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The Story of Tron
An anonymouse reader writes "Tom's Hardware has a feature up on the makings of Tron which may interest latent fans. Through interviews with the creators they explore the makings of Tron, from how it came to be picked up by Disney to how the effects were put together ('While the majority of the film takes place in the computer world, only 15 minutes worth of footage actually used CGI', because it would have taken years to make the film otherwise). They then explore why the film flopped at the box office. 'It was like we put LSD in the punch at the school prom and it was just way more than they can handle,' said Steven Lisberger."
Really? I don't get anything like that in Konqueror 3.4.2.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Firefox has an extension called Anti-Pagination that does the 'next', 'next', work for you. You end up with all the articles all on one page.
Yeah, that's just about the stupidest page layout ever. But the underlining is easy to fix if you block intellitxt.com.
Maybe not
It was 22nd in the top grossing films of 1982. Blade Runner was 27th that year.
Maybe it wasn't the smash hit they were hoping for, but it looks like it did very well.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/
Monolith Productions already created it. Tron 2.0 was originally planned to be a film, however they moved the concept into a video game instead. Actually, it makes sense since Tron was about video games in the first place.
The game isn't fantastic, but it's fun and the storyline is moderately interesting. I especially like the internet hub level.
GLtron
Both free, for Windows/MacOSX/Linux.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Family Guy riffed on Tron too - they had Peter driving one of those light cycles. I guess this just proves that plenty of Geeks go into animation!
One thing the article failed to mention was how ardous it was to make those "mere 15 minutes of cgi." Back then, no animation tools existed nor were there any GUI based rendering tools either. All of the CGI was hard coded by hand using a text system very similar to Pov-ray. There was no animation programming either. To animate something they had to calculate how far they wanted each object to move, then calculate and enter the cordinates by hand frame-by-frame.
Furthermore, the computers of the time didn't have enough memory to store entire movies, let alone any sort of device to output it to video tape or film like we have now. Instead, they had to render each individual frame, display the frame on a high-resolution monitor and then photograph the monitor onto regular 35mm film. Each frame would take several hours to render further complicating the process trying to keep the lighting uniform on each exposure.
Now, fifteen minutes * 60 seconds in a minute * 24 frames per second = roughly 21,600 frames. Just an insane amount of manual labor.
Something the article doesn't mention is that Tron also had a futuristic soundtrack by Wendy Carlos, the same woman who composed (at least, she composed the song Timesteps) and performed the soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange.
He's talking about the game they did a couple years back. Should be cheap, I just saw it for $6 at the local Big Lots. Amusing, and it really does look very much like the movie - sobering to think we can do those kinds of graphics in real-time now.
Music available here.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
The ethic of programs of little fighters within a sometimes incomprehensible system was very appealing. The idea of old crusty programs bearing the likeness of their users was cool. The idea of independently minded security programs running around like white blood cells was also pretty fabulous. In terms of what actual programs could do at the time, Tron was inspirational to real programmers. I mean every program in Tron could communicate to every other program. Strong programs could defeat weak programs by learning new games at the instruction of stronger still programs, all without user intervention. A super program that could heal other programs that had crashed...
There were realistic in-jokes, like the Bit, the PacMan graphic in Stark's domain, the endless infinty of cubicles, and the fantasy that (arcade) gamers could pull chicks by getting high scores.
Tron was true the spirit of the then-emerging hacker ethic in many ways that other movies haven't really ever captured. In fact, I can't think of any other that captures more truly on an emotional scale how programmers think about their programs. In fact there is probably only one movie that has ever been cooler to hackers and that is Swordfish.
fault-tolerant
I have a couple of her other albums, which are also good. One is Switched-On Bach 2000, in which she revisited the material she covered in the original Switched-On Bach album, with modern synthesizer gear and period-correct Bach tunings. She added one "bonus track" as well, a rendition of the famous Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor--perfect for Halloween music. The second is her collaboration with "Weird Al" Yankovic on a rendition of Prokofiev's Peter And The Wolf, as well as a new piece, Carnival of the Animals, Part Two (parody of Camille Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals). She proved she could be as much of a parody artist as Al, throwing a bunch of references to other pieces into her compositions to counterpoint Al's bizarre sense of humor.
Be who you are...and be it in style!
It wasn't a PDP-10. It was a Foonly F-1, which was a PDP-10 clone (it executed the PDP-10 instruction set) but was much faster.
The software was a mix of FORTRAN, MACRO-10, SAIL, and LISP. It didn't run on a Cray.
Mxyzptlk.
Sorry, sorry, sorry ... [runs away and hides]