Transformers Quotes

“Silas, AKA Colonel Leland Bishop, leads MECH, an organization seeking political control through the application of Cybertronian technology. His obsession would eventual lead to his surgical implantation inside the corpse of Breakdown. When he became Silas's fighting 'bot, we had to figure out how he was actually connected, what sort of damage there was, even come up with the lighting for the interior the body. It was a challenge. -Auqusto Barranco”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“I thought it'd be awesome if he looked beat up but he could still kick everyone's *$$. -Jose Lopez on Agent Fowler”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“I thought it'd be awesome if he looked beat up but he could still kick everyone's *$$. -Jose Lopez”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“At the beginning we weren't sure how much of June we'd see. I think I only did 2-3 versions of her. I did a couple of costume changes; we tried sweaters, but stuck with scrubs because we wanted her to have that nurse look. -Jose Lopez”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“We had to find a balance between how nerdy he was supposed to look and how old he was supposed to be. In some sketches he was really young, but we ultimately made him a little bit older. One of the things about his design was that everything fits him a little bigger because he comes from a big family, so everything is a hand-me-down. -Jose Lopez on Rafael”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“Miko went through the most drastic changes in terms of style. I just produced pages and pages of sketches, trying to figure out what she'd look like. We looked at a lot of harajuku girls. We wanted her to be a bit more eccentric than the other kids, so we gave her multicolored clothes with the short shorts, the color to her hair, the ponytails. We did some really cool texturing on her; look closely at her boots, at her belt. At one point I suggested that the little characters on her belt turn out to be Decepticon spies, but they didn't do that. -Jose Lopez”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“One of the things that everyone thought was interesting was that I gave [Jack] dark hair. Typically your hero has blond or light hair, but I thought the dark hair fit his personality better. -Jose Lopez”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“Soundwave at the beginning- he was one where they were like "The fans are going to kill you once they see this guy." Some stuff you take liberties, other stuff you think "This stuff is too important, we can't mess with it, we'll keep it the same way." Then you have the ultimate say, which is Hasbro. If they want something then straight away you have to do it, even if you think the fans are not going to go for it. -Jose Lopez”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“Christie [Tseng] was a really young girl who came to do props and she was amazing, a nineteen year old girl doing this stuff. She helped design Bumblebee and parts of a lot of the early characters. -Jose Lopez”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“I think there's characters like Knock-Out where, at the beginning, when we were first designing him, that they said let's make him this hot rod, all into his paint and how it looks but I think eventually he became a lot more comedic than when we designed him but the idea was always he's like this hot car, he's in love with himself. He just thinks he looks good and wants to keep his body in shape. -Jose Lopez”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“One of the things that kept coming out with the villains is that we only use purple on the bad guys. We never put purple on the Autobots. We established that Dark Energon is purple and stuff so if the audience sees purple we wanted them to identify it as the color of the bad guys. -Jose Lopez”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“One of the first characters I looked at and thought "This guy's kind of different" was Soundwave, and talking to Jeff and Duane [Capizzi, Transformers Prime Head Writer] it was always "What is the character about?" They would say "He's always in the shadows, he never talks. He's very mysterious." I was like "Let's make him like a ninja." You've got this thing where the wings are the arms and when you look at them straight on they're really thin so it's like they kind of disappear but then when he moves then we can play around with the shapes. So it's that kind of stuff that we tried to figure out as we were designing the characters. -Jose Lopez”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“Collision is when you have one shape crashing into another. Like with Ultra Magnus. With Ultra Magnus we have the original design with these giant shoulders so when he lifts his arm up, that giant shoulder is going to crash to his head and in CG that thing will just go right through it, so we have to figure out ways around that. We had comments from our CG studio on our storyboards where they'll say "Breakdown will fold his arms" and they'll say, "Well he can't do that because his chest comes out this far." So those physics and geometry have to function. -Jose Lopez”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“For example, we learned that on the toys they always design the vehicle first and then the robot. They design a vehicle then they break it apart. With us, because the robot is the actor and is what we see 90% of the time in the show we told them that we wanted to design the robot first and from there, break it apart and create a vehicle. Obviously we'll