Slashdot Mirror
John Knoll on CGI, Tron And 25 Years of Change
StonyandCher writes to tell us John Knoll, visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic, is using the 25th anniversary of Tron as a platform to look back at the last 25 years of visual effects. "The type of imagery that was possible to create at the time was very clearly computer generated; it wasn't going to fool anybody into thinking it was live action. That was a limitation of the technology that worked very well within the story, that fit right in and made a lot of sense: if you're telling a story about events taking place inside a computer, inside a big virtual environment, what techniques should you use? Parts of the film were done by shooting live action then doing rotoscope and other optical techniques over the top of it, but the stuff that really looked cool and stood out was the stuff that was computer generated."
It's amazing that this film was passed over for an Academy Award for Special Effects because "using computers was cheating." Times have certainly changed in that regard.
THERE was a time when GOOD stories were told, and technology was used to push the story forward and special effects were not the stars per se.
In the end, there can be only one!
Of all the movies that could have been remade, and wasn't. This one's at the top of my list...
Come on Hollywood!
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
I'm sure it's not because of the technology involved. I don't know -- maybe the story didn't grab people, or they felt like it was too juvenile. I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't technique-related. It was because, underneath the brilliant technology, it was pretty standard Disney fare. The Disney audience didn't appreciate the technology and those that did wanted better writing. After all, we were used to sci-fi of the Star Trek standard where the quality of the writing overcame the poor effects.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
...people will still be bitching about "fake CGI" and wishing they could return to the flawless, joyful days of stop-motion, when special effects were indistinguishable from reality!
...reading a review of TRON in InfoWorld. The headline was (I am not making this up) "The Disney Empire Strikes Back".
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CGI
Tron? Many
The grpahics may have changed and look better, but the physics and implementation are still awful. When I see spiderman swing, he just falls too fast and the swing doesnt look natural with the cgi (like, his body doesnt react or stiffen to the G-force).
And when Cgi characters jump off something and land on the ground, most of the time it doesnt look natural. I mean, are they even using earth's gravity acceleration of 9.8 m/s2????
Seriously, look at the scene from the first movie where Peter jumps from building to building. it doesnt look naturally he's falling too fast, and when he lands, the way his body looks when he lands just doesnt look natural. looks as if he just fell 3 feet. his body should have crouched/sunk more.
Syd Mead and the rest of the designers (who's names escape me at the moment) did an incredible job designing to the limitations of CG at the time. The graphics still look great today, and in fact, I think Tron still stands apart from most of today's CG. Almost all of the current CG tries to look like reality, which makes it invisible. With Tron, you knew it was CG and that was cool.
If Tron had only had a good story, good acting, and hadn't opened against ET, this anniversary would have gotten more notice.
In Shop (I was in Electronics) we watched Tron with the class group to basically see what the technology was like back then. Now, at the time Tron was out the FX were pretty dam amazing. This anime-loving spaz kid kept saying how "teh graphics suck, i don't see what the big deal is!!!11" over and over, and everytime someone reminded him of the year it was made, and how computers weren't the same back then, he would wait a minute and repeat himself, about teh graphics. That fucking clown. I wanted to throw a chair. Everytime I hear the word Tron, I picture his head, with his jaw flapping about how the graphics suck, while he struggles to comprehend that when Tron came out people weren't buying Dual Core 64 Bit computer systems for a week's paycheck at Dunkin Donuts.
"If you plant ice, you're gonna harvest wind."
Has ruined far more movies than it's improved. When used discretely and where necessary to the story it is fantastic tool. But in too many movies the creators have reveled in their ability to create more and more spectacular stunts and made a movie that showcases CGI talent instead of one with an interesting and well told story. Think the dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park" versus the infamous Jar Jar Binks. One was done very well and effects were used in such a way as to cover the inadequacies of CGI (which are still present today), while the other--well, not so good.
In the old days every movie was like starting from scratch. Every scene took a different approach, a lot of building from scratch, and imagination to pull off. Lots of people with different skills were involved. Today exactly 1 person does everything: the 3D artist. 3D artists aren't paid as much as the modellers, stuntmen, programmers, water experts, fire experts, lighting experts of the past. There isn't any building from scratch or standing around wondering how to pull off a scene. Today the movies are an assembly line. Shoot, chroma key, model, composite, next scene.
