We don't usually post news stories telling you of some of the things you can expect to see at Transformers At The Moon in the future, we have lots of plans for the site which are on hold due to other commitments, but I thought I'd let you know of some toy galleries which will be comning your way over the weekend.

Basically we won a few Yahoo Japan auctions recently, mainly small items, all but two were cheap. Many of the items were Micron Legend Microns, some of which we're yet to identify, so their galleries have to wait until we know who they are. The others included Rabbicrator, the blue recolour of Skystalker, and the Super Car Patrol, the Japanese recoloured versions of the Super Car Patrol.

We have some images of our Micromaster Transformers collection which was taken a little while ago, and there is a nice list of our Micromaster collection on our Transformers Forum if you want to see a list of who we own. There is an older gallery, which includes many of the Japanese Micromaster combiner robots, also available.

We own 173 Micrmasters, 171 of them are different toys, so although the toys are micro-size, their sheer number have the power to suprise.

When speaking about the delay to the new Star Trek movie, who's release has been pushed back from Boxing Day 2008 to the 8th May 2009, Paramount Pictures spokesman Michael Vollman was quoted as saying "Summer is where you see the Star Wars and the Transformers, ... Star Trek is in that league.".

Source: The BBC

Simon Furman has updated his blog with a One Page Transformers Mosaic called Hail and Farewell. Set in the IDW universe, 2 years on, the story focus on Hunter O'Nion.

Go and read what Simon has to say, then have a read of the comic

In a response on his message board, Transformers director Michael Bay has responded to reports that Dreamworks are not ready to begin work on the second live action Transformers movie. Here's what Michael had to say

"Oh really???? Is that why 20 people in production are in my office right now, another 20 art designers another location, scouts in two countries, one back east??? Don't ever bet against me in making my date - June 2009!

Michael"

TFWorld2005 have a press release from Hasbro regarding what they will be showing at the US Toyfair. Included in the press release is an official Stock Image of Transformers Animated Roll Out Optimus Prime.

Long time Transformers At The Moon member Minion has been kind enough to supply us with our latest 7 Transformers toy galleries, which focus on his Japanese Exclusive Generation One Kabaya King Poseidon set.

King Poseidon is the Japanese version of the Seacons, and the Kabaya toys are Minons fourth official Seacon set (which includes the Unrelease Universe Seacons) as well as a Knock Off set of Seacons. You can find the image galleries below.

• Kabaya Turtler
• Kabaya Tentakil
• Kabaya Overbite
• Kabaya Lobclaw
• Kabaya Kraken
• Kabaya King Poseidon
• Kabaya Gulf
  

Transformers Animated.com's charcter section has now been updated with the fourth official profiles for the main characters of the Transformers Animated show.

These profiles are the ones which appear on Hasbro's US Transformers website and include a different motto for Bulkhead.

The unofficial pacific northwest Transformers fan and collectors convention known as The Cybertronian Conference, aka CybCon, will take place this year on Saturday, August 23rd at the King Oscar Convention Center in Tacoma, Washington.

Registration is required to attend the show. There is also a special "early bird" pre-payment period where the price is $5 per attendee, or $25 per dealer (includes one dealer table). The early bird special ENDS at midnight between March 31st and April 1st. After that, the prices jump to $10/attendee and $30/dealer until a week before the show. Prices jump another $5 at the door.

The CybCon 2008 information and registration page can be found here:
http://www.ggaub.com/tf/cybcon2k8.html

Simon Furman has updated his blog with a post regarding the 10th issue of the UK Transformers comic. Artwork by Jeremy Tiongson, colours by Jason Cardy. Here's a quote

"As bleak as things were looking for the Autobots (and pretty much the whole of humankind) in part 1, in part 2 things get that much worse. The Autobot counter-offensive against the ruling Decepticons looks to be derailed before it’s even started, with Bumblebee and Mikaela both hunted (by Megatron and Frenzy respectively) inside the former Sector 7/Hoover dam base and the moon-based Autobot reinforcements compromised, and Earth’s military response targeted (by Starscream and Dreadwing). Only Ratchet and Ironhide’s side of the main strike seems still to be proceeding on course, but (realistically) how long can that last? Chaos, carnage, all-out action, things haven’t been this epic since the days of Marvel UK. Whatever you do, don’t miss it."

