Yeah, I didn't see any mass shifting. All the stuff he transformed into was about the same size/mass/vume whatever. Each mode obviously requires his 'parts' to be compressed or expanded differently but I'd say it was all entirely believeable, in the context of Transformers live action movies of course!

 

Well....the allspark cube did....why not him?? LOL

 

wasn't it orcis & kurtsmans hwo didn't like the idea of mass-shifting? Maybe kruger didn't care about mass shifting.

 

This isn't fucking G1!!

Anyway I'd still say there was a fair bit of mass shifting going on, a child sized Bumblebee could not be the same size/mass as a monitor.

The Allspark can because it's a mystical object that not even the Transformers fully understand.

Frenzys head becoming a mobile phone is debatable, but at least it was only one alt-mode.

 

also he was fairly tall, probably bout 3-4 ft and bulky-ish, his wings also folded up real nice and they where pretty thin. i dont think the crew cared that much about the tiny bit of mass shifting he or for that matter frenzy would do, cause they were so small and it wasn't noticeable, i for one didnt think that frenzy's head could'nt turn into mikaleas phone in TF1 it seemed the right size, now if lazerbeak turned into a cellphone that would be ridiculous.

 

Obviously not, I'm just comparing it to an other occurance in the Transformers Universe. No one complains about a 30 ft tall giant robot turning into a small handheld blaster, but they complain about a vulture sized bot that turns into a 4ft toy.

 

Because the Mystical God-cube doesn't give a shit about your puny "Law of conservation of mass."  

Personally I attribute it to his wings, he can compress into smaller, more compact forms, while larger forms like Bumblebee that aren't based on anything real he expands into, like a balloon.

 

He was hurting the guy's hand too. Laserbeak was more than just the monitor. At the very least he was also the mouse, quite likely the entire PC (though that may have been an all-in-one PC built onto the back of the monitor).

 

No, yeah, he actually is.

 

Keep in mind that Movieverse Transformers have billions of tiny shifting pieces that make up their bodies. When they change form, the pieces move where ever necessary to replicate the scanned form. It's not at all hard to believe that Laserbeak in his flatscreen form was simply incredibly compact, and his Bumblebee and copier forms were simply shells, with no real inner structure.

Even then, though, it's hardly a critical flaw in the film.

Troll much?

 

This.
It's amazing how often people don't consider this when discussing how alt-modes work in the movieverse, claiming they absolutely can't be an exact replica of their alt-mode because "There's nowhere for the hands and head to go."

 

Let's look at Lockdown. He goes from Deluxe car to near-Voyager robot. Lockdown can't possibly shift mass, but he does change size.
We can also look at telescopic cylinders (like telescopes and crane arms), those fold in and extend out, again changing size but not mass.
Same thing applies to Frenzy and Laserbeak, they just fold up/out in a way that makes them look bigger, but don't actually gain or lose mass. Not to mention they're only shifting a few feet, and the transformation animations avoids "magically" growing/shrinking.

If Laserbeak or Frenzy gained or lost weight that would qualify as mass-shifting, but we can't tell if they did or not (that is, we never got any sense how heavy their robot modes were).

 

/thread

 

He doesn't, his self-regenerating armour can change parts really quickly. This means he can expand or compress, fitting his parts together really densly, or spreading them out to appear larger.

Exactly.

I'm pretty sure Laserbeak can't transform energy into mass or give life to entire planets and create sentient life on a large scale.

 

I noticed that too.

They way I see it, Laserbeak's "normal" bird mode only looks really big because of his wings and the overal span of his body. Remove the wings and he's actually not really that big. Considering the amount of material shifting that would be needed to acomplish a 4-ft. mini-Bumblebee AND a complete enertainment system (complete with human torturing mouse, as Deep Wang found out), he has to break his body down to really small bits. That's not something randomly introduced in the movies, after all Ravage threw up all the Insecticons that combined to form a litteraly paper-thin creature (Reedman or something), while the Insecticons themselves were clearly much thicker than that, so it's possible Laserbeak could do something of a similar nature so that he could compress himself to become something as widely spaced as a monitor and mouse, or form a Bumblebee-like shell (we never see the inside of the Bumblebee disguise, so it could in fact be a mostly hollow husk with the bare necessities for it to be moved around on the inside). The Compression ability would also explain how he was able to turn into a photocopier.

Since Laserbeak is a spy/assassain, being able to break down your body into really small interconnected bits in order to assume any given possible disguise at a moment's notice is really the original idea of being able to Transform in the first place taken to a very extreme (and effective) level.



Also, notice how his toy's alt. mode is some made-up VTOL vehicle, because the engineering to actually make bird-Lasebeak turn into ANY of his on-screen alt. modes can't be done in toy form at that size.

 

Michael Bay admits they did use some mass shift throughout the entire Trilogy...not like it matters anyways...

Frenzy transforming into a cellphone
Laser Beak and its many transformation

 

I personally experienced some mass shifting during Carly's scenes.

 

mass shifting is a can of worms that shouldn't be opened! its applications are endless and complicate things from using it for disguise to using it as a weapon

 

You do realize that the transformation process involves a lot of folding, right? In order to turn into the monitor, a lot of it probably had to do with his wings folding to form the actual screen. Meanwhile, his main body more-than-likely transformed into the machinery behind the screen. I dunno, I suck at trying to be scientific.

 

Because he just WANTS TO!!!