know things like Optimus is a truck, Soundwave's going to be some kind of jet, so we know what kind of vehicle it is but we have the robot dictate the shape of the vehicle. That was one of the new things we did on the show that was pretty interesting. -Jose Lopez”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“We didn't even know his name when we started working on him. Once we got the name, I said to Hasbro 'you guys know Sky Lynx is an Autobot, right?' I really wanted the animal aspect to come out. That's why I kept the animal face around his robot face, and claws on the hands and legs. -Walter Gatus”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“He has wings, but I wanted to give him a very canine-like feel. There as a lot of back and forth to find the balance for what works for the character and might make a really cool toy. - Augusto Barranco on Darksteel”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“Hasbro wanted him to breath fire. I figured he'd have to open his mouth really wide. I was inspired by Predator for an alien way to open his mouth. -Jose Lopez on Predaking”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“Predaking was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. I designed Optimus 2.0 and Predaking simultaneously and I went nuts with the detail. A lot of people freaked out, on the toy side and at Polygon. I made a lot of people's lives more difficult. -Jose Lopez”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“I had done some early sketches for Megatron that were deemed too regal, too sophisticated. I really liked those designs, so when Predaking came in the picture I pulled some of those designs and implemented them in the design of Predaking. -Jose Lopez”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“With Unicron, the biggest challenge was implementing rock elements that worked with our robot design language. We took elements of the original, like the shapes on his shoulders and the creepy bony wings he has, and pushed them up further. We wanted to keep the original color scheme, so we made sure the mountains they came out of had the same tones. -Jose Lopez”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“I really loved his original G1 design. We focused on things you really wouldn't think about. We spent a lot of time designing the chain that connects his gun to his back. The chain became the treads for one area on the tank. The other set of treads we just hide in his back but you can see it in the design peeking through. We actually created his spine from that. -Jose Lopez on Shockwave”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“With Skyquake, we wanted to push the military elements. The head design felt very samurai for that reason. The color scheme draws from that too. At one point we gave him medals but were asked to take them out. With Dreadwing. the challenge was to keep the Skyquake design but make him feel different with textures and colors. We wanted to keep the military feel, so we went with the blue and gold. -Jose Lopez”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“To design the bot mode, I looked at some military vehicles I could use as a jumping off point to establish the design language for that character. For the silhouette I wanted something very large, bulky, kind of square. -Augusto Barranco on Breakdown”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“When we started designing [Knockout], the only directive was to make him a fast car, a foil for Bumblebee. I remember looking at rims and saying 'just pimp him out.'" We gave him lots of red and gold. That made him feel more extravagant. I remember thinking that he'd be attractive in bot mode. Then the studio said that he's the sexiest they'd ever seen. That's where his vanity came from. -Jose Lopez”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“I was inspired by Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty, her elegance. I love how the helicopter tail drags behind the bot mode of the character. I felt like she was wearing a long dress. -Jose Lopez on Airachnid”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“One of the elements I wanted to keep was Laserbeak. He wasn't a cassette tape, but I wanted him to come out of Soundwave's body. -Jose Lopez”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“He's the one that Hasbro had concern about, and said that we had to put something from the original version. There are elements around the head that were borrowed from G1 but that's about it." -Jose Lopez on Soundwave”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“We made Soundwave very alien in terms of design details. We wanted to keep him mostly Cybertronian looking. There are no humanoid vehicle parts even though he scanned one. -Jose Lopez”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“Starscream was a lot of fun. He went through different incarnations in the elements. I did a design of him where he was very imposing and badass. Jeft [Kline] said 'he looks like he can take down Megatron, Starscream's not about the physical element, he's all about his cunning and intelligence." We went back to the drawing board. When I did a design where I could draw a cobra right over his darkened silhouette, that sold Jeff on the design. -Jose Lopez”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime

“Because he's still Megatron, but taken over by Unicron, we kept him Megatron but hinted at different elements that were more Unicron, like the horns, the spikes. Then color and texture, too, hint at the Unicron taint in him. -Jose Lopez”
― Jim Sorenson, Transformers: Art of Prime