You can read the post in full as well as see a preview image, if its been re-uploaded by then, over at Simon's blog.

From Variety:

Transformers director Michael Bay returned to the scene of the crime Thursday night at the Cary Grant mixing stage at the Sony lot to revisit the Oscar-nominated achievements in VFX and sound. The place was packed with filmmaking geeks eager to hear and see the behind-the-scenes machinations that go into a formidable FX epic like Transformers.

It was tough for Bay to go back, he admitted after the show, as he's already deep into pre-production on Transformers 2, which is set to start filming on June 2. Bay didn't let the strike stop him. "The strike was a drag," he said. "But I like to write myself. So I wrote 60 pages. I showed the writers something to look at. We'll get back to the torture chamber on Monday." Transformers 2 will deepen the different robot characters as well as the humor, he said. "There's a geriatric robot. If there's an actors strike we'll just stop and start again. We'll make our date." (The movie is scheduled to open June 26, 2009.)

After The Rock, Armageddon, and Pearl Harbor, Bay is tight with the Pentagon and thinks nothing of picking up the phone to get them to reroute a C130 gunship with Seals in it for a few hours. "We pay for the fuel," he says. "The military looks at this as a recruiting effort. The jargon is real. I told them what was happening, and that's what they said. I shot it like a documentary."

Bay, who has a reputation for being tough on crews, endured some good-humored riffing during the show-and-tell, from star Shia LaBeouf as well as his sound designers, editors, and mixers and special FX and ILM VFX artists. Bay was proud that he made Transformers "for a price" he said, in California and New Mexico. "We have the best crews."

For Bay, sound is "50 % of the movie, while the visual effects are a whole other movie unto itself." He shot as much of the film as possible in real locations with live (often dangerous) on-camera stunts and real FX supervised by the legendary John Frazier. In stark contrast to a Star Wars episode which boasts mostly blue screen shots, Transformers had only two days of blue-screen shooting (when the young leads climbed on the shoulders of the robots).

Even the famous shot of the bus that is split apart by a giant robot was a live-action bus blown in two going 60 mph on the freeway with a 30-foot CG robot added six months later. "There's one million details these guys put in the movie," said Frazier, who tried to keep enormous spaces open in the shots for the CG animators to work in.

For LaBeouf and the other actors, "acting without anything there is hard," said Bay. "It's so different when you don't have any environment to react to." LaBeouf described a P.A. holding a long big stick with a green ball on top and shaking it. "They're angry now, shake it faster," he described Bay saying. ILM VFX supervisor Scott Farrar showed the actors a pre-vis--"a cartoon of what's going on in the scene," said Bay, adding, "I always like to put my actors under duress." According to LaBeouf, hanging from a building 20 feet in the air to talk to Megatron or being surrounded by explosions while the cameras wore protective gear was the norm.

On the VFX side, "it's lighting," said Bay. "Everyone looks at light every day and when something looks fake it's not lit well to your brain. We worked on the light, that's why the robots look so real, these things sit next to humans." Bay flew up to ILM in San Francisco frequently, and communicated via satellite link with a pen pointer. He'd never dealt with animation before, which is about performance. "It was painstaking, like Pixar cartoons," he said, "a pain in the ass."

Scott Benza, the animation supervisor, was there to "bring life to the robots," he said. He worked with 30 animators on 16 characters and 47 transformations--each one unique. "It encompasses everything from subtle acting to a full on action scene with brutal robots fighting each other. We gave each artist the freedom to go to town." Optimus Prime has 10108 parts. All the pieces had 4 to 16 layers of information: details, scratches, and metal flake paint with a clear coat finish.

The robots were heavy and massive and athletic and nimble, all at the same time, like Ninja fighters. "They had to have weight and mass and be very cool," said Farrar. The transformations involved "clever people solving puzzles, fitting pieces from one form into another. It would take brute force on each shot until it worked."

The robots also had to act--with complicated facial rigs for the eyes, nose, and mouth-- and each one was different. They rebuilt Bumblebee's eyes three times, making the iris go up and down, until one day in dailies "we saw his soul," said Farrar.

The VFX team took the live-action shots and created CG environments to match them. Said Farrar, "it's about how to make the big guys who are not there look real. You have to go way beyond--the metals look metallic, they look like part of a scene, they fit in with buildings. We are there to put things in the movie that can't be photographed or are difficult or too dangerous to shoot."

