Okay, so today brought with it a bunch of wild stuff (the TF trailer being the most wild, obviously.) However, the Transformers movie website was also updated with a spinning planet. Now, unless I missed a press release, this planet has just been dubbed Cybertron, (which would make sense, seeing as it's the main navigator thingie for the main website.) Personally, I don't think it's the best design for a planet that's supposed to suggest a planet inhabited by millions of sentient mechanical beings who have, in turn, ravaged their beautiful cityscape world with war. Now, what general planetary images do the CG artists have to avoid? 1. The Death Star. If the planet is too organized in design, or chunks of it are missing and chunks of it are intact, the visual connection would be - at least, to me - too strong. On top of that, if Cybertron is all very organized and very metallic, the connection to the first Death Star as a visual image is equally powerful. So, those are pretty hard design constraints to work around. 2. Coruscant. If the artists tried to suggest eons of technology by showing technological lighting patterns on the surface and indigenous ships in orbit, they'd be repeating a very strong visual image from all three Star Wars prequels. Outta luck there. 3. The "Borg Earth" from Star Trek: First Contact. While this image borrows from the Coruscant image, there are some unique elements of the design - particularly, the atmosphere is a little more translucent, the ground and surface are a bit more visible, etc. Unique, but worth avoiding as our Cybertron. In my opinion, the CG artists are closer than they think with all of the spires and stalagmites sticking off of the planet now. If you think about it, there ARE elements of the original Transformers cartoon Cybertron that were, design-wise, pretty unique to other iconic planets from different universes - plenty of buildings that reached near-unrealistically into the sky, chasms of technology that went on forever, etc. Cybertron, as a planet design in the original show, hinted great plans to succeed, followed by great failures, as the planet was covered with designs that reached impossibly high into the planet's periphery, many of them covered with scars or just missing whole chunks of building/structure. That, to me, suggests a more plausible planet where machine creatures have built great weapons and places of war, only to tear the opposing sides' structures down again, wash, rinse, repeat. I say this not as a knee-jerk fan, but as someone considering the design aesthetic that could make Cybertron look less like a strip-mined moon with blue guts: Take a few more hints from the original Cybertron images from "Transformers: The Movie" and the original TV show. The image of Cybertron from the original cartoons is just unique enough that it doesn't tread on the artistic boundaries set by other iconic planets from other films. I'm not talking stupid here just because I want an '84 movie, I'm just hoping we could get something that looks like a planet that has been built up, destroyed, rebuilt, etc., ad nauseum, by its indigenous species - a group of mechanicals.
Not sure what to think about that "Cybertron" The size of the surface craters and spires and whatnot give it the appearance of a very small moon or asteroid. Looks kinda like an orange that's been left in the back of the fridge for a year. .. and someone stuck a blue light in it.
Ops_was_a_truck, I agree with everything you said. It's definitely a tight rope to walk to capture that Cybertronian look without making non-fans believe they "ripped off" some incarnation of Star Wars or Star Trek. I'm not sold on what appears on the official website at this time, but perhaps presented on film some swift zooms into those blue cracks could reveal a living world beneath?
I hope there are layers and layers full of eclectic and bizarre scenes; pristine untouched areas yards from war ravaged areas, Cybertronian art, and Cybertronian versions of human marketing/signs/etc. Also, they can never go wrong if they ripped off Blade Runner for esthetics (just scale things up and add lil touches here and there-- voila!).
