Philly­Film­Girl is back again with her next video of a Trans­form­ers 2 scene. Spoil­ers below!. This comes via TLAMB:

This scene shows Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBoeuf) on the phone to Mikaela explain­ing about his grandfather’s quest to the arc­tic, how he saw Mega­tron and how weird things hap­pened to him (“see­ing crazy sym­bols”) — things that have since begun hap­pen­ing to Sam — read­ing a 930 page book in 30 seconds.

The video very help­fully has subtitles:

Since post­ing this video, Philly­Film­Girl has also filled in some of the plot details that she has dis­cov­ered con­cern­ing Sam’s light­ning fast book read­ing skills:

–he gets some sort of a box, he touches it, it zaps him
–all of a sud­den in class (which is a large lec­ture hall) he goes crazy say­ing whats wrong in the book and draw­ing sym­bols all over his notes and on the board
–i myself have held and seen the astron­omy book, its pretty big
–he calls mikaela freaked out, thats where the video comes in
–from there, he tells her on the phone in another loca­tion, ‘dont touch the box’ so i guess thats what did it to him
–then he draws a lot of sym­bols and i guess it leads him to the final bat­tle and draw­ing sym­bols
he also meets another girl, alice who turns out to be evil and is try­ing to get all up on him at a party, bum­ble­bee crashes the party and here is the con­ver­sa­tion sam has with a frat brother
“hey fresh­men!” frat bro
“yea?” sam
“is that ur car parked there?“
“what car?“
“the yel­low one on the bushes“
“oh my friend just went to get u a tighter shirt“
“there is no tighter shirt i checked and you dont have any friends…say how about if i park my foot up ur ass!“
“what size shoe are you?“
“10”
sam then stum­bles on some bushes out­side the party, gets in the car with alice (that girl i men­tioned)
bum­ble­bee doesnt like her (hence that video with the spin­ning stop we saw), she gets out with goo on her because of bum­ble­bee
then later alice is seen in a court­yard all meni­a­cle look­ing after some sort of explo­sion and the trio are run­ning from her

oh yea, he gets a new roo­mate at col­lege and his name is leo — leo knows or fig­ures out about trans­form­ers and they basi­cally kill that new saturn…i think it gets split in two and placed up high on a ledge in a warehouse/factory place, and theres explo­sions
thats some of what i know hap­pens, hope that helps, this is all the truth

the par­ents are in france…something bad hap­pens there they all observe a tv in a open air mar­ket and peo­ple are cry­ing (an old woman is even wear­ing a biret), a build­ing col­lapses, and peo­ple are flee­ing from it and then we see a trans­former in france hunt­ing down the par­ents or pro­tect­ing them, i dont know

shia gets stran­gled by mega­tron too…we will see megatron’s hand stran­gle him

Explo­sions were promised, and Ranger565 (via TLAMB) has come back with his report which you can find below. Now all we need are some pic­tures and video…

OK Well I work in the area and they have the whole area set up to be China, as you guys know. Now I did see Prime, Bum­ble­bee, the sil­ver corvette, 2 blue cars (small) and Iron­hide. All were parked on the back lot behind Catalina Landing!

The scene I wit­nessed was a traf­fic scene where they were dri­ving down Shore­line Drive and then 2 flatbed Trucks merge into traf­fic. THEN BOOOM!!! One of the two trucks blew in half.

NOTE: The Auto­bots were not in the blow up scene. That’s it the stunt guys got out the cars and the Heli­copter flew off. But man that truck blue the trailer hitch right off. Then I heard that it may not have gone accord­ing to plan. Both trucks were [sup­posed] to blow up.

Got pic­tures? Send them in!

In an inter­view with MTV con­cern­ing the Trans­form­ers 2 pre­quel comic, pub­lisher IDW con­firmed that they would be pro­vid­ing a wealth of back­ground infor­ma­tion on the new main vil­lain, The Fallen.

“[We’re going to] explore the back­ground of The Fallen — the main vil­lain of the movie — as well as expand on the ‘Reign of Starscream’ story that we’re doing and tie every­thing in to what this next movie is going to be,” explained writer Chris Mowry, who part­ners on the book with artist Alex Milne. “The next movie starts out with just tons of action and there’s obvi­ously going to be a lot of ques­tions, so we’re hop­ing to answer some of those beforehand.”

