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" &amp;quot;Where the hell did I put my t-shirt?&amp;quot; That was the question I asked myself late on a hot August day last summer. I was on location in downtown Chicago, working as an additional set production assistant on Transformers: Age of Extinction (although at that point, the crew referred to the film by its intentionally misdirected title for the public, E7). The reason I wasn&amp;#039;t wearing the t-shirt I arrived to set in was because the heads of production \u2014 under the guidance of director Michael Bay \u2014 requested that crew assistants wear these glowing neon t-shirts with the Transformers&amp;#039; Autobots logo on them, making us easily identifiable amid the massive crowds of spectators who surrounded the perimeters of the set&amp;#039;s streets. Moments before, I quickly changed into this neon TF4 &amp;quot;uniform&amp;quot; t-shirt and in the process I literally threw my personal shirt off to the side of the street. And now I couldn&amp;#039;t find it. As I searched for my t-shirt, walking along the police barricades that the locations department had set up to keep the public from entering the live set, I ran into a colleague and friend of mine: filmmaker and critic Kevin B. Lee. Kevin and I each created video essays and wrote about film for sites like Indiewire&amp;#039;s Press Play and Fandor. So I was surprised to see him embedded in the crowds of eager spectators and fans who were trying to get a glimpse at stars Mark Wahlberg and Stanley Tucci. Right then and there, I noticed Kevin \u2014 like many of the onlookers \u2014 had a camera with him, but his was more professional, a DSLR camera with the ability to shoot high-definition video. He said he was trying to film whatever he could of the on-location shooting of Transformers for his graduate school project at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.      In April of this year, Kevin invited me to his project office at the SAIC media hub downtown. He led the way into his office, lifting a curtain at the entrance. When I walked in I was kind of stunned. The walls were filled with color printouts of every scene from both the Super Bowl TV spot and theatrical teaser for Transformers: Age of Extinction. More importantly, next to each image on the wall was an index card or Post-it note, with an observation or deciphering. I remember seeing the image of that &amp;quot;Remember Chicago&amp;quot; billboard in a farm field from the first teaser trailer, with Kevin&amp;#039;s note &amp;quot;America&amp;#039;s Heartland?&amp;quot; taped next to it. Kevin explained his Transformers: The Premake desktop documentary project in further detail and offered me a role in creating an extension of his idea via a supercut video essay. Between that moment and the premiere of my video, Your Transformers: Digital Age of Immersion, at Chicago&amp;#039;s Nightingale microcinema on June 20, where it screened alongside Kevin&amp;#039;s Premake documentary, I revised my edit at least four or five times. The editing process itself was quite intense and offered some interesting revelations. While assembling the footage from 67 different YouTube users, I even discovered a clip uploaded by a YouTube user named Melita Rodgers, which showed me working on the set of Transformers. How meta is that? What started in my head as a quick three- to four-minute supercut ended growing into a twelve-minute, three-part user-generated odyssey that celebrated the &amp;quot;filmmaking&amp;quot; process from the very audience who would eventually pay to go see Transformers in IMAX or 3D. My tactic was simple enough: assault the viewer with a cavalcade of YouTube clips (much in the same fashion that Bay assaults the audience with chaotic editing and sometimes jarring camerawork) to the point where these amateur &amp;quot;filmmaking&amp;quot; video snippets began to create an expansive moving image collage, a collective artistic voice of the public. I also felt it was important to juxtapose the content-creating power of a show like Entertainment Tonight with your everyday pedestrian, so I sprinkled in clips from these professionally produced TV shows \u2014 and the truth is that they&amp;#039;re indistinguishable from much of the YouTube user-generated footage.  Because of the Internet, most big Hollywood movies don&amp;#039;t have many secrets. Spoilers are published nearly every day and as the production of Transformers proved, the public records its own guerilla version of the film on their cell phones. Whatever magic these tentpole movies once possessed is gone. There is something happening in the way we consume content and because of that, the big movie screen at your local multiplex has been weakened. The new magic is on the screen of your iPhone or tablet or laptop. Anyone can create a moving image and publish it and share it with a curated audience. This new media sender-receiver model has radically empowered the receiver (the audience) to play an integral part of the filmmaking process. Does my video essay serve as a promotion for Bay&amp;#039;s film? Not in my opinion. For me, it functions as part an engrossing found footage production diary (told from the onlooker&amp;#039;s perspective) and also as a cross section of our instant gratification and instant uploads culture. We record and publish everything. We are immersed in the moving images that Hollywood produces in more ways than we realize. What does it all mean? I&amp;#039;m not entirely certain. What I am certain of is that I never found my personal t-shirt, but I still have that hideous neon Autobot shirt in my closet for some reason. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/videos/a29103/transformers-4-set-video/>