Last night I got to attend a very special event held at Paramount Studios – "3D: A Transforming Visual Art – A Conversation with James Cameron and Michael Bay." The two legendary filmmakers were there to talk about 3D filmmaking and show off 15 minutes of 3D footage and the 3D trailer from the upcoming Transformers: Dark of the Moon. And I have to say that it looked incredible! There was plenty of destruction to the city of Chicago; a very cool sequence involving basejumpers wearing special ‘winged’ flying suits soaring around buildings of the city skyline; and an amazing clip of Bumblebee transforming from his car self with Shia LaBeouf in the passenger seat, into his robot self which catapults LaBeouf into the air, then plucking LaBeouf mid-air and transforming back into his car self safely placing Shia back in his passenger seat – all in slo-mo! This made the audience of hardened journalists and guests break out into congratulatory applause!

Bumblebee

As for the conversation between the two filmmakers, it was interesting to note that the younger Michael Bay was the cautious one when it came to 3D filmmaking and that the older veteran, Cameron had to convince him to use the new technology. In fact, Bay went so far as to go ahead and use Cameron’s 3D crew from Avatar for this latest Transformers. Cameron mentioned how he "hadn’t shot on film since ’97" and that he "had no intention of going back now." He said he first embraced the digital technology when he wanted to shoot in 3D and realized that digital was the best way to do that. Bay admitted that he "had a wonderful time doing 3D" and that "not everything is right for 3D but it works for this picture. It's a lot of work, but it's good when it's right for the experience." It seems that Cameron has made Bay a 3D convert!
 
 
The 3D trailer for Transformers: Dark of the Moon will be in front of screenings of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides this weekend and Paramount is releasing a special video featurette from the movie this Friday, so keep an eye out for it as we will have it up as soon as we get it! The movie opens everywhere on July 1st.