These facial designs are so far off the mark, even more so than the robot faces that made it into the film which were also poor.

 

Does the Optimus Prime concept head remind anyone of Orion Pax (who later became Optimus Prime) from G1? It looks like Orion Pax to me.

 

Lol, and some people are complaining about the present robot designs. With all due respect, but those James Clyne art designs look really bad. I'm glad they are not among the final designs.

 

Although some of the earlier bot designs aren't to my liking, some of the images look quite cool - especially the aircraft carrier! Although I hoped the thin leg-like things in 5/15 in Tim Flattery's gallery weren't actually the legs, are they?

 

Totally agree with you on that.
I think Bay (mostly, and his staff) had "HIS" idea of what transforming robots should be and it feels to me that he almost refused to do anything that was not his idea (Alien looking highly technical robots with lots of moving parts).
Yes from a filming standpoint, the transformations were incredible because of some of these changes, but so many characters were, as you said re-invented. I personally feel Starscream got the worst design of the bunch, and there was no reason to change him other than to fit the new style.

IMO I think he was trying to cheat a little of of some classic Sci-fi designs (Aliens, Predator, Independence Day) and make a robot version. If he pulled it off, everybody would have thought it a genious move. Instead it was totally inapropriate to Transformers, and because of the efforts of some passionate people we got the final designs we did. I'm just glad that I joined TFW2005 early enough to see the leaks and adjust to them.

It's funny you mention Iron Man, I remember seeing something from the directors where they said exactly that. They re-envisioned rather than re-invented iron man. When I heard that It came off as a pot shot at Bay and Transformers, as it was likely intended.

 

Did I just see Movie Crazy Blitzwing?

 

those are amazing... i mean, well they look alien and such, but you could see what direction they were going to take... the realism of the incoming alien robots, etc... and yeah, the artwork is top notch... wish i could illustrate like that...

 

james clyne concept drawing of Bumble,Megs and Prime are ugly...sorry to be so blunt,his artstyle is AMAZING but his idea of there looks Im go glad it didnt make the final cut!

And Tim Flattery has some great art work! impressive stuff...

 

I just love how all the fans immediately jump on these without thinking it through...For a movie, they do HUNDREDS of concept art images, sometimes even completely random ones that don't fit the direction. Why? Because you have to explore every direction and see what bits work and can be carried over to the next couple of design stages.

Why did they only post those concepts, while they likely did a LOT more? They can't show off all of their work since the studio may want to do something with it in future sequels, which is why they could only post stuff that has already been seen on their websites, along with a couple of other 'rejected' concepts.

 

Now that is some sick stuff that should have made it into the movie!!

 

While I still don't like the design and aesthetic of the movie, I'm so glad they didn't use that first guy's ideas. Prime with a dog face looks really bad.

 

To me it looks more like a pig!

 

Someone probably already mentioned this, but when you listen to the Michael Bay commentary he said one of the animators said Prime's head design was a disgrace to the Japanese" or something or other. By the looks of this he was totally right.

 

I don't know how much any you guys know about motorcycles, but if you look closely enough you can see that Bumblebee's jaws I guess you could say, are the breaking assembly and shifter, also known as the rearsets. Prime's forehead crest thing is the front fairing to a Suzuki GSXR. I don't know if that's laziness or creativity.