[…]

“Des­tiny” will estab­lish much of the sec­ond before fans are intro­duced to an increas­ingly com­plex sto­ry­line with mul­ti­ple new robots. “We’re def­i­nitely tak­ing every char­ac­ter that we can from the sequel,” said Mowry. “So you’ll see some Sec­tor 7 involve­ment and how they devel­oped into a new group that will be intro­duced. The same thing with some of the new char­ac­ters, we’ll explain how they get to Earth. Because like I said, [the sequel] starts out with this giant bat­tle so peo­ple will be won­der­ing ‘Hey, where did that guy come from?’”

This is reit­er­ated in an inter­view with Simon Fur­man at CBR,

“I’ve never really had the chance to lay down the defin­i­tive story around [the 13] and what role they played in what came after them. Over the years for var­i­ous pub­lish­ers in var­i­ous pub­li­ca­tions, I’ve laid seeds of this group called The 13 and hinted about who some of them might be and how they play into the big­ger mythos. I think this is where we’re find­ing answers to all the big ques­tions. We’re work­ing very closely with Has­bro in this series so that what­ever we do in ‘The 13′ is very much tied in to the whole Trans­form­ers Uni­verse. They want to get all of their irons in the fire ready and in the right order for 2009, which is the 25th anniver­sary. We’re all work­ing hope­fully to get a defin­i­tive, cohe­sive Trans­form­ers Uni­verse in terms of the back story.”

The writer added that the threads intro­duced in “The 13″ will even­tu­ally pay­off in cur­rent series and plots and pos­si­bly else­where within the Trans­form­ers fam­ily of media. “It’s inter­est­ing that the sec­ond movie is using this char­ac­ter called the Fallen, which is a char­ac­ter that we cre­ated back in the Dreamwave days for this big series called ‘The Dark Ages’ which tapped into what had gone before. So these names and insti­tu­tions like The 13 are rolling on into dif­fer­ent incarnations.”

For those not in the know, from Wikipedia:

Although the Fallen’s ori­gins are only sug­gested in his comic book appear­ance, they would be fully explained in Dor­ling Kindersley’s Trans­form­ers: The Ulti­mate Guide. One of the orig­i­nal thir­teen Trans­form­ers cre­ated by Primus, the robot who would become the Fallen betrayed his cre­ator by sid­ing with Primus’s dark twin, the malev­o­lent planet-eater, Uni­cron. In the final bat­tle between Primus and Uni­cron, the Fallen fell vic­tim to the same fate as his mas­ter, sucked through a black hole into another dimen­sion. How­ever, while Uni­cron emerged into another uni­verse, the Fallen was not so for­tu­nate, find­ing him­self trapped in the “under­space” between dimensions.

The Fallen made his only appear­ance in the sec­ond vol­ume of Trans­form­ers: The War Within — the Dark Ages. Around 6.5 mil­lion years ago, a test of the exper­i­men­tal “space bridge” matter-transport sys­tem on Cybertron lib­er­ated the Fallen from his prison, and he mate­ri­alised on Cybertron, where he quickly recruited the Chaos Trin­ity, three mystically-inclined Decep­ti­cons — Blud­geon, Mind­wipe and Bugly — into his employ. Abduct­ing Trans­form­ers that he iden­ti­fied as pos­sess­ing “genetic poten­tial” within their sparks — Grim­lock, Blitzwing, Jet­fire and Hot Spot — the Fallen planned to use their ener­gies to awaken Primus from his self-imposed slum­ber, thereby alert­ing Uni­cron to his loca­tion, allow­ing the world-eater to renew hos­til­i­ties with his old enemy. An attack from com­bined Auto­bot and Decep­ti­con forces led by Shock­wave and Prowl dis­rupted his plans, and Primus him­self reached out and promptly destroyed the Fallen.

The Movie Blog got the scoop on one of the key indoor scenes involv­ing Shia La Boeuf and Rainn Wil­son as a pro­fes­sor. This pas­sage of text does give away spoil­ers — involv­ing mys­ti­cal pow­ers and Ein­stein. Josh Duhamel has also revealed a key plot detail in an inter­view with Empire:

“I guess who he’s work­ing with is prob­a­bly the biggest change,” said Duhamel, before adding once more, pre­sum­ably for empha­sis. “Who he’s work­ing with.”

Imply­ing that the Auto­bots and Decep­ti­cons may be forced to work together to over­come a greater evil, per­haps the all pow­er­ful Fallen.

