Jaeger’s creation process begins the moment he gets the script or even hears of the idea, “the gears start turning,” in his own words. “You start thinking, wouldn’t it be cool if these things could be driving down the freeway and transform while still having some wheels on the ground, so they can still be going 80 miles an hour while they are transforming?’ He would study his surroundings for more answers, and might note how a forklift has the axle bend around or the R-Model lamp, examining the movement. But frequently he would just start out with a piece of paper and a pen. “It’s not all digital these days,” he chuckled, “I just sketch out very simple ideas. Once you get the overall action or design feel you want, you can go in and add all the little details, the stuff that people go, ‘It was really cool the way that thing broke apart.’” The pipeline went from 2D sketches directly to 3D models. “Most of the artwork we got was just a front view and a back view, so I had to take the artwork and interpret what it looked like from the top and side so the modelers had a guide.”
To provide input on the robot faces and heads that would portray the bulk of emotion, Director Michael Bay sent Jaeger to the Los Angeles ILM department where the robot bodies were created. Inspired by the original cartoon but not limited by it, Jaeger modified details such as the horns on Bumblebee, sticking with the general silhouette but exchanging the horns for fins. “We call those the emotional horns, because they pop up or fold back like a dogs ears.” It turned into a nice little design feature.
Bumblebee required the most emotional range, difficult because he didn’t have a mouth. “Initially, when I did the head design, I also did a series of emotion tests where I took pretty much the same artwork and reconfigured it to him doing different poses and different facial expressions. That was just to get the buy off, to prove this design could work.” Scott Benza and the animators would run the robot through its motions and together with Jaeger would figure out what pieces could be used where. “For example, we could use the piece just below the top of his faceplate as an eyebrow, or some of the pieces inside his cheek could swivel up and would replicate a smile. But a lot of it came down to the eyes. The eyes are really complicated on these robots, dilating in and out, getting bigger and smaller and brighter. Those things alone conveyed a lot of the emotion we needed.”
Bumblebee has the basic design elements of the cartoon with a silver face, yellow helmet, and the Autobot logo on his forehead, as well as shapes like the scoops on the side of his head resembling the ’74 model Camaro headlights. “Michael [Bay] didn’t want to see any stretching metal. He thought that was cheesy, a little too Terminator esque. The idea was we would have all these little mechanical pieces that would slide and move, little tiny pieces that fit together to create a face that you could connect with.”
Jaeger’s focus on detail also had a hand in the process of turning a car into a robot. “The LA art department had the cars and the robot bodies, and we were brought in to help them figure out some of the transformation stages. I also helped some of the animators up here. They would take a first pass, and I would draw notes on top of their animations and suggest, maybe, make this piece become the fender, and lets have it wrap around, and at this point in the transformation we can pull out the roof pieces and they can fold down in sequence.” Jaeger spent two years on the project in all, starting with basic geometry animation going from car to robot and then adding in details. He offered his insights with a smile I could hear through the phone. “It’s one of those things that have never been done before, so you have to take a first pass at it and see if it works.
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