Just remember that this is the John Knoll who originally developed Photoshop too (stated in the article too).
The article mentions Tron. In another post I mentioned The Abyss. What other films advanced the art and perception of computer-generated effects? I can think of:
Toy Story (and Geri's Game, which I think was attached to Toy Story)
This film really advanced the public perception that movies could be all-CG, and opened the door for all of the CG films that followed.
Terminator 2 (another Cameron film)
This was, I think, the first use of a CG character in a live-action film.
Titanic (Cameron again)
The impact on the public with respect to the computer animation was minimal, but on Hollywood it was a huge deal. The fact that the ship was regarded as realistic by so much of the audience opened the door for dozens of projects that replaced models and stock footage with CG. It was, arguably, the most realistic CG in film to that date, and changed a lot of directors' and studios' perceptions.
Anything anyone else can think of?
IMHO movies are still abusing CGI a lot and forgetting completely about a cool story or good dialogue, with few exceptions. Hollywood has turned making films into making remake-rehash-bloated with CGI worthless movies.
Film making is a business but also an art, it is sad to see that (being a bit simplistic) whatever studio releases the flashiest effects with the poorest acting/dialogue is the best movie. Compare Indiana Jones (cool effects, humour, dialogues and story) vs. Episodes I, II, III (ridiculous dialogues and plots cut and pasted with special FX).
Pixar has a tendency to push the boundaries in their films: Monsters Inc. gave us amazing hair and fur (just watch the way Sully's fur sways and even shows up in shadows), Finding Nemo was all about realistic water, and I'd argue that Ratatoullie does amazing things with light (specifically, the natural light in the kitchen scenes). If anything, it seems they push the bar so *freaking* *high* in their films that it's almost impossible to match. Certainly it's got to be depressing for the movie maker in the garage who has Pixar-sized dreams and then realizes that he's not only not coming close, he's never in the same race.
Well, back to inking the cels...
Tron 1, people invade the computer space. I assumed Tron 2 would be the computer space invading people space. I imagined a tank coming out in downtown NY and crushing over a ton of cars. Maybe a light cycle bursting out on the highway clips off a car that just cut off another driver. It wouldn't take a lot of thought to make computer models invading our world work.
God spoke to me.
I picked up the latest greatest Tron disks not long ago because I did like the movie and wanted a nice copy. My experience at the time was people just weren't going to get the jokes unless you were a tech or programmer. When they said "Bring up the Logic Probe!" I laughed my ass off because I had been using one that day.
The other six people in the audience made no sound.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
How did Knoll or the author manage to snub Information International Inc. (aka Triple-I) , the very people who created the graphics for TRON?
Most people will read this story and think ILM did the graphics for TRON.
Shame on you, Computerworld and John Knoll!
I know, but that's what directors want. I used to do physics simulation for high-end animation. Directors want an end state - they want the character to end up in some specified position. Sometimes one that's unreachable in the physical universe, let alone achievable with human muscle power. That's tough to do with a physics engine.
The way this is usually done in production today is to motion capture lots of motion, splice the bits of motion together, and edit the result manually. The result is some good motion and some bogus motion tied together. It looks bogus, but it's become a cinematic convention.
This really shows up in sports games. When EA runs an EA Football ad during an NFL game, you can tell from way across the room that the motion looks wrong.
Game-like motion has become enough of a cliche to be parodied. The opening scene of Tomb Raider has Angelina Jolie moving like a video game character, tucking and rolling while staying in a single vertical plane, just like the game.
There are many cinematic motion conventions that don't work in the real world. The classic is a car jumping across a gap. In reality, once the front wheels go over the edge, the car starts to rotate forward in pitch at a high rate. When you see a car jump in a movie, there are guides, ramps, extra wheels, and even pneumatic rams involved.
As for "the way his body looks when he lands just doesnt look natural. looks as if he just fell 3 feet. his body should have crouched/sunk more.", that kind of thing is sometimes done with flying rigs and high-speed computer-controlled winches. "Underworld - Evolution" did that. They record and debug the motion in a heavily padded gym, then play it back on the set.