Movie Blog Spoiler

On the first day of class, Sam goes crazy just before get­ting to class for some rea­son. It seems there is some object that he was exposed to that affected him, our guess is the splin­ter from the cube. Any­ways, Rainn Wil­son asks the class to turn to the first page of the text book (which, appar­ently, Rainn Wilson’s char­ac­ter is the pro­fes­sor of the class AND the writer of the Astron­omy text book that they are using in class). Wilson’s character’s name is Pro­fes­sor Colon (pro­nounced: koh — lawn). Every­one except Sam turns to the first page. Sam, instead, read the entire book in 5 sec­onds by just flip­ping through it, then starts telling Wilson’s char­ac­ter about what parts of his book are wrong. He also starts talk­ing about how Ein­stein was wrong. Sam gets up from his seat and goes up to the chalk board and starts writ­ing a lot of weird sym­bols on the chalk board (prob­a­bly Cryp­ton­ian). Then he starts ask­ing why nobody under­stands and then he leaves class. On the sec­ond day of class, he appar­ently returns, but acts less crazy.

The rea­son we sus­pect that it is an object he touches that makes him crazy is because there was a scene shot ear­lier where he was on the phone Fox’s char­ac­ter Mikaela, and he was ask­ing her if she had “it” and then told her to make sure she doesn’t touch “it”. Our guess is the “splin­ter” (left over piece of the Allspark Cube), but it could be some­thing else, of course.

Oh, and the last scene that was filmed on Wednes­day evening was of Sam arriv­ing to class while rid­ing the red motor­cy­cle that peo­ple have seen in pic­tures. I don’t think that proves whether or not it is a Trans­former or just a motor­cy­cle, but it could be worth­while infor­ma­tion in the future.

Talk­ing with the New Jer­sey Times, Michael Bay has revealed a lit­tle about Sam Witwicky’s char­ac­ter development:

The uni­ver­sity angle to the plot “is all about Sam grow­ing up and going to col­lege … a teenager grow­ing into a man,” Bay said.

[…]

With Witwicky enrolled at a fic­tional East Coast school with an Ivy League feel, Banes comes from Los Ange­les as a vis­i­tor to her friend’s new cam­pus, Bay said.

Cam­pus scenes were shot at both Prince­ton and, ear­lier this month, at the Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia in Philadelphia.

Con­tribut­ing sources: /Film, TLAMB

Thanks to Robo­quaker, we have a sec­ond set of images from the Smith­son­ian National Air and Space Museum near Wash­ing­ton DC.

These pic­tures show a small radio con­trolled car, rumored to be “Wheels” given the call sheet descrip­tions which sug­gest Wheels is fairly small. (Can you imag­ine it as a toy!?)

UPDATE: High Res­o­lu­tion images added. Repro­duced under a cre­ative com­mons license.

SHH have posted up a sec­ond set report to go with this:

I’m back one last time with a report about what I saw filmed at the museum on Sat­ur­day. Some poten­tially spoi­ler­ish stuff will fol­low, so be aware.

I arrived around 10 and stayed until they broke for lunch (around 2, 2:30). Got to see a lot of stuff filmed, it was really quite inter­est­ing stuff. Shia, Megan Fox, and John Tur­turro were all on set.

All film­ing pretty much took place around the SR-71 Black­bird today. When I first got there, Michael Bay was being pushed on a cart with a cam­era film­ing an RC car, an RC mon­ster truck to be exact. It would roll past the side of the Black­bird and stop at the front. After sev­eral times doing this, Shia and Megan would then run and fol­low the RC truck along the plan to the front (Shia was hold­ing what I can only describe as a plas­tic spoon prob­a­bly stand­ing in for some­thing dig­i­tal later). When he got to the front he would hold it up to the nose of the plane.

Poten­tially big SPOILERS may be here in this next part, but the next bit filmed was John Tur­turro and that unknown actor in the green hoodie from yes­ter­day film­ing a scene fac­ing the front of the plane. After some flashes of light, Tur­turro freaks out and yells “Decep­ti­con! Get behind the MIG!”. So it’s offi­cial, the Black­bird is a Decep­ti­con, or at least that’s what the char­ac­ters think.

After that they took a long time set­ting up and film­ing the RC car rolling straight towards the nose of the plane and stop­ping. They then placed a two foot tall cutout of a robot (what the RC car will trans­form into) in its place and took some shots to get ref­er­ences for the FX team. And finally, they had the car roll towards the plane and stop, then Shia crawled into view and held up his “spoon” to the nose of the plane.

The last cou­ple of scenes I saw before the broke for lunch was a scene with Megan Fox. It was far away from where we were allowed to stand and I couldn’t hear any dia­logue but the tiny robot cut out was stand­ing off cam­era and she was look­ing down at it while talk­ing. And lastly, Shia stepped in the scene next to her and was yelling at some­one off cam­era (though again I couldn’t hear any dialogue).

