The Morning Call have revealed that Bethlehem’s filming shall be at a steel works, a highly mechanized and perfectly suited backdrop:

Try to imagine giant, extraterrestrial robots disguised as tractor-trailers on Route 22 or camouflaged among the towering Bethlehem Steel blast furnaces.

A film crew from ”Transformers 2” will bring those shape-shifting robots to life in south Bethlehem next month for a movie scene in front of the iconic furnaces.

Of course, no one will see the robots because they’re computer-generated. But anyone will be able to see the action at the old Steel site as the filmmakers transform it into a fictional Chinese city populated by people from the Lehigh Valley.

[...]

The movie crew will film in Bethlehem during the first week of June and will use the blast furnaces as the scene’s backdrop, Callahan said.

[...]

According to an announcement from Heery Casting of Philadelphia, the filmmakers hope to cast local ”Asian men and women, boys and girls, ages 7 [to] 65” as paid extras in the movie. In particular, the crew hopes to recruit extras of Asian descent who have military backgrounds.

Thanks locoexw!

In an interview with IGN, writer Roberto Orci confirmed that fan favourite Soundwave would be making an appearance in the sequel:

Q: What’s the status of Transformers 2?

ORCI: That starts shooting in three weeks.

Q: What do you want to do that builds from the first one?

ORCI: We want to follow some of our lead characters which we thought were so successful. Shia’s character; where is he two years later? His girlfriend, where is she two years later? But for fans, I guess I’ll address this more for the fans, because I think if you didn’t know Transformers at all and you came in and you liked the first movie, you’ll like the second one. However, some of the die hard fans, which we were a member of that group, felt, well, maybe it’s a little light. Maybe it wasn’t science fictiony enough. And I think the second one will deliver on a true Transformers story. You know, the first one, we had a limited budget for what it was. Every second of Transformer time is a million dollars or whatever the heck it is, so this time, because we were able to prove through the whole thing that it’s a viable live-action movie, we have a little more freedom this time to actually learn about the Transformers, see them, hear them. It’s a better balance between the humans and the Transformers.

Q: Is there one particular Transformer, good or bad, that you absolutely had to get into the sequel?

ORCI: Yes.

Q: You’re not gonna tell us.

ORCI: I’ll tell you. We had to get Soundwave in there.

Q: Nice. Where Soundwave goes, will Ravage follow?

ORCI: Perhaps! Who’s Ravage? … I’m kidding! You know, we had Ravage in an early draft of the first movie and Soundwave, and we couldn’t do it right and I think this time hopefully we’ll have the ability to do it.

Chud have confirmed that John Voight (Defense Secretary John Keller) and Tyrese Gibson will be reprising their roles in the movie sequel:

‘I just talked to Shia a second ago, and left John Voight a message 15 minutes ago,’ he said, inadvertently letting slip that Voight’s Secretary of Defense character returns for the sequel.

‘Michael Bay is going to up the ante on round two and raise the level. I can’t go into any details , but it’s going to be some real one of a kind things in this movie that no one has seen visually in their life. Michael Bay is really fired up to try and outdo what he did on the first round.’

Via Variety and Jordan’s first pavillion at the Cannes film festival, we have found out that Michael Bay plans to take TF2 to Jordan:

Jordan [...] is joining the Mideast film gold rush with a number of projects and initiatives designed to bolster the country’s film biz.

Paramount-DreamWorks has inked with the Jordanian Royal Film Commission to film “Transformers 2” in the country and Fox has scouted locations in the country for its bigscreen “The A-Team.” It is believed to be in discussions for the action pic to lense there.

A promotional newsletter released by Dolby for this year’s ShoWest contains a list of upcoming 3D feature films in 2009 – at the very bottom is Transformers 2, amongst Avatar and Tintin.

Via Comics2film

Moviehole spoke with Rachael Taylor and confirmed that she will not be appearing in the sequel:

“I wasn’t contracted for a sequel anyway, but I also think it would be pretty ridiculous for my character just to show up and say ‘We’ve got some more computers to play with!’.

More importantly, I don’t think I’d wanna do it to be honest, and not for any particular reason other than the fact that I’ve done it. I’m just drawn to doing different things. It was the same when I went to the U.S, I didn’t want to do TV, because I’d done it. I want to be able to mix it up all the time.”

Well, that’s that.

In a very brief post on his blog “Shoot for the Edit“, Michael Bay responded to claims about Jonah and Teresa Palmer:

No we have stopped negotiating with Jonah, and Teresa Palmer was not considered for a role – you have wrong info.

M

Isabel Lucas’ management agency, Meissner Management, has listed Isabel as a cast member of the Transformers sequel:

ISABEL LUCAS
NEW – Feature Film “TRANSFORMERS 2” DreamWorks US Production. Role of ALICE.

Alice is not listed in the cast breakdown we saw leaked a short while back.