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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.
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.
At the risk of repeating myself: I'm convinced the biggest difference between Tron and Star Wars is John Williams. Go ahead, hum the Tron theme. I'll wait while you try to remember it...
Music isn't the only difference, I'll grant. But I believe it is the biggest.
If you say, "now I'll be modded down because of X", I'll happily oblige.
Just remember that this is the John Knoll who originally developed Photoshop too (stated in the article too).
Also, according to a theory in Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, people are able to project themselves more easily into a cartoonish character. This allows them to imbue the character with more emotion, and allow them to sympathize with that character.
He was using that theory to explain why the protagonists in Japanese anime and manga tended to be very cartoony, while the villains were more detailed. The lack of detail in the main character's appearance more easily allows the viewer to put themselves in that character's place, while the detailed villains provide a stark contrast and a clear division of identity.
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.
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.
- 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).
The Tron 2.0 PC video game is a worthy successor to the film. The visuals and atmosphere are spot on, and the gameplay is excellent. Updates the tron mythos, featuring parts on the internet, inside personal computers and in PDAs too.
Of course I'd like a new film sequel too, but only if it kept the same stark art style of the original.