JesWal wrote:Bay also does not design the robots. That's Hasbro.
Now see, while I immediately agree (my feelings for the guy aside) that Bay does get blamed for a lot of little things that aren't his department so to speak, this is one item where you're wrong. Does he decide every single little detail about the final designs? Probably not, but his hand is heavy in the decision, don't think otherwise. The movie designs are his own, just ask. Others have, and he's said so in interviews and board messages. In some of his own word this is
his superhero movie, the designs are of what he was trying to do, and he's always adamant to tell others he makes his
own films &
no one tells him what to do. Hasbro gave him uprecidented control over Transformer design in the first film, and now the second. Jared Wade, Transformer design director for Hasbro who's worked close with the Bay camp for the act of getting film designs to the toys (NOT the other way around), has given interviews talking of the challenges of finding creative ways to actually make the movie designs translate into toys, pushing the envelope of the craft. They work mostly on whatever designs the studio says they're going with, and while this time around they were knee deep from the get-go, the last time due to early designs and later/last minute additions, is - for one of Jared's personal examples - the reason the first film's Optimus looked the way he did. You can quote him as saying while he doesn't think there's anything wrong with the toy they didn't have finalized designs when they made him and didn't even know about the sword until production was done, which is why he came with a gun, then later a sword on the Premium item. It's also why this time around Optimus (among others) more accurately represent their screen counterparts. The first time around ILM could barely get their input across. In fact a Q & A done at a convention shortly before the first film premiered in theaters, done by one of the big names at DM.net though I don't recall which, reports the guys at ILM flipped out on the designs when first presented, simply HATED them, much like a good deal of traditional TF fans did when designs started to hit the web years ago. I mean fit throwing, walk outs, denouncing work on the film. So the designs? Not ILM's. It was Bay who had to convince
them of what he was trying to do with
his designs. It's solely because of Bay, for example, that Movie Optimus has a face. Don't get me wrong on this (any of this), I dig the face (and still wonder why Hasbro won't produce a removable faceplate already!), but it's all Michael Bay there. In that same prior mentioned ILM interview it was reported that everyone, from the writers to ILM, wanted to keep the faceplate on Prime. Yet even when the animators purposely kept it on during preliminary renders in hopes of swaying Bay's decision, it was reiterated by Mikey that this was his film and he had final say. And here we have the results. And when Michael was once asked if there was any concern that Bay was also serving Hasbro, in regards to ensuring that Mikey was true to things like the original toys and characters? Bay's answer? "Well, I said 'Listen, if I do this, I'm going to redesign these things. You might not like everything, but I'm going to do it my way or I'm not going to do it.'" He even reported that they had huge issues with LAM Starscream, yet his take came out on top. If
that doesn't speak volumes over his control in that department, I sure as **** don't know what does.