Today, when someone does a tough stunt for real, nobody notices. There's a minor SF film which shows a woman running down the face of a 40-story building with a cable paying out behind her for support. A stuntwoman is really doing that on a real building. And for the bottom 30 feet, the star of the picture is really doing that, twisting to land on her feet and come out shooting. On the screen, it looks no different than similar things done in CG in other movies.
"What other films advanced the art and perception of computer-generated effects? I can think of"
Maybe you should ask yourself what commercials advanced CGI? That's were a lot of techiniques are tried first and were it's still being tried before moving to film.
Three more who created TRON. John Knoll never worked for any of them.
The story really resonated with hackers, hobbyists, and computer enthusiasts--particularly those who were enthusiastic about the style of direct interactive computing... as pioneered by Project Whirlwind -> Tracy Licklider -> timesharing -> DEC OS -> hobbyist microcomputers... but were also familiar with IBM-style mainframe operating systems.
By 1982, there were beginning to be a lot of people who could relate to that kind of story, but still not enough to make a movie a box-office hit.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
In case the name's not familiar, John Knoll's brother, Tom Knoll, wrote the original version of Photoshop. John has always been more the artist, and Tom more the signal processing geek, although there's plenty of overlap between their sets of skills. A talented duo.
I speculated on reasons for this in a much longer analysis of the film I did a couple of years back.
However, (as also mentioned in that comment), Tron has never been given the credit it deserves for innovative use of non-CGI animation. "WTF?!", I hear you say... but watch the 20th anniversary DVD documentary, and you'll realise just how reliant Tron was on:-
- Manual Layering and Compositing. To get that particular appearance to the characters and other film elements, it was necessary to split the elements up, process them and recombine them. This was *not* a trivial process, and caused many headaches. (For example, when they received some matted-out frames from Korea- or wherever they were doing it- and the wet ink had caused them to stick together. Wet ink!... This is *not* CGI, folks.)
- Backlit animation (i.e. pretty things that "glow"). Again, there is a lot of this in the film. Sure, backlit animation itself was nothing new; it seems to have been fashionable in the late-70s/early-80s for animated logos. But the extensive and professional manner in which Tron used it put it in another league altogether.
Both techniques feature so universally (on the scenes inside the computer, obviously) that you could legitimately ask whether those parts of the film were truly "live action"!The documentary asserts that Tron was the first- and likely to remain the only- film to use these techniques on such a wide scale, and I see no reason to disagree with that. So for once, let's forget Tron's (admittedly brilliant) use of CGI and give credit to its innovations in the non-CGI area.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Obviously, you're not in the business.
On any major film, they will have all sorts of specialties. Some people just model, some people rig, some people paint textures, some people light the scene, some people manage the render farm, some people do the special effects, some do the composite, some people animate.
But, yes, it is an assembly line, and things are standardized as much as possible, but the assembly line does change a bit depending on the show.
Only on really small productions do you have one person doing everything.
- As the black monolith vanishes into a strangely symmetrical alignment of Jupiter and its moons, the camera pans up and the "Stargate" engulfs the screen. For this infinite corridor of lights, shapes, and enormous speed and scale, I designed what I called the Slit-Scan machine. Using a technique of image scanning as used in scientific and industrial photography, this device could produce two seemingly infinite planes of exposure while holding depth-of-field from a distance of fifteen feet to one and one-half inches from the lens at an aperture of F/1.8 with exposures of approximately one minute per frame using a standard 65mm Mitchell camera.
The top and bottom scans are actually seperate passes. You can see an example of the effect in this article, which includes a video link. In this article, the author makes some guesses as to what artwork might have been used in some of the 2001 shots, which can help visualize how the effect worked.Again, it's a cool effect - it's just not CGI. (Trumbell and John Dykstra were my optical effects heroes when I was a kid).
Agreed. While it's basically a FPS it does the Tron universe so well. From a PDA through a mainframe. Plus the multiplayer is fun (lightcycles anyone?*).
