TF1 - Truck Drone 02

The finals for the truck drone. Originally just gray, after the toys were being decided on, Hasbro sent us their graphic preferences, so I took him to the paint shop, and matched up as close as I could to the toy. This is before I fully figured out how to keep a separate graphic layer, and know what other layers to keep separate, to make the changes really fast...so the purple doesn't blend very naturally. It gets the idea across, at the very least.


Again...'quaint.' I did weird stuff with the front wheels, and ignored the rear wheels, split up the glass in strange ways...of course I designed him before I knew he was going to be a toy, but I should have not sliced up too many of the elements - again needing to emulate what we were aware of at the time with the movie designs.


So this is Dropkick, and I think the toy design came out better than the game version that I did. Somehow I missed getting the bulk, and taking advantage of the mass that the truck has versus the car, and created a more spindly character than I meant to. This version of him pushes what I had started into a more well rounded design. He's pretty cool...

TF1 - Truck Drone 01

The origins of the truck drone, AKA Dropkick. After making a good impression with Hasbro with the car drone, they said we could do more, and initially we were just going to do three. The car would be the middle range guy, and we needed something smaller and something bigger. The bigger was decided to be a pickup truck. Something that didn't compete with the Ironhide design as a vehicle, and something stood a little bigger as a robot.


I guess the one on the end was selected, but I had to drop out the tuck bed stuff - I can't really remember why at this point, but I think people responded to the pose more than anything else. Looking back, I think it would have made more sense to put the middle idea from above into this pose - make him a lot bigger, or at least the impression of size.

Again, a bit of character, having him be able to combine his arms into a gun - I didn't know ol' Megs was going to do that in the movie just yet...

TF1 - Car Drone 02

And here is the final for the car drone. In addition to the single eye, I placed a central power source, that and the eye would be a shared characteristic to show the player that these were drones. Now it seems pretty unnecessary, but at the time we didn't have clearance to use any other characters in the Transformers Universe (we'll talk about Shockwave later) and really, we still didn't know what the movie characters would end up looking like. So this was the best effort to create characters for the movie-verse, without really knowing how they'll match up in the end. We also didn't know how the GM deal was worked out - turned out it was for movie only, but I had already played it safe, and used a Chevy Colbalt for the base, later having to go back and change details for legal. I am not a Chevy fan, nor do I think a Colbalt is a cool car. We wanted something to invoke maybe a more (albeit CHEAP) import car within the product range of GM at the time...but, if it was me, GM would have been the last company I would have gone exclusive with. Especially at the time, they were way behind the crest of the tide in car design. They basically had the concept car that turned into a Camaro/Bumblebee, and some cool trucks. Lucky the Mustang/Barricade snuck in there...


He's almost 'quaint' to me, looking back at him now. I want to pat him on the head, and say 'good try.' I took the Production's design philosphy, and went my own way with it. For what he is, it came out pretty well, and now from an art director standpoint, I wouldn't say it fits in the movie-verse for the first movie, but I still think it looks more like a Transformer than Ironhide and Ratchet from the movie. Anyways, Hasbro absolutely freaked out on it, and said we could do more.

Meet Swindle.


Little did I know that they were planning on making a toy out of it...I got a call from the producer - "are you sitting down? I'm going to blow your mind!" What an honor, 20 years of fandom culminating into a character I designed turning into an actual action figure. On a card, hanging on the pegs in a toy store. Not only that, but they put this character in all the press kits for the movie, so he got used has a promotion tool for both the movie and the game. Pretty awesome. What really blew me away is the attention to detail, the extra effort to create the details into the forearms and ribs/waist from my artwork -it really touched me. I still haven't met the actual engineer who did the sculpt and tooling for this guy, but I will bow down when I meet him or her.

TF1 - Car Drone 01

AKA Swindle, as he's known to the public! He is mostly a reaction against what they had going for the robot designs, in particular Bumblebee and Jazz - remember those guys were still in development, and had a serious lack of vehicle cues on their robot forms. So my main goal was to have wing doors, and a headlight/hood chest, on MY car-based Transformers.


The conceit being that these were drones, and relatively mindless; this was the reason behind the cyclopian eye, intending to give the impression that they were single-minded in causing trouble for the player.