Fol­low­ing the Smith­son­ian rev­e­la­tion in the call sheet, fans rushed to the Smith­son­ian Air and Space Museum know­ing what, where and when to expect the Trans­form­ers film­ing crew to be doing. Topher­lyon has sent TLAMB his pic­tures of the event, and HowDe­sign have some up too. There’s a set report fol­low­ing the gallery that pro­vides some back­ground infor­ma­tion on the day’s events.

It is thought that the plane with the Auto­bot sym­bol on its tail, where no film­ing was tak­ing place, is Michael Bay’s per­sonal air­craft. You can also see sev­eral shots of the SR-71 Black­bird, which is now known to be Jet­fire. Out­side, Bum­ble­bee is clearly vis­i­ble as well as a green car (partly under cov­ers), thought to be a Chevy Beat con­cept, almost cer­tainly another Autobot.

Both Shia and Megan Fox have been spot­ted on set, though no clear pho­tos snapped.

I’ve got a first-hand Trans­form­ers 2 set report from Friday.

The mis­in­for­ma­tion machine con­tin­ues to roll for TF2. News was that TF2 would be film­ing in DC for a few days. Got a call from my buddy at 4pm yes­ter­day that they were film­ing at the Air and Space Museum, no not the one in DC, the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum by Dulles Air­port in Dulles, VA (30 –40 mins out­side DC).

My friend and I quickly left work and headed over to the museum because it was only 5 min­utes away. We arrived there and there was noth­ing to really indi­cate that film­ing was going on, it was very low-key. Found them film­ing inside and the only way you could tell it was for TF2 was from the crew’s badges (an Auto­bot logo fol­lowed by the num­ber 2).

Met up with our buddy and watched a few scenes being filmed. Saw Michael Bay film­ing, but couldn’t make out what was going on too well because they kept us back far enough. Museum secu­rity and crew were heav­ily guard­ing the area from peo­ple tak­ing pho­tos. My buddy said Shia and Megan Fox were there ear­lier film­ing some scenes and Shia would be back soon. We finally saw what looked like Shia dressed in an old time pilots out­fit (think avi­a­tor gog­gles and a white scarf around the neck). He was stand­ing between a pil­lar and a man­nequin dressed like him, along with sev­eral other man­nequins dressed in dif­fer­ent pilot out­fits. They repeat­edly filmed a secu­rity guard run­ning by as Shia reached out and put a taser to his neck and the guard would fall to the ground.

We chat­ted with a crew mem­ber and he men­tioned how not many peo­ple knew they were there and that they had been film­ing there since Thurs­day. At the time we were there, they were film­ing around the SR-71 Black­bird. I don’t know how legit this is, but the crew mem­ber said that the Black­bird is going to be fea­tured very promi­nently in the film, but that peo­ple aren’t really sup­posed to know that. So if true, let the spec­u­la­tion begin as to what Trans­former this will be [Jetfire].

They con­tin­ued film­ing the taser scene as the museum closed and we were ush­ered out­side. The crew mem­ber also men­tioned they would be going out­side to film some scenes in the park­ing lot later. So when we got out­side we found the coned-off park­ing lot with a few cars sit­ting hud­dled together under tarps. One was clearly Bum­ble­bee, the rims and parts of the yel­low bumper were vis­i­ble. There was also a lime green car. From the look of the shape and the front bumper I would guess that it is either a Toy­ota Matrix or a Scion xA, but I’m prob­a­bly wrong. The third car had a very strange shape and I could not make it out.

Unfor­tu­nately, I couldn’t get close enough to the cars to get decent pic­tures on my cam­era phone. We waited around for a while but by 6:15 we had to leave. They were still inside at that time so we didn’t get to see the new cars actu­ally being filmed.

So there you have it. They are film­ing there again today and I plan on going back to check out some more. I’ll be sure to send along any­thing new I find out.

Oh, one last thing, Michael Bay flew to the Museum (which has its own run­way) and there on the run­way sat a white plane with the Auto­bots logo on the tail. Pretty freakin’ cool. Can’t remem­ber if he had that dur­ing film­ing for the first one, but he’s got it now!

An anony­mous tip­ster has sent TFLAB the Beth­le­hem, PA Call Sheet (wiki) and with it some mas­sive spoilers.

MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW

To the top right of the image, it reveals that there are 84 film­ing days, not includ­ing sched­uled breaks, etc.

