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'Tron: Legacy' Director Explains the Tron World
An anonymous reader writes "We only had to wait 28 years for the second installment of 'Tron' — the sequel, 'Tron: Legacy,' comes out on Friday. It is expected to have less awesomely bad '80s graphics and more awesomely awesome millennial CGI. In advance of the opening, Discover has an interview with director Joe Kosinski in which he talks about reinventing the light cycle, and explains that the Tron world resembles the Galapagos Islands, where everything evolved in isolation."
WTF!
Watch this Heartland Institute video
A tremendous amount of the original Tron "graphics" were actually done the old-fashioned way: multiple passes with filters on the cameras, hand-drawn art, and fancy non-computer special-effects tricks.
There were also a lot of computer graphics in the movie, but not nearly as much as modern viewers seem to think.
This is probably because we are so accustomed to everything being done by computer enhancements, especially things that look computer-y, that we just assume anything similar was done on a computer.
In the case of Tron, much of it was not.
Fun fact: the name "Tron" was not derived from the old "Trace On" command, but from the word "electron."
Those 80s graphics were state of the art in 1980 when the movie started production. It sounds like AC has no idea what the fuck he is talking about. See the "Making of Tron" to understand all the complex work involved.
Hey, don't diss the 80s. Those effects were state of the art for their time and deserve better than being said that with 10000X more computer power that we can do better now.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Actually, they were making sharp turns along progressively smaller triangles.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
You are comparing it favorably to "The Last Starfighter." Talk about damning with faint praise.
Not really, I am saying it's way better than that was. It holds up MUCH better than other movies from that era, visually and plot wise - as other people noted many of the graphics were not even done on a computer which is why that is true. In fact because so much of the game is set in the computer world you have very little dating of clothing and hairstyles!
Since you scoff at the Last Starfighter comparison, I'll add a more modern one - Mirrormask. I just saw that, I disliked the plot in that movie and thought Tron was a better movie overall, even with the older computer graphics.
It is a shame you can't even rent Tron (at least not on Netflix) to see for yourself. But I think the original is a classic that really deserves that term.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Art and music can be taught without inspiring imagination (unfortunately). And art and music are only one part of imagination. Rote memorization does little good for anyone, but it is what what schools focus on. And much of it is lost so quickly after school ends that it really serves no use. Teach a man to fish... should be our schools motto. So much of what we think we know turns out to be wrong anyway, once we have more information. "Nerves don't ever regrow on their own. Oh wait, they can in the tongue. Oh wait, they can in other areas, too, our brain just aren't wired to remap pathways after childhood..." For just one example. And correcting rote memorization (for those times it does stick) after the fact is really hard.
End of line.
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
Enough, already! All of this arguing over whether "Wargames", the original "Tron" and "The Last Starfighter" are really as bad as everyone says, or if it's just elitist snobbery ("I really liked them, but I'm too cool to admit it") is making me want to go watch all three movies to find out if I only enjoyed them because I was in junior high school at the time. In any case, I really don't have the time or money to watch a bunch of old movies, so can we PUH-LEASE end the list with just those three? :D
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
I went to the advance screening that Disney held here in Toronto on Monday night; loved the movie. The one thing I would've liked to see, when Flynn did his flashback, it would've been cool to see TRON in his original look.
Michael
http://s1.sfgame.us/index.php?rec=58163
Actually about the "grid bugs" I remember seeing an interview back in the 80s with one of the special effects guys where he explained that there was supposed to be an entire grid bugs sequence where the bugs were to come climbing up the sides of the surrounding hills and attack the solar sail, but the suits balked at the cost of the CGI for it and thought the movie was long enough as is but the special effects guys got it thrown in because they thought the bugs were cool and didn't want to waste them.
And while I agree that having the devices look a little too realistic may hurt for fans of the original, lets not forget there are plenty of kids out there now that grew up on CGI and if you don't bump things up a bit they yell "fake!" and tune out. Kids today don't seem to be able to suspend disbelief as easily as we could pre CGI. Just look at how there are those on the net that think EVERYTHING is shopped.
But from what I've seen having Clu II as the bad guy will probably make things a little darker than the first. in the first you could almost feel sorry for Dillinger and Sark because their creation had gotten so far out of control and looked down upon them as primitive. The way Dillinger is told to STFU by the MCP who informs him "no single user wrote me" for example. But as someone who loved both the Tron movie and the later Tron 2.0 PC game I'll go and see it no matter what, if for nothing else the cycles and the discs.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.