound crew for 12 years. He affectionately razzed sound mixer Kevin O'Connell as "the biggest loser in Academy history." He's had 19 noms and no wins. This is his 20th go-round.
O'Connell, supervising sound editors Ethan Van Der Ryn and Mike Hopkins, sound rerecording mixer Greg P. Russell and sound mixer Peter Devlin explained how they capture all the distinct sounds on set (dialogue, planes, guns, ricochets, explosions, 9 sets of sounds specific to the robots) and collect it all for the sound mixers to file and manipulate, along with the music. "We take hundreds of sounds," said O'Connell, and try to focus the energy." The goal is to key the audience into what's important in a given scene, and not wind up with "a train wreck of sound."
The sound designers had to come up with characteristic personalities for the different robots, and make the large robot sounds work--partly by throwing the sound to all the speakers in a theater, not just the "dialogue" speaker in the center of the screen.
The sound of Optimus Prime, voiced by Peter Cullen, is about air. Bumble Bee is about buzzing. The sound crew brought a volunteer up to a mike to record sound for Bumble Bee as he groans on the battlefield. The audience listened to the actor live, then heard the sound integrated through the Bumble Bee sound matrix on screen. It magically worked. Big applause. The magic of sound.
Transformers director Michael Bay returned to the scene of the crime Thursday night at the Cary Grant mixing stage at the Sony lot to revisit the Oscar-nominated achievements in VFX and sound. The place was packed with filmmaking geeks eager to hear and see the behind-the-scenes machinations that go into a formidable FX epic like Transformers.
It was tough for Bay to go back, he admitted after the show, as he's already deep into pre-production on Transformers 2, which is set to start filming on June 2. Bay didn't let the strike stop him. "The strike was a drag," he said. "But I like to write myself. So I wrote 60 pages. I showed the writers something to look at. We'll get back to the torture chamber on Monday." Transformers 2 will deepen the different robot characters as well as the humor, he said. "There's a geriatric robot. If there's an actors strike we'll just stop and start again. We'll make our date." (The movie is scheduled to open June 26, 2009.)
After The Rock, Armageddon, and Pearl Harbor, Bay is tight with the Pentagon and thinks nothing of picking up the phone to get them to reroute a C130 gunship with Seals in it for a few hours. "We pay for the fuel," he says. "The military looks at this as a recruiting effort. The jargon is real. I told them what was happening, and that's what they said. I shot it like a documentary."
Bay, who has a reputation for being tough on crews, endured some good-humored riffing during the show-and-tell, from star Shia LaBeouf as well as his sound designers, editors, and mixers and special FX and ILM VFX artists. Bay was proud that he made Transformers "for a price" he said, in California and New Mexico. "We have the best crews."
For Bay, sound is "50 % of the movie, while the visual effects are a whole other movie unto itself." He shot as much of the film as possible in real locations with live (often dangerous) on-camera stunts and real FX supervised by the legendary John Frazier. In stark contrast to a Star Wars episode which boasts mostly blue screen shots, Transformers had only two days of blue-screen shooting (when the young leads climbed on the shoulders of the robots).
Even the famous shot of the bus that is split apart by a giant robot was a live-action bus blown in two going 60 mph on the freeway with a 30-foot CG robot added six months later. "There's one million details these guys put in the movie," said Frazier, who tried to keep enormous spaces open in the shots for the CG animators to work in.
For LaBeouf and the other actors, "acting without anything there is hard," said Bay. "It's so different when you don't have any environment to react to." LaBeouf described a P.A. holding a long big stick with a green ball on top and shaking it. "They're angry now, shake it faster," he described Bay saying. ILM VFX supervisor Scott Farrar showed the actors a pre-vis--"a cartoon of what's going on in the scene," said Bay, adding, "I always like to put my actors under duress." According to LaBeouf, hanging from a building 20 feet in the air to talk to Megatron or being surrounded by explosions while the cameras wore protective gear was the norm.
On the VFX side, "it's lighting," said Bay. "Everyone looks at light every day and when something looks fake it's not lit well to your brain. We worked on the light, that's why the robots look so real, these things sit next to humans." Bay flew up to ILM in San Francisco frequently, and communicated via satellite link with a pen pointer. He'd never dealt with animation before, which is about performance. "It was painstaking, like Pixar cartoons," he said, "a pain in the ass."