Now this was based on the animatic and description we were given. Unfortunately, we weren't familiar with 'BayLogic' and by the time the movie came out, they just made the Energon created characters as full on as the main characters...whatever.

And so this is what was sent off to Hasbro for the intended design, they liked it a lot, and I went ahead and got started on the final.


This was a game play idea that existed at the time of the roughing out phase of this character, but I don't think this actual art was created until all the characters had been modeled, and the animations were starting - I basically threw together a basic move for each guy to send off to England, to see if Traveler's Tales could fit it in. I think in the actual game, he was given like a side step move, that made it tougher to track him with the player weapon.

TF1 - Drones

So it came clear fairly soon, that with only around 6 characters per faction, the game player would run out of stuff to do pretty quick. The idea came about that the movie characters would stand as either playable characters, or boss enemies, and we needed to create other robots for the player to beat up on as he/she progressed through the levels.


We had seen the animatics for the (at the time) iPod getting a drop of Energon on it, to make it transform into a mindless robot, so we developed a conceit that the Autobot/Decepticon factions could drip some energon on Earth vehicles to create little armies to help in the fight.


So these were just some really quick sharpie sketches (in reality, they're about 1-2 inches high) to get the ball rolling for what level of sophistication these drones would have...

TF1 - Animatics From Memory pt. 2

Continuing with the memory-boards, these are based on the scene they had in rough animation, showing Prime rolling down the freeway, and facing off with another Decepticon. Again, all from memory, and based on in-progress character designs...I think that must be Barricade, who was called Brawl at the time.


When we were there, the production had shown us what they wanted Prime to be for final, and an artist at Hasbro did an overlay adding in the windshield chest, and spires on the helmet, and a couple of other G1 cues, asking if they could rework the final to make it more like the source - and while I thought that looked awesome, the production designer was all pissy about it, but it looked really good. In the end, what we got was a 50/50 compromise between what Bay wanted, and what Hasbro requested. SO close. Anyways, I semi-based the Prime in this set to look like the Hasbro image...

Hopefully you folks can tell that this turned into the Prime vs. Bonecrusher fight that kicked off the finale; in my opinion, by far the best action sequene of the film. Because it had a beginning, middle, and an end. Go figure.


And this is just a clip of a building top fight, mostly to show that the game would have an all roam environment that went from street to rooftop. This must be Prime/Megatron duking it out, but the animatics we had just been shown had two generic robots fighting it out, working out the camera moves.


I think I just added helmet spikes to insinuate that it was Prime, you can see the fall between the buildings down to the street was kept in the movie.

It was pretty cool from a technical standpoint, to see the rough animations turn into the final frames, how that process was worked out from start to finish.

TF1 - Animatics From Memory

So soon after the script session, we all went down to the offices of the Production Designer, who I wanted to punch in the face after about ten minutes of listening tell us how dumb the original Transformers were. I don't know if he was over-compensating in protecting his director's vision, or if he was just clueless - statements like 'if you could be anything, why would you be a truck? That's so lame, you'd get your ass kicked by the jets!' Obviously the guy didn't immerse himself in the lore, and just pointed out a problem with the movie script.

If anybody has the TF-Movie special editions, you can see him continue to mock the source material. I have lots to say, (I won't) but the movies really speak for themselves, whether you like them or not; but I will say, ILM shored up all the concepts and made them way better. And that's not a quip against Ben Procter, (the Lead Designer) who is really a master artist. I hate when people rail against the designs of the movies, and the concept artists get thrown in the mix...if you hate the movie versions or not - either way the artwork is incredible...but we all have to answer to somebody who is driving the vision, and you have to do the best you can in creating the art.


We were shown a ton of animatics, and afterwards I was asked to recreate these scenes from memory, coupled with the notes/thumbnails I was able to pull out of the script. The discovery of the Ice Man Megatron was originally the opening of the movie, and we were playing with the idea of opening the game with a Megatron level, flying through space debris, and eventually crashing on Earth, in search of the Energon Cube.


And these were meant to be the following cut scenes leading into the next level in movie continuity...


...which was the Qatar scene. This was a more stealthy infiltration, with Skorpnok sneaking in and then creating mayhem.


After the destruction, he sneaks off, and then the Blackout (still called Vortex) level would begin.