By Joe Walker
The New Citizens Press
23-year-old model and MSU student Davyn Cuffie was enjoying DreamWorks Pictures’ Transformers motion picture long before movie theater visitors. She landed on set in a few of the movies action sequences, filmed in Detroit.
“I was so nervous the first day I was there,” Davyn says. “They took us to one of the shooting areas – the old building off of Michigan Avenue, right across from the old Tiger Stadium – and they told us that [Transformers’ star] Shia LeBouf was shooting a scene for the movie there. Then we went to where we were filming. It was surreal. We were at an intersection that was decorated to look like this imaginary place.”
The war between Transformers’ good-guy Autobots and evil Decepticons – a dueling race of alien robots that morph into such earth vehicles as semi-trucks and fighter jets – is sci-fi fantasy, but for Davyn the on-set simulation of this fictional war was very real.
“They were blowing things up left and right while we were running to get away,” she says. “The scariest parts, I would say, are all the explosion from the Transformers barreling down the street.”
Davyn learned of the movie shoot from a friend online. She sent in her press material and was contacted by the casting agency two days later. “Being on set was exciting,” she says.
Davyn Cuffie, a native of Romulus, MI, is Family Community Services major at Michigan State. She has been modeling professionally for two years.
Transformers is based on the popular 80’s cartoon series, The Transformers (1984 – 87). Its first theatrical release – 1986’s The Transformers: The Movie – is an animated feature-length film developed by series creators Hasbro, Sunbow Productions and Marvel Productions LTD. Its 2007 Dreamworks live-action update is directed by Michael Bay (Bad Boys, Armageddon), produced by Steven Spielberg (Minority Report, The Color Purple).