Scott Benza, the animation supervisor, was there to "bring life to the robots," he said. He worked with 30 animators on 16 characters and 47 transformations--each one unique. "It encompasses everything from subtle acting to a full on action scene with brutal robots fighting each other. We gave each artist the freedom to go to town." Optimus Prime has 10108 parts. All the pieces had 4 to 16 layers of information: details, scratches, and metal flake paint with a clear coat finish.
The robots were heavy and massive and athletic and nimble, all at the same time, like Ninja fighters. "They had to have weight and mass and be very cool," said Farrar. The transformations involved "clever people solving puzzles, fitting pieces from one form into another. It would take brute force on each shot until it worked."
The robots also had to act--with complicated facial rigs for the eyes, nose, and mouth-- and each one was different. They rebuilt Bumblebee's eyes three times, making the iris go up and down, until one day in dailies "we saw his soul," said Farrar.
The VFX team took the live-action shots and created CG environments to match them. Said Farrar, "it's about how to make the big guys who are not there look real. You have to go way beyond--the metals look metallic, they look like part of a scene, they fit in with buildings. We are there to put things in the movie that can't be photographed or are difficult or too dangerous to shoot."
Russell Earl did lighting and rendering. "We'd go back and recreate in the computer Scorpinox jumping out of the sand," he said. "We'd copy the scene and use a CG version to match." Adding reflections and highlights and shadow are a big part of making the robots' 20-foot height look real. And making the environment "dirty." Flying debris. Particles. Compositing all these elements is the other huge challenge.
Bay has worked with the same sound crew for 12 years. He affectionately razzed sound mixer Kevin O'Connell as "the biggest loser in Academy history." He's had 19 noms and no wins. This is his 20th go-round.
O'Connell, supervising sound editors Ethan Van Der Ryn and Mike Hopkins, sound rerecording mixer Greg P. Russell and sound mixer Peter Devlin explained how they capture all the distinct sounds on set (dialogue, planes, guns, ricochets, explosions, 9 sets of sounds specific to the robots) and collect it all for the sound mixers to file and manipulate, along with the music. "We take hundreds of sounds," said O'Connell, and try to focus the energy." The goal is to key the audience into what's important in a given scene, and not wind up with "a train wreck of sound."
The sound designers had to come up with characteristic personalities for the different robots, and make the large robot sounds work--partly by throwing the sound to all the speakers in a theater, not just the "dialogue" speaker in the center of the screen.
The sound of Optimus Prime, voiced by Peter Cullen, is about air. Bumble Bee is about buzzing. The sound crew brought a volunteer up to a mike to record sound for Bumble Bee as he groans on the battlefield. The audience listened to the actor live, then heard the sound integrated through the Bumble Bee sound matrix on screen. It magically worked. Big applause. The magic of sound.
Transformers wins 4 awards at the VES
02/11/2008 07:54 PM
Click here to view the complete list of winners at the Visual Effects Society awards.
From the Hollywood Reporter:
"Transformers" on Sunday won four Visual Effects Society Awards, including the top prize for outstanding visual effects in a visual effects-driven film.
Visual Effects in a Visual Effects Driven Motion Picture
"Transformers"
Scott Farrar
Shari Hanson
Russell Earl
Scott Benza
Best Single Visual Effect of the Year
"Transformers" (Desert highway sequence)
Scott Farrar
Shari Hanson
Shawn Kelly
Michael Jamieson
Models or Miniatures in a Motion Picture
"Transformers"
Dave Fogler
Ron Woodall
Alex Jaeger
Brian Gernand
Compositing in a Motion Picture
"Transformers"
Pat Tubach
Beth D'Amato
Todd Vaziri
Mike Conte
From the Hollywood Reporter:
"Transformers" on Sunday won four Visual Effects Society Awards, including the top prize for outstanding visual effects in a visual effects-driven film.
In addition to the top award, "Transformers" won trophies for single visual effect of the year, for its desert highway sequence; models and miniatures; and compositing. Collecting the top prize were Scott Farrar, Shari Hanson, Russell Earl and Scott Benza.
Visual Effects in a Visual Effects Driven Motion Picture
"Transformers"
Scott Farrar
Shari Hanson
Russell Earl
Scott Benza
Best Single Visual Effect of the Year
"Transformers" (Desert highway sequence)
Scott Farrar
Shari Hanson
Shawn Kelly
Michael Jamieson
Models or Miniatures in a Motion Picture
"Transformers"
Dave Fogler
Ron Woodall
Alex Jaeger
Brian Gernand
Compositing in a Motion Picture
"Transformers"
Pat Tubach
Beth D'Amato
Todd Vaziri
Mike Conte