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Tron film - Technical

Tron film - Technical: Encyclopedia II - Tron film - Technical

Tron was one of the first movies to use long computer-generated sequences. About thirty minutes of computer-generated animation (blended with the filmed characters) were used. Though the movie has been criticized for woodenness of acting and — perhaps unjustly — incoherence of plot, the movie is celebrated as a milestone of computer animation. To be able to create the film, Disney turned to Triple I who owned the Super Foonly F-1, the fastest PDP-10 ever made (and the only one of its kind) as well a ...

Tron film: Encyclopedia II - Tron film - Technical

Tron film - Technical

Tron was one of the first movies to use long computer-generated sequences. About thirty minutes of computer-generated animation (blended with the filmed characters) were used. Though the movie has been criticized for woodenness of acting and — perhaps unjustly — incoherence of plot, the movie is celebrated as a milestone of computer animation.

To be able to create the film, Disney turned to Triple I who owned the Super Foonly F-1, the fastest PDP-10 ever made (and the only one of its kind) as well as MAGI and a number of other companies.

Renowned French comic book artist, Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Moebius), was the main set and costume designer for the movie, while most vehicles were created by industrial designer Syd Mead, of Blade Runner fame.

The film, however, contains less computer-generated imagery than is generally supposed. Many of the effects that look like computer graphics were created using traditional optical effects. In a technique known as "backlit animation," the live-action scenes inside the computer world were filmed in black-and-white on a entirely black set, printed on large-format high-contrast film, then colorized with traditional photographic and rotoscopic techniques to give them a "technological" feel. The process was immensely labor-intensive, and would never be repeated for another feature film; with multiple layers of high-contrast large-format positives and negatives, it required truckloads of sheet film, and a workload greater than even that of a conventional cel-animated feature. In addition, the varying quality and age of the film layers caused different brightness levels for the backlit effects from frame to frame, explaining why the glowing outlines and circuit traces tended to flicker in the original film.

In the year it was released, says director Lisberger, "the Motion Picture Academy refused to nominate Tron for special effects because they said we "cheated" when we used computers which, in the light of what happened, is just mind-boggling."