Transform-ing Chicago

As you may or may not have heard, Transformers 3 is currently filming in Chicago and will be for seven weeks. Shia LeBeouf, Josh Duhamel, Patrick Dempsey and that Victoria's Secret model chick who is replacing Megan Fox are all here and taking over the city streets.

Each week, the film shuts down a strip or area of downtown in order to film. While Chicago is expected to make $20 million off playing host, many people I know are already tired of the film's inconvenience of extra traffic, tourists, street closures and bus reroutes. To give you an idea: Michael Bay and company had a chunk of Michigan Ave closed from last Thursday at 8 p.m. through 5 a.m. this morning (Monday). This included the Michigan Ave Bridge, which was reportedly used in this weekend's dramatic explosion and helicopter scenes (my boss said she saw the bridge up with cars hanging from the edges).

While I didn't catch any of the action this weekend, I was able to see it on Friday, as they set up shop right where I work. I had a great view from the 43rd floor, and some coworkers and I spent most of the day peering out the window scoping the scene and taking turns passing a pair of binoculars (which weren't necessarily needed but they gave us a close up view of LeBeouf when we finally spotted him). At one point, they even filmed something in the Chicago River... as the crew members jumped into the water and swam around with equipment, I wondered if anyone told them that the water isn't exactly safe for swimming.

At the beginning of the month, the building manager sent an email warning people of the closures and the schedule of action. My favorite part of this email (and my dad's least as he now realizes that Optimus Prime and Voltron aren't real) was this:

Since the Transformers robots are all digital creations, you
won't be able to see them during filming

Duh.

During lunch on Friday, I took a walk over to the set in order to get a view of the wreckage, the man-made craters in the streets and perhaps even Optimus Prime (oops, forgot about the part that he wasn't real). I got some good pictures of the set and the smell of burning cars still lingers in my nose, but I didn't get close enough to see any of the actaul filming. So I returned to my 43rd floor perch where I could see them set the cars on fire and people running around.

Before my retreat, I did learn one fun tidbit from a security guard: the cars in the wreckage and in the scene aren't from a junkyard. Paramount buys them and then blows them up themselves. They then use the spare scrap metal for pile-ups like the ones you will see in the slide show below.

Enjoy! (I made it on a free website, so you have to click the X to get rid of the advertisement in order to see the captions).