You think of big robots invading cities and it’s hard to imagine any nuance to it. "Sky Captain" had stiff, hulking hunks of metal marching in formation. One of Michael Bay‘s mandates for "Transformers" was that in robot form, they had to be graceful.
"I wanted them not to be clunky, lumbering robots," said Bay. "I looked at a lot of kung fu movies. I wanted them to have a different type of movement so I would just clip different things from different movies and I’d reference those to the animators on how they would move."
It wasn’t any easy assignment for the techies, and Bay was a tough boss to please. "Let me tell you, these robots didn’t come out good at first. It was hard. It was not all peaches and cream at ILM. There were a lot of angry phone calls like, ‘We have to do better. We have to do better.’ They thought they were settling on something and I was like, ‘Nope. This is unacceptable.’ I just kept pushing them and pushing them and pushing them, but we came up with a really a good visual thing."
Check out Bay’s robots in disguise next week, when "Transformers" hits theaters July 3!
