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Twenty Five Years of Tron

Posted by Zonk on from the it's-all-about-the-light-bikes dept.

the_quiet_angeleno writes "I have an article in today's Summer Film Preview issue of Los Angeles CityBeat on Disney's sci-fi classic Tron, which is celebrating it's 25th anniversary this year. The piece includes a discussion with Richard Taylor, one of Tron's visual effects supervisors on the film's groundbreaking effects, as well as director Steven Lisberger, on how the narrative incorporates the Jungian concept of individuation. Here's a sample: 'Visual Effects Society member Gene Kozicki, of the L.A.-based visual effects house Rhythm & Hues, believes Tron's legacy was in moving computer-generated visuals into the realm of storytelling. "Research into this type of imagery had been going on for over 15 years, but it was more scientific in nature," Kozicki says, "Once artists began to share their ideas and treat the computer as a tool, it moved away from strict research and towards an art form."

8 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Bring in the logic probe! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A little off topic, but if you're bored or interested you can make your own Lightcycle out of paper:
    http://aliens.humlak.cz/aliens/aliens_papirove_mod ely/bonus-tron-cycle_gb.html
    It looks really neat and should be on any Geek's desk.

  2. Re:Storytelling? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Sadly, there was not a lot of compelling storytelling in that movie. The script was pretty bad, as was much of the acting

    That didn't stop it from gaining a cult following, several computer games, and this article. You can criticize the movie all you want, but the people who made it are already more famous and influential than you will ever be. They must have done *something* right.

  3. The DVD commentary is about the effects by Dr.+Manhattan · · Score: 4, Interesting
    It's telling when the DVD commentary focuses almost entirely on the special effects, and only rarely even mentions the acting or the story. Don't get me wrong, I love the movie, my kids love it, I loved the "Tron 2.0" game they made, but... well... Shakespeare it wasn't.

    The funny thing was it didn't win an Oscar for special effects that year because the Academy felt they had "cheated" by using computers. (Of course, the computers were so slow they had to plan every shot out in detail because 'rerendering' would have taken too much time. And they communicated the data over the phone... by reading the numbers out loud.) Interesting to see how attitudes have changed.

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    PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
  4. Troff by Ep0xi · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Dad used to love that movie, it were our common motor to computing.

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  5. I'll see your IT-related quotes and raise you one by Dachannien · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Gibbs: User requests are what computers are for.
    Dillinger: Doing our business is what computers are for!

  6. Re:Tron's box office numbers by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Speaking of Hollywood reluctance, I wonder what ever happened to the Tron sequel? A few years ago, Disney was in a buzz about how the new Tron movie was coming out soon. They even made the Tron 2.0 game to ride the promotion wave. Yet nothing ever appeared, and the very idea of a sequel seems to have vanished into the ether.

    To be blunt: What happened?

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    Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
  7. Remember the hot babe in Caddyshack?!?! by ed1park · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I was watching Caddy Shack in HDDVD, and found out that Cindy Morgan, the hot babe, was also the girl in TRON. And she's a regular geek!

    "I wanted to go to Illinois Institute of Technology and become an Engineer, but when I went to open house it was all guys. I kind of got scared. I was a little freaked out. I got over that obviously. I was a geek."
    http://www.retrocrush.com/archive2005/cindymorgan/

    *sigh* :)

  8. Couple of things - by VariableGHz · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I saw how the bikes were put together for Tron a long time ago -- apparently they lacked the ability to use boolean operations so all of the parts of the bikes were animated together and placed together very carefully out of real primitive shapes. I can't remember if they had basic parenting or not...

    Oh, and the outfits were all hand painted in by some hardcore artists in Korea, they had to do the job twice over because they finished it so damn quickly the first time that each frame stuck together and was rendered useless. Pretty fascinating.