Wreck­ers

Until now, the weaponized Nascars have been dubbed stun­ti­cons, omni­bots and rally­bots, all three names have been rejected by MichaelBay.com’s Nel­son. Nel­son has since con­firmed that they are actu­ally called Wreck­ers. Wikipedia pro­vides some back­ground on the characters:

The Wreck­ers are a sub-team of Auto­bots in the fic­tional Trans­form­ers Uni­verse, func­tion­ing essen­tially as a com­mando unit.

Red Faced

Film­ing last week on Michi­gan Avenue, Chicago, the Trans­form­ers 3 crew were using more card­board head cut outs. This time, lowfatoreo’s YouTube video has high­lighted a new char­ac­ter, red faced and angry look­ing this could be the robot mode of the Fer­rari, Roll­bar or a Wrecker, my per­sonal guess is that it’s the red Wrecker. Hat tip to Trans­form­ers Live for pick­ing this one out.

Ein­stein, Mercedes

Until now it’s been pre­sumed that the Mer­cedes was the lat­est incar­na­tion of Jolt, how­ever Nel­son has dis­pelled these rumors on the offi­cial Michael Bay site, point­ing out instead that the Mer­cedes E550 is the alt mode of the Ein­stein looka­like robot, that is called Q (“like in James Bond”).

Trans­form­ers 3 pro­duc­tion has con­tin­ued work­ing in Chicago, mov­ing their sets to Wacker Drive. Scenes have included a seem­ingly heroic moment for Patrick Dempsey, as Shia and Rosie sit amongst the rubble.

On set, a new red 4x4 truck has also been spot­ted, glow­ing and undam­aged, it stood out promi­nently from the mis­cel­la­neous burnt out cars. This has now been con­firmed as Roll­bar — his name is spelled out on the vehi­cle and he sports the auto­bot logo. Roll­bar doesn’t have a big per­son­al­ity within the Trans­form­ers fran­chise (or much of any­thing beyond being many dif­fer­ent toys), with this char­ac­ter Bay is free to recre­ate as he pleases.

Add to all this, the card­board head of Mega­tron has been thrown into the mix.

Roll­bar

The folks over at TFW2005 inves­ti­gated the T B logo on the back and found that it stands for “Tommy Built”, the jeep wasn’t orig­i­nally built for the movie and a clip on YouTube showed it with a mounted machine gun on the rear, Para­mount pic­tures have sinced removed the video.

Mega­tron

This one was picked up by Trans­form­ers Live:

Wacker Drive

The full pic­ture set is avail­able from The Chive

More of those card­board cut-out heads, as opposed to a 20ft robot. One dili­gent snap­per (mtoe­set via TLAMB) caught an image of what is pre­sum­ably Shockwave’s head (being a cyclops and all, with a slight pur­ple tinge), next to Sound­wave. Still no hints at his alt mode.

via Trans­form­ers Live

The most inter­est­ing aspect of Day 5’s film­ing was the photo of an autobot’s head, a grey haired char­ac­ter sport­ing spec­ta­cles and stand­ing next to Bum­ble­bee. These cards are used to aid the actors with line of sight, etc. Who is this new auto­bot? What is his alt mode? The head of Sound­wave was also spot­ted (Pix­el­Rally got the shot), con­firm­ing his role in the movie.

The day also fea­tured a base jump from Trump Tower and scenes below, much of which has been cap­tured on film. Then of course there are explo­sions, wouldn’t be a Bay film with­out them. Cars flip­ping, Bum­ble­bee skid­ding around, para­chuters fly­ing in. The video playlist below has over 15 videos from the day’s shoot:

Film­ing con­tin­ued on Sat­ur­day, and the ’72 Dat­sun sport­ing Bum­ble­bee colour­ing was spot­ted along­side Shia and Rosie in Chicago, prob­a­bly con­tin­u­ing from the scene in Mil­wau­kee. The auto­bots were also out in full col­ors and a truck sport­ing the word “NEST” has shown up, spark­ing rumors that it’s a mobile HQ unit.

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Trans­form­ers 2 art work from Ben Proc­tor reveals the robots that made the cut, and more inter­est­ingly, those that didn’t. Stealth boats, nuclear subs that take down air­craft car­ri­ers and alter­na­tive con­struc­ti­cons. We also get a look at the inner work­ings of many decep­ti­cons, includ­ing eye details on The Fallen, an early Dev­as­ta­tor design and pre­tender Alice, tongue and all.

This TV Spot con­tains some spoil­ers as to one character’s des­tiny — how­ever it also intro­duces Side­swipe, show­ing his trans­for­ma­tion from the Corvette and his slip and slide tech­nique in full. Embed­ding on the video is dis­abled, but you can catch it in HD on YouTube.

A set of new images has recently been released to the press, here’s a quick run down of them from a vari­ety of sources. Prime stand­ing in front of the Sphinx looks awe­some, as do the twins cov­ered in sand whilst look­ing aghast.

From USA Today

From GM’s Autobot’s site