An giant animatronic Autobot Bumblebee waits for his close-up on the set of Transformers last year.
I have to say that I was really skeptical of the new Transformers movie, but the newest trailer for it looks pretty good. If you grew up in the `80s playing with the toys like me it's hard not to find the shot of Optimus Prime rolling up as a big truck and transforming (with the classic sound effect no less!) pretty darn cool.
While there's little doubt that Transformers is going to be an over-the-top CG extravganza, what's really interesting is that in additional to all the computer work, KNB FX has built several giant animatronic Transformers for the film. You can see some of the pics of the animatronic version of Bumblebee (pictured above) here.
I don't believe that KNB has gone on the record about their work on the film yet, except to confirm that they were "building some robots" last year, which is not surprising since Transformers - which comes out July 4th - is still shrouded in a lot of secrecy. While it's not clear whether KNB's animatronic Transformers will appear in the finished film or if they were just used as stand-ins during live action filming, it's worth noting that there's a lot more animatronics in the movies than you might expect.
It's not uncommon for animatronics and practical FX to be heavily utilized in movies to do things people usually assume are accomplished completely in CG. KNB built an animatronic version of the lion Aslan for use in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and Doctor Octopus' tentacles in Spiderman 2 were performed by a team of puppeteers in many scenes, despite most people's assumption that they were entirely computer animated.
