TF1 - Storyboards, Tranquility 01 Intro

This is a sequence that introduces Bumblebee to Earth. He comes in as a protoform, get his mission, finds an alt mode, and gets to work!

TF1 - Storyboards, Qatar Outro

It's pretty self explanatory...since, you know...it has words. I remember this script being pretty much a block of dialog, with around three visuals described. Helicopter, Transform, and Blackout looking around. I gave him a bit of business, studying some wreckage while he lies to Starscream, and gave it a sweeping crane shot around him as it fades into the game play.

TF1 - Storyboards, Qatar Intro

So now we're on to storyboards - funny how the timing is...I started these the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2006. It was a crazy amount of work to do in a short amount of time...I had to do as much as I could between the Thanksgiving and Christmas break, and I ended up working 19 straight days on these.

I was given the assignment after a group of us went down to Bay's to see the first teaser trailer for the movie, after the meeting I was heading out of town for Turkey Day, and they wanted me locked down for when I got back! The scenes were already being written out, based around the levels for the game, and they had hired Flint Dille and his writing partner, John Zuur Platten (I think!) to do the scripting. I don't know what kind of time crunch they were under, but the scripts were very basic, with minimal staging, so when I got back to the drawing board, I found I had a bit more work than I expected. So all the text placed under the images were done by Flint and John, but I ended up adding more frames, and breaking it up a bit more to get more dynamic scenes out of the source. So anytime you see frames without any text at all, I added it in to give the animators more direction, rather than some of the abrupt cuts that would have occured if I stuck to the script set ups.

So this is the intro to the Decepticon Qatar level, you can see the origin of Blackout, replacing the base helicopter, and making his way towards the Qatar Base.



























I thought these turned out pretty cool - I never spoke with Flint and John, I was just passed along the pages as they were being written out; we were all working our asses off, but I think their scripts more than got the job done, supplying the dialog and direction, and I added in additional transitions and camera moves to get a little more life injected into the scenes.

Bats

I'm still working on getting all the TF1 cutscene storyboards organized - in the meantime, enjoy the Batman sketch I did while waiting for an oil change yesterday...

TF1 - Cybertron 07

Here's a couple Decepticon specific areas...first, a landing platform. I guess the inspiration was a variation of a aircraft carrier, offset to the side, and placed stories up in the air.


I also used this idea to further push the concept of a lit grid to stand in for 'streets' to help guide traffic patterns, in the good times at least. At war time, maybe just used as landing signals? The craft/robot would land, transform, and take the elevator located in the center of the structure.


And this is a concept for the Decepticon Headquarters, or at least the lair of Megatron, an outcropping connected to the larger structure, which included the high above landing platform.


Someone visiting would be very exposed down the long ramp, with sentry emplacements on either side - it would be a very daunting walk down to visit ol' Megs...

And so that's it for Cybertron. All told, this was a very fast and furious four days of work, to get this all together, and I had received just a few notes of feedback from Hasbro to push the craziness of the background skylines a bit more when I did the finals...but then the level got canceled, and that was that.