Pime I Dub The Octopus Prime

 

Eh, its all relative. To those who are saying "see? it coulda been much worse", it could also have been MUCH MUCH better. People could be saying the same exact things about the designs in our movie too...

 

Some of the James Clyne artwork is remarkable (the first illustration of the captured Megatron, is more dramatic than the final film), but far too much of the rest just reminds me how much I still dislike the movie asthetic.

Which is intensely.

 

Im guessing this is all misinformation considering how bad the heads are.

 

^ How can it be misinformation when it's concept art for the first movie?

 

After a quick glance at Puptimus Prime, I'm glad that puppy was put to sleep before it would have the chance to soil the good name of the brand.

 

These have been around forever (or at least James Clyne's has). I am surprised they've only just surfaced now.

 

Ack! These guys are even worse at designing robots than Ben Proctor.

What's with Optipig Prime??!?

 

Both of these guys are massivly talented artists, there is no questioning that.
To me from viewing the galleries and seeing the different heads, it becomes very obvious that neither of these artist had any connection to the source material, and IMO most likely that was intentional.

I personally don't agree with that way of doing things. It's like asking an artist to draw something vague. "Dog" or "caveman", wont necessicarily get you "Scooby Doo" and "Fred Flintstone", but If you ask for a modernised version of each you are going to get something that is close to the original.

I think they were just trying as hard as possible to get away from the original style and still call it transformers. For the most part they pulled it off. Yes, there were some casualties, but it's done now.

With so many great artist who are fans and have conection to the comics it would have been hard to create this completely new look they wanted, so they just avoided those artists all together.

 

Very well said.

 

Wow. This goes to show that the people they were hiring to design the TF's have no f***ing clue what they were doing. It looks like they drew random robots and gave them semi-proper colors and called them TF's.....oh wait, that's kinda what happened with some of them....these just look even worse.

 

That's the point of rough concepts. They're not really meant to figure out how the robots' faces are supposed to emote but to capture the design style the producers/directors are looking for. While certain details might make it into the final designs, most of these head concepts are meant simply to establish the aesthetic direction of the robots and take it from there.

That being said, it's an interesting look into the design process for the movie. I'm a junkie for this sort of thing, especially since concept art is one of the professions I'm interested in getting into after college. I'm still hoping for an art book out of this series, hopefully, after RotF.

 

Awww man, now I'm REALLY missing having the aircraft carrier TF in the movie. Tarantulas REBORN!

 

Very good response but I have to say just on stylizing the designs are more disturbing even if you dont assert these to transformers.

As far as talent, it depends really. They have the talent to put images down that look interesting with very nice detail but as far as concept and imagination of the designs I have questions when it comes to the topics of robots or even robotic aliens. To me it seems with the subject they are trying to cover (robots in general not Transformers) its a square peg round hole. Some artists are better suited for other types of subject types than others being a great artist doesnt mean your good at every subject type and being able to draw is only half of the requirement.

Best part is atleast there was one guy who wasnt a yes man to these things because in the michael bay interview on the movie disc he talks about this. They showed the approved concept and only one Japanese guy actually said it sucked. lol (I believe he called it a discgrace to Optimus and TF fans). We were one person away from getting Dog face optimus. Atleast they had the sense to listen to him and he got to redesign optimus.

my biggest problem with the movie industry in general there is alot of mediocrity when trying to re-envision something that only needs to be dressed up for the big screen. I wonder what Iron Man or hell boy would look like if they went those directions. Those are great examples of making the source material movie ready instead of feeling the need to change everything.

 

Wow. Terrible Transformers designs there. As someone who can appreciate art and artistic freedom, it's nearly impossible to tell what one is looking at in some of them.

For generic monsters for a monster movie, great, they'd work, but as for Transformers, bleh.

Doesn't really matter at this point, they didn't use this, and what they did use isn't too far from it. What's done is done.

Just gives me more proof that the folks who made this just don't "get" Transformers.

Hopefully the 2nd one will be different.

 

What's worse? That these artists don't "get" Transformers, or that their sites are abysmal to navigate? James Clyne's site is absolutely dreadful. Neither site played particularly well with FF2.x

 

Ouch, I guess you don't have to have any idea of what a Transformer looks like to draw Transformers. So yes the piles of scrap from the Discovery Channel could have looked even less like any characters we knew, but that's still not a good excuse to throw iconic things out the window left and right.

 

Clyne is a great concept artist but his head designs just made me love the final film even more. Love concept art, hope there's an art book for both films when ROTF is out.

 

So, James Clyne made the infamous fat Opimus head, even Bay hated it. I can't believe how somebody thought it looked good.