A few days ago I was lucky enough to be able to do an on-phone interview with Scott Farrar the special effects supervisor and second unit director on Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen. You may not recognized Scott by name, but you have surely seen his work. Scott’s masterful resumé includes Star Wars VI- Return of The Jedi, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Jurassic Park, Men in Black, Artificial Intelligence: AI, and many other classic films. His work on both the Transformer films are ground breaking achievements in special effects.
How’s it going Scott? Big fan by the way.
Scott Farrar: Very well, thank you.
Was it a challenge getting all the effects done in a two year span and how much time did you have to work on the first film?
Scott Farrar: Well on the first film, actually each film took about a year and a half. We start with the script and then we start breaking it down to figure out how many shots and how much work is going to be involved. So after reading the script we realize, “Oh my gosh there are forty to six new characters!”, and they have major speaking roles and they have to act a lot better then they did in the first one. So right away you see some pretty daunting challenges.
So how do you make sure all the robots are different and unique in their own way? So when they are battling the audience can tell the difference between an autobot and a decepticon.
Scott Farrar: Well we know that in the first movie some of the characters were a little bit confusing because some of their colors looked similar. So that was a big note from fans and audiences. So we tried very hard to make sure we had colors and shapes that were a little easier to tell apart. So we try to make sure the fallen standout and hopefully the voice actors help the audience recognize some of the characters. It’s pretty easy for us to keep track of the characters because each one has a name so right away we start calling them by their name when watching dailies. So we can recognize that buffoon Starscream kissing up to Megatron! (Laughs)
Check out the rest of the interview below >>
