Motion blur had to be reduced during fight sequences to prevent artifacting.

"Even there, we were doing little odd things, like variation percentage of motion blur on the characters. I tell everyone to jump on the Harryhausen band wagon -- that's what we've gotta do. People in computer graphics don't want to reduce motion blur, but the problem with the robots is that they have so many little pieces that they become artifacts with so many sharp things moving through the frame. I found it's better to reduce motion blur in certain moments, like when Bumblebee comes close or Starscream has moments in the forest fight and Optimus and Megatron, where we reduce motion blur to half, a third and an eighth."

Given Farrar's photographic background, he continues to push really hard for better lighting, shading and rendering. "Everybody knows that I'm trying to create a lighting package that emulates real world photography. We're not there yet but everyone has the hang of what I'm looking for stylistically. A good example is Jetfire. He's about 50 feet high and in computer graphics terms you can put a single light source out there and light the whole object. If you're out in the sun, that's one thing. But if you're indoors, like in the Smithsonian, that's not real in human terms. So what I like to remind everyone is that it's like lighting a real set, where you have a maximum of a 20K HMI. And that will cover so much of a range, but there's falloff in every area -- that's physics. And so you have to supplement. Still, you'll see imperfections. But the problem with computer graphics is that it's so perfect. So we try and induce these imperfections. So Jetfire in the Smithsonian required around 41 actual lights and we chose to make them smaller and human size. And we hope it will seem more real to the viewer."

The pyramids in Egypt were one of two locations VFX artist visited in prepping big action sequences.

There are a lot more environments in Revenge of the Fallen, allowing greater diversity for eye candy. The two main locations are Bethlehem Steel in Shanghai and the pyramids of Egypt.

"It was an honor to shoot in these places," Farrar admits. In Shanghai at night, that was a week of prep just to get all those lights up there. The biggest problem with our large robots is to show scale. And the pyramid backgrounds were fantastic for that. A key concern was we were not allowed to do aerial photography at the same time the crew was there. Permits were not approved when the main unit was shooting, but we had our Digitmatte crew there and our stills crew was assigned to get every side of every pyramid close and at distance. Our big worry was that we would not be approved to shoot aerial plates. So we were canvassing the area and it would've been really, really hard to recreate based on stills only. Fortunately, I think it was in December, we got approval for the aerial shots. But the stills gave us a lot of textures. Almost everything we do in computer graphics backgrounds I like to glean from photography as much as possible so it'll have a realism to it."

The other noteworthy development was that the breaking apart of a pyramid top was eight times bigger than the previous ILM rigid simulation record. It only required four or five shots but that took seven months just to create the simulation of the blocks tumbling and being torn apart by Devastator. TD Christopher Horvath oversaw the pyramid sim work.

"It has caused our simulation folks to improve everything and we've got some really clever people that understand cinematic movement better, not just the technical elements," Farrar says. "We push everybody to observe what is real."

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN and VFXWorld.