Tank Program wrote:Bear in mind that all I've seen of transformations is a bit of one series when I was like 9 and two of the recent movies, so it's probably not what anyone expects.
Yeah, forget the recent movies; they're garbage, on so many levels. Any episode of the original 1980's Transformers—a 23-minute cartoon aimed at children, created primarily for the purpose of selling toys, mind you—had a better story/plot, characters, and dialogue than any of the Michael Bay abominations. Even the visuals are cooler, I say. I think the cartoons are actually fairly entertaining, and much more watchable as an adult than the absolutely banal, vacuous ACTIONPACKEDEXTREMEEXPLOSIONSANDGRAPHICSINYOURFACETEENAGEANGSTYSEXYEYECANDYSHINYOBJECTSSENSORYOVERLOADYEAH!!!!! stupidity that is the recent movies.
So, as I sorta alluded to earlier, the original "Generation 1 (G1)" Transformers, especially the first two seasons, is the gold standard. And as it pertains to the transformation sound effects, they're downright iconic. Here are a couple examples: It's "an 8hz pulse, repeated five times, with each pulse lasting a roughly equal amount of time, whose pitch can be represented by the absolute value of a declining (for
robot mode to alt-mode) or increasing (for
alt-mode to robot mode) sine wave. In general, the larger the robot, the deeper the pitch of the sound, and the longer the duration of the pulses." I also found a site,
TFCog, that has collected sound effects from some of the different series. The G1 collection has a several transformation samples.
All that said, I figure the appropriate transformation sound effect for a lightcycle "Tronsformer" might be a combination of the sound effects heard in the original scene, right after the lady says "prepare to transport to lightcycle grid" and right after Sark hits the button and the lightcycles rez from those bars they're holding. There's also a sound that, I think, was included with one of the earliest moviepacks for this game, as part of intro.wav. I'd dig it out, but it's on my external drive and I've been having trouble with that.
Also, combiners. Guys, combiners. Imagine, if you will:
Two Recognizers form the body: the first in normal configuration forming the lower torso and upper legs, or as [whatchamacallits] for the legs to attach to/around; the second on top with its legs out horizontally and shortened to form the upper torso, shoulders, and head. Legs formed by Tank Programs, and arms formed by lightcycles, a pair each. Tank Program turrets become an arm or shoulder cannon, Solar Sailor transforms into a light sword. Oh, and one of the platforms from the jai-alai scene becomes the combiner's identity disc.