Russell Earl did lighting and rendering. "We'd go back and recreate in the computer Scorpinox jumping out of the sand," he said. "We'd copy the scene and use a CG version to match." Adding reflections and highlights and shadow are a big part of making the robots' 20-foot height look real. And making the environment "dirty." Flying debris. Particles. Compositing all these elements is the other huge challenge.

Bay has worked with the same sound crew for 12 years. He affectionately razzed sound mixer Kevin O'Connell as "the biggest loser in Academy history." He's had 19 noms and no wins. This is his 20th go-round.

O'Connell, supervising sound editors Ethan Van Der Ryn and Mike Hopkins, sound rerecording mixer Greg P. Russell and sound mixer Peter Devlin explained how they capture all the distinct sounds on set (dialogue, planes, guns, ricochets, explosions, 9 sets of sounds specific to the robots) and collect it all for the sound mixers to file and manipulate, along with the music. "We take hundreds of sounds," said O'Connell, and try to focus the energy." The goal is to key the audience into what's important in a given scene, and not wind up with "a train wreck of sound."

The sound designers had to come up with characteristic personalities for the different robots, and make the large robot sounds work--partly by throwing the sound to all the speakers in a theater, not just the "dialogue" speaker in the center of the screen.

The sound of Optimus Prime, voiced by Peter Cullen, is about air. Bumble Bee is about buzzing. The sound crew brought a volunteer up to a mike to record sound for Bumble Bee as he groans on the battlefield. The audience listened to the actor live, then heard the sound integrated through the Bumble Bee sound matrix on screen. It magically worked. Big applause. The magic of sound.

Toy Workers have updated their blog with an entry that is for a pre-order of what they are referring to as the 2008 San Deigo Comic Con exclusive Classics Nemesis Prime. The figure is a black and silver repaint of Transformers Classics Optimus Prime. You can view the image below.

At this time it is not known whether the item is legit or not, hence why this news story is under the rumours category.

Credit to Nevermore for the link.

Hasbro have issued a Press Release release regarding some of the items they will be showing off at the forthcoming US toy fair. The press release, called "Hasbro Unveils Innovative New Toys, Games and Entertainment Experiences at Toy Fair 2008" can be read in full here. due to its size, we have extracted all of the Transformers related items which you can find below.

"Hasbro Inc reveals its exciting new product offerings at New York’s annual American International Toy Fair with innovation in a wide range of entertainment categories. ....

HPG, the licensing division of Hasbro, continues to translate one of the industry's richest portfolios of brands into powerhouse lifestyle properties for children and adults around the world. On the heels of last year's TRANSFORMERS licensing program which boasted more than 230 licensees, initiatives supporting that brand are still going full tilt in 2008. Moving forward, HPG will seek to carry the global momentum surrounding the live-action TRANSFORMERS movie over to the animated world of TRANSFORMERS ANIMATED to build an equally powerful licensing campaign for years to come. ....

TRANSFORMERS

In 2008, Hasbro will build on the buzz generated by last year’s blockbuster TRANSFORMERS movie by offering a variety of new products in both the TRANSFORMERS Movie and TRANSORMERS Universe segments. In addition, the TRANSFORMERS brand returns to its origin as an animated series with the debut of the new TRANSFORMERS ANIMATED series on Cartoon Network. Co-produced by Cartoon Network Studios, the series is set in Detroit in the near future and airs on Saturday mornings at 10:30 a.m. (ET/PT). The new TRANSFORMERS ANIMATED toy line features an array of characters from the series that will appeal to both young and long-time fans alike. Highlights of the line include Animated styled action figures, ROLL OUT COMMAND OPTIMUS PRIME (Approximate retail price: $49.99; Ages: 5 & up; Available: Fall) along with the SHIFT TECHOPTIMUS PRIMEhandheld game.(Approximate retail price: $19.99; Ages: 6& up; Available: June 2008)"

Million Publishing, publisher of the Japanese Transformers Visual Works Book, has updated their website with a bio and photos for their exclusive Emergency Green exclusive redeco of Encore Ratchet.

We own a copy of the book, and plan to add a gallery to the site in the future.