Early in July action started to ramp up in the backlot of the Michigan Motion Picture Studios in Pontiac. This wasn’t an easy place to see what was going on, but I managed to find a place with a pretty good view of at least some of the filming done here. And it was spectacular. We’ve already seen the result of much of this in the movie trailers, but watching the Bay magic up (relatively) close was incredible. Over the month and a half that followed I took literally thousands of photographs. To be honest, many of those are terrible. I was working at a huge distance from the filming, and I don’t carry around the sophisticated equipment of a professional, but I did what I could and begged and borrowed and rented equipment here and there. So some days were more successful than others!

My view of the set at first wasn’t that great, but I thought it might give me some insight into what was going on and hey, perhaps I’d get lucky and see something cool. We’ve seen these towers before, and the platform in front of them.

But when you zoom in there’s more detail on the platform. And that green screen thing? If you’ve followed my Twitter feed and blog you’ll know already that close up of the ‘green screen thing’ reveals that it is actually the torso of an autobot, most likely Hound. I literally saw this thing for weeks and didn’t work that out.

When you see the trailers you’ll see the scenes I’m going to describe in the next couple of posts. They get a couple of posts because the filming was pretty spectacular. Movie stalking is not an exact science. Unless you have a solid tip-off (and those are hard to come by), you never know whether you’ll be driving around for hours trying to find the set, or sitting somewhere for hours waiting for something (anything!) to happen that will justify this bizarre usage of your time. Sometimes you’ll watch a whole bunch of stuff being moved around, production crew setting stuff up and that’s all. I happen to love the whole movie package, so that’s OK. You’ll see I have hundreds more pictures of sets than I do of ‘celebrities.’ Yes, I’m happy when an actor turns up, but the sets and everything else that surrounds the actors is more important to me. So this was a balmy evening in July. I’m watching a lot of movement and then suddenly I see this guy.

If Michael Bay is there, action will soon follow. So I’m excited. This set looks cool. But unfortunately from my angle and with that big green thing in the way and also the green screens, I’m not expecting to be able to see too much. Then I see a guy who looks a lot like Mark Wahlberg (to the right being fitted into some kind of harness). I’d see this guy a lot over the next month or so. I hope he was paid well!

I was still cursing my obstructed view. Then I heard a siren. And then this happened.

The platform lifted up. And up.

I have the perfect view. Stunt Mark Wahlberg is poised for action at the top of the platform. This is going to be fun.

(to be continued)