SundayI
blogged on the arrival of the Transformers into Second Life as part of Paramount Pictures campaign to promote the new Transformer movie.
Tonight Liam Kanno of the V3 group was kind enough to give me a personal guided tour of the Transformer sim at Sector 7.
"This build was done by 12 members of the V3 Group team for the Picture Production company, for Paramount Pictures and took 2.5 weeks to complete. The day after the V3 Group completed the Die Hard 4 sim we moved on to this build."
Again we started on top of the dam, which is based on the Hoover dam in Nevada and sector 7 concept in the movie.
"We decided to used the default setting of the sim (The cloud cover) to mask the views since we couldnt create all of Hoover dam, we felt the fog and mist will help create a mood."
The build is impressive and complicated, nearly using all available prims. Was it just a coincidence that they’ve managed the build, or was it pre-planned, I asked.
"One of the tricky aspects of this build is when Paramount makes some of their pictures there is no master over arching seemless plan of layout... i.e. they would film the top of the dam and film the stairway scene in Hollywood and the elevator scene perhaps somewhere else and. yes. during the Bumbleebe Avatar contruction, we had to build that on one of our other sims but otherwise it was well planned.”
Through good cooperation with Paramount V3 managed to put it together in 2.5 weeks but
“In terms of the movie translation to 3d. when it comes to making a movie process seemless in 3-D there are alot of gaps therefore we have to use alot of creative licence to fill in the blank spots and get it approved by paramount. As we received assets from ILM and Paramount we got more accurate, but never had to do a rework. The discussion was mainly about... "How will the rooms be layed out., or how will we solve Bumblebees 16 foot height issue." and how do we put more emphasis on the Megatron room.”
The Megatron room is the press room where the movie junket with Michael bay and 4 of the other main talenSt from the movie took place (prerecorded interview can be seen on www.slcn.tv). Megatron itself is a little different from the original cartoon.
“yes, quite, we put quite a bit of emphasis on creating mood with sound . We had several builders in here create parts ranging from pumps to Megatron sculpties, to structures etc. The majority of it was orchestrated by Kelly Emms the V3 Producer.
Building megatron in SL is almost insanity due ot his organic design. We had to do a combination of 2d art with sculpties, and basic prims to give the presence of him and we put more emphasis on mood and lighting then hyper accuracy. Due to the time constraint we had to focus more on the mood but if we had an extra week. we would have finished him as a full prim sculpture.”
One of the hottest items in the build is the Bumblebee avatar freebee.
“We feel that the sim is just an anchor to a marketing campaign, but the Avatar is the viral aspect. Bumblebee was the first robot seen in the movie, and had the most human likeness. We are working on other avatars at the moment. Avatars are excellent marketing tools in SL since they spread quickly across sims.”
One of the hardest thing to put into perspective was the all-spark cube;
”The allspark cube was the most tricky since we recieved assets 1.5 weeks into the build and we saw that the allspark cube was huge in the movie which we could not recreate in SL since we try to keep certain builds within 64 meters so all parts draw in at the lowest setting so in order for us to make this space appear much larger, we made all the objects in this room 1/4 scale.”
There are a number of rooms inside the build that do not fulfill a utilitarian need, but help to create mood and give the impression of the movie. As the Picture Production company puts heavy emphasis on the "art of the film".
Labels: bots, hollywood, paramount, second life, transformers, V3
