Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1527843
J U LY • A U G U S T • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 4 C G W 1 5 T ransformers One, from Paramount Pictures, is the untold origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron. While fans know them as sworn enemies, they were once best friends who bonded on planet Cybertron. The fully CG-animated movie was directed by Oscar-winner Josh Cooley (Toy Story 4), and features an all-star voice cast that includes Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry, Scarlett Johansson, Keegan-Michael Key, Steve Busce- mi, Laurence Fishburne, and Jon Hamm. Here, Cooley shares insight into creating the ‰rst fully-CG Trans- formers movie, the production process, and working with VFX pow- erhouse ILM. Josh, based on your background, it sounds like you were the perfect person to direct this †lm? Well, aŒer I ‰nished Toy Story 4, I read the script for Transformers One. When I ‰rst saw the title, I was like, 'Okay, another Transformers movie? There have been so many of them. What's new about this?' There's basically three things: It's an origin story. There's these two characters that I grew up watching, and watching the cartoon, and loving the fact that it's about those two characters, speci‰cally, and their relationship. And it's on Cybertron, which is awesome! This is made for showing something epic, and I love sci-‰ as well. And then on top of that, the detail of it not having humans in the movie. The relationship between them is the human part. That's how the audi- ence will connect. And that's the thing I was the most excited about. I could see a clear arc in their character and their relationship go- ing from best friends to enemies. If we could sell in Act 1 that these characters really like each other, and they're really good friends we enjoy watching on-screen together, then it would just be absolutely heartbreaking and tragic to see that relationship fall apart. Then you would really understand, it's not just, 'I'm a good guy. I'm a bad guy.' You really understand kind of where they're coming from. And I just thought that could be really, really powerful. There are lots of visual references out there from past mov- ies, cartoons, and comics. What were you trying to visualize? I wanted to start with the G1 design—the design from the origi- nal cartoon in the '80s. That was the one I grew up with. You could see their faces really clearly. With the live-action ones, they have to match everything in the visual ežects to real life, so you have to see every bolt, every screw in there to really make sure to sell it. I knew that if we didn't have Earth, we didn't have humans, we can actually stylize a little bit more and kind of bring our own look to it. I knew I wanted to start with the original design because that's what I grew up with and that's what I loved. We just kind of [worked] with the production designer and all the artists. We updated everything and kind of brought a style to it that I also loved—[an] Art Deco sort of [look] I felt like the city should have. Flamboyance and kind of cele- bration when everything's great. J. C. Leyendecker was an illustrator/ painter [and a] huge inspiration because of the way his characters would look—really strong humans, but also kind of statuesque. Are you starting with voice tracks or concept art and story- boards? Early on we have a draŒ of the script, and we start storyboarding right away. I like to get everything up on the screen—the whole mov- ie as fast as possible in storyboards and with scratch dialogue and scratch temp track music…I wanted to get it into movie form as fast as possible, knowing it's not going to be right. You've got plenty of time to make changes along the way with the animation process. So, starting with story. At the same time, I'm also going to the art department and we're developing the look. What's so cool about that is that the story can ažect the look in the ‰lm, and the look that we're developing can also ažect the story, so it's really fun to [work] in dižerent departments and then connecting them into one vision. While ILM has a history with the live-action †lms, this is an 'or- igin' story and there are no existing assets in that case. Exactly! That they're starting from scratch. It's as if we're making a completely dižerent movie. The one thing that's connective is that a lot of our animators also animated the visual ežects for the live-ac- tion ones, so they're familiar with the scale and weight of these char- acters, which is great. How does the production evolve? They're starting to build models based on our art. It's one thing to have a 2D drawing, but then to have it in 3D, it changes things and you can make design changes based on that. Luckily, our art team is so pro‰cient with not just drawing on paper, but also modeling, so we were able to help give these models to ILM and they already had something to go ož of. It was a really smooth process…Once they have models, they're doing test animations. They're showing me, 'What if Bumblebee walked like this?' Even before they're talking, as they move, it should feel dižerent. Everybody moves dižerently, so they're playing around, just trying to get familiar with the style of the ‰lm. Since this is an origin story, where are you drawing visual ref- erences from? The interesting thing I found out, I didn't realize how deep it was—the lure of Transformers—is they made the toys ‰rst back in the early '80s in Japan. And then they were like, 'We need to sell these toys in Japan and in America, so we're going to make a cartoon series to sell these toys.' Japan was doing their own thing with the same designs that America had, [which] was doing their own thing…Instead of having a timeline, it just kind of spider-webbed out. There is this version of a story where they were friends before they became enemies. [It] has existed in the comic books and probably video games, but never on-screen, so this is the ‰rst time it's been brought to the big screen. Hasbro was great. [We'd] ask questions like, 'Do you have anything from when they ‰rst met that's been done before? And they would immediately supply me with whatever we needed, whether it was designs or just story points that they've used before, or the names of things, which was really helpful.