*BTW there's is the best implimentation of lighcycles I've seen.
growing up i could never decide what i wanted more, a light cycle or a light saber :-)
Go and see Daft Punk's live show - it's the closest you'll come to real life Tron:
p g
http://www.thecentric.com/wp-content/daft-punk1.j
You know, Spiderman isn't about realism, as the stories arise from the Marvel comic character... Spiderman. I *expect* the slightly-off physics in such a movie.
I'm with you and agree to your point if you look at movies which are set in a realistic environment and the modified physics aren't part of the visual concept. But Spiderman (or Matrix or LOTR or...) is a bad example for your point.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
Honestly, I think that one of the films to make best use of CGI has been Forrest Gump. For the most part the effects were well done, such as in removing Gary Sinese's legs. Or the ping-pong balls. I guess the only part it looked particularly bad was when they tried to changed the historical figures' lip movements.
Not a film, but Babylon5 opened the floodgates to full on CGI use in TV series. The large highly dynamic space battles were also a first generally (afaik).
o ry_id=3971
B5 was the death knell for miniature work in TV (Trek, etc), Foundation went on to do the effects for DS9 and Voyager. A lot of other shows, such as BSG & SG, owe a great deal to the pioneering work done back then - and it was all done on a shoestring budget (read: networked Amigas in an apartment with cables running through rabbit cages!).
Until B5 most TV producers didn't think good CGI was a possibility with the budgets/timescales limitations they had to work with. A lot of jaws dropped when B5 first aired, mine certainly did (it's what inspired me to became a 3D artist).
CG Society has quite a nice writeup on the work: http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?st
I thought of this when reading the article when they asked Knoll about a remake. Remaking Tron would be impossible. Tron was something that really marked its time. Part of the magic of the movie was the era. It was a great movie, and the concept and graphics marked it's time well.
A rethinking of Tron is really the Matrix. Both concepts hinged on a person trapped in a computer and having to overcome the 'evil' technology that was abused in some way and returning it to human control. The Matrix is the natural evolution of Tron. Instead of a nice resolution where man gained control of the technology, in The Matrix control was never restored but man worked out a truce with machine. We've come from a place where we were unsure about the role of computers in the future to a time where we anticipate their power and understand that the genie doesn't go back in the bottle.
Both were masterpieces of their time that captured a culture's fears and anticipations of technology with cutting edge computer generated graphics which set the tone for the setting of the movie.
Listen to the commentaries on the Stargate SG1 DVD's where they talk about how the big space ships move to fast out of planetary atmospheres etc - they know it, they just can't be bothered because 'it would take to long' to show it realisticly! Totally incompetent in my opnion, if you make a movie about the aircraft carrier Enterprise leaving a harbor you don't just speed up the film - you edit your way out of it, clearly what they should do here as well.
Nobody really aims for realism in Hollyweird (like when you get alien spaceships which are Apple mac compatible)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Even recent movie "Grindhouse" by Rodrigez and Tarantino, in which Tarantino touted his feature "Death Proof" as mostly old school stunt drivng, was paired with Rodrigez's "Planent Terror" that used obvious CGI to replace an actress's leg with a machine gun.
I don't think the old days are come back...
is cartoons.
We expect more weight behind something doing something spectacular. When the CGI renders *accurately* the physics, the thing it doesn't seem to get right is the perception of WEIGHT. And that's because it is falling at an eqivlent of 1G. Blade2 has Blade falling down and hitting the ground but it looks better because they've slowed the fall down. He's falling at 1/2 G. But it "looks" better for it.
When they have the vamps whipping around the ceiling, the bodies need to be moving fast in order to get to the next beam before gravity pulls them too far down. But it "looks" false. If they moved slower it looks better but the gravity needed to make that trajectory possible in the real world is significantly less than 1G.
All this talk about Tron and CGI and no mention of the machine it was done with? The story of the Foonly F1 is quite interesting in itself.
You of course realize that for titanic many of the ship scenes were giant sets, and models with CG backgrounds added afterwords? A quick web search picked this up http://titanic.pottsoft.com/home/titanic/film_set. html. I just remember seeing a documentary about the films special affects, and the absolutly huge models built while the CG was used to add enhancments to the film. Things like the scene with people sliding off the deck was done with a giant model and CG people added afterwords.