What would you use as the stand-in for a Transformer like Optimus Prime?
It is very sophisticated! It is a window washer pole! I believe in low tech for high effect. How it works is like this… if you have a robot and I want the actor to look at the robot, then you could have a big head (to represent the robot) but those are really heavy. So we just have the pole and the actor uses that to get an eye line. Shia has become very good at this. The actor has to sell the shot, otherwise you don’t believe it. So we work very carefully with it. We just use that to help them react. That’s what it is all about. We also use them to represent the height of the robot so the camera operator can aim at it and judge composition. Can you give an idea of the time and money it takes to bring just one of the robots to life for 10 seconds? That is a great question because no matter how many times they appear in a movie, it takes a certain amount of work. It takes roughly about six months to put a robot together. This may be surprising, but you have to build all the pieces. It