Trans­port

The break­down of the trans­port used dur­ing the shoot reveals 3 Arcee Motor­cy­cles, an Ice­cream Truck, Iron­hide, Stinger, Audi R8, 3 NEST Hum­mers, 2 Trikes, 10 ND Vehi­cles and an ND Semi, with Auto­bot dri­vers to be dressed in black.

Using the set descrip­tions, and loca­tion, it is obvi­ous that the area we have seen is being used as a steel pro­duc­tion yard — set in Shang­hai, China. The scene break­downs also reveal that the Ice­cream truck is a new robot — split­ting in two (“twins”) around chil­dren whilst leav­ing them treats (com­edy is back, excel­lent!). The Audi R8 is also a sus­pected Trans­former, though it is not revealed here — it is involved in a chase through alleys, escap­ing from The Twins. There is no men­tion of the aer­ial pur­suits we have seen in videos and images.

June 5th — 6th Schedule

Air and Space Museum

A sec­ond loca­tion, Smith­son­ian Air and Space Museum (Wash­ing­ton DC), has also been revealed in the Advance Shoot­ing Schedule.

Here a Decep­ti­con sym­bol is dis­cov­ered on an SR-71 Black­bird, before trans­form­ing into Jet­fire! There is also ref­er­ence to let­ting “Wheels” out, pos­si­bly another Transformer.

Bum­ble­bee and The Twins are also estab­lished in an alter­na­tive scene at a park­ing lot at the Sands Beth­works.

The IESB have thrown out their Trans­form­ers 2 robot roll call, and with it they state that the Decep­ti­cons shall have the help of the Con­struc­ti­cons in the sec­ond movie.

In the car­toons, their names were Scrap­per, Bonecrusher, Scav­enger, Mix­mas­ter, Hook and Long Haul. And what do we get when they all com­bine and form one huge ass robot? That’s right boys and girls, we are going to see DEVASTATOR on the big screen!

… I’ll re-iterate that. Dev­as­ta­tor is big.

Here’s a pretty awe­some fan mock-up of what Dev­as­ta­tor may look like in the movie, cre­ated by Rise Stu­dios. A cin­e­matic adap­ta­tion of this char­ac­ter shall prob­a­bly appear a lot more com­plex than this, to fit in with the style already set out by the first movie.

As for the human side of the argu­ment, IESB have posted up a prospec­tive char­ac­ter list which is now wait­ing to be cast:

[CHUCK] 19–25 yrs., Sam’s room­mate at Prince­ton. He runs a con­spir­acy the­ory web­site. Funny in an irrev­er­ent, edgy way, he is shocked to see his con­spir­acy the­o­ries come to life. (2nd Lead)

[U.S. MILITARY LEADER] Late 20s/early 30s, African Amer­i­can with a great sense of humor and a tough mil­i­tary pres­ence. (Sup­port­ing lead)

[UK SPECIAL FORCES LEADER] British, in his early to mid 30s, smart and capa­ble. Can be Cau­casian, Black, East Indian. (Sup­port­ing lead)

[GALLOWAY] Early 40s-early 50s, male, National Secu­rity Advi­sor and pres­i­den­tial liai­son. A curt man who is tightly wound. (Sup­port­ing Lead)

[PROFESSOR COLAN] 40s, Sam’s physics pro­fes­sor at Prince­ton. He’s a self-satisfied intel­lec­tual who com­pares him­self to Ein­stein, and is arro­gant enough to wear leather pants to look cool. (1 Scene)

[THERESA] Early 30s; she’s Sgt. Epps’ wife, has 4 kids, sassy and sexy, good with com­edy. Sub­mit African Amer­i­can actresses only

[MOMMA SIMMONS] This NY Momma is in her late 60s / early 70s. She runs a deli/ butcher shop with her son in Brook­lyn. Tough and sar­cas­tic. (1 Scene)

[MASSIVE DYNAMICS CEO] 50s, male, this Cor­po­rate CEO appears in front of con­gress to tes­tify. (1 speech/scene)

[TEXAS CONGRESSMAN] 55–65 yrs., on a Con­gres­sional Com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the pur­pose of the “Auto­mated Defen­sive Ini­tia­tive” devel­oped by Mas­sive Dynamics.

[FBI DIRECTOR] Mid 50s, male, giv­ing a press release assur­ing the pub­lic they will be safe against attacks. (1 speech/scene)

[CNN REPORTER] Report­ing on mis­sile strikes and bomb­ings in var­i­ous cities. Sub­mit male / female, all eth­nic­i­ties (1 speech)