Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
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34 KEYFRAME MACHINE LEARNING TRANSFORMERS ONE Paramount Animation In Transformers One, a mining robot named Orion Pax is the big-hearted ideas guy, and his best friend D-16 is his practical, detail-oriented foil. Behind the scenes, Production Designer Jason Scheier and Art Director Gerald de Jesus had a similar dynamic. When they first collaborated, setting up the visual style for Blue Eye Samurai, they discovered they worked best with Scheier doing big, broad-strokes designs and de Jesus turning them into detailed blueprints. They both view each other's process as essential to setting up a complete, concrete vision to inspire the rest of the team. Coming onto Transformers One, Scheier and de Jesus felt the pressure of giving longtime fans something that fit into the franchise but still had its own unique vision. The film was to be set before the war on the planet Cybertron, in a time when society was separated into an upper class of Transformers and a lower class of bots tasked with mining Energon to power the planet. Orion Pax and D-16 would go on a quest to build a better future for mining bots, but the secrets they'd uncover would threaten their friendship and set them on the course to become the beloved hero Optimus Prime and the villain Megatron. The film being an origin story meant that Scheier and de Jesus had to imagine a world before the franchise existed, as well as one that also complemented it. This goal drove the approach to world-building for the design team. They spent time looking at the polygonal shapes of the Transformers: Generation 1 toy line, Floro Dery's designs for the 1980s animated TV series, and the use of different kinds of metals in the live-action Michael Bay films. For this latest Transformers iteration, they created class divides by contrasting gilded, Art Deco architecture and old, rusty structures built from scrap. They used panel cuts in the bots' faces to distinguish between old and young, and they showed the journey of careful, rule-following D-16 to his villain form of Megatron by tracking the color of his eyes, which turn from a cheerful yellow to a burning red throughout the runtime. But it wasn't until they completed their first sequence that they landed on the keystone that would guide them. Developed from one of the first paintings Scheier did on the project, the "train to the surface" sequence follows Orion Pax, D-16, and fellow miner bot B-127 as they chase their boss, another mining bot named Elita-1, through a cargo train on its way to the forbidden surface area of Cybertron. Inside the train, the viewer gets a clear sense of the industrial look of the mining world and the dynamics of character movement as they dodge falling crates. Then, they follow Elita-1 to the exterior of THEY CREATED CLASS DIVIDES BY CONTRASTING GILDED, ART DECO ARCHITECTURE AND OLD, RUSTY STRUCTURES BUILT FROM SCRAP. Rich metallic detailing draws attention to Iacon Tower in Cybertron's capital city of Iacon. F E AT U R E 34 KEYFRAME