Sunday 25 May 2014

VFX Analysis In The Industry - Tron Legacy

I will review the VFX process of one of my favourite films in recent years.

First up, Tron Legacy - 2010 (Walt Disney Studios)

The visual effects team had worked on Tron Legacy for about 2 years, but surprisingly, a lot of what you may think are VFX are really practical effects. A lot of the sets were built physically with the help of the director, Joseph Kosinski, who has a background in architecture. Even the costumes with the lights were created. Elements of the film that were created digitally are the establishing shots, which were based around Japanese landscape art, some of the background scenery and the Recognizer - the flying vehicle.

It took two years and ten companies to create the 1,565 visual effects shots of Tron: Legacy. The majority of the effects were done by Digital Domain, who created 882 shots under supervisor Eric Barba.The production team blended several special effect techniques, such as chroma keying, to allow more freedom in creating effects. Similar to Tron, this approach was seen as pushing the boundaries of modern technology.

Rather than utilizing makeup tactics, such as the ones used in A Beautiful Mind, to give Jeff Bridges a younger appearance, the character of Clu was completely computer generated. To show that this version of Clu was created some time after the events of the original film, the visual effects artists based his appearance on how Bridges looked in Against All Odds, released two years after Tron. The effects team hired makeup artist Rick Baker to construct a molded likeness of a younger Bridges head to serve as their basis for their CG work. But soon, they scrapped the mould because they wished for it to be more youthful. There was no time to make another mould, so the team reconstructed it digitally. On-set, first Bridges would perform, being then followed by stunt double John Reardon who would mimic his actions. Reardon's head was replaced on post-production with the digital version of the young Bridges. Barba – who was involved in a similar experience for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — stated that they used four microcameras with infrared sensors to capture all 134 dots on Bridges face that would be the basis of the facial movements, a similar process that was used in Avatar. It took over two years to not only create the likeness of Clu, but also the character's movements (such as muscle movement). Bridges called the experience surreal and