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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.
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
lol agree, everytime I see CGI I think of common gateway interface and wonder what a movie has to do with a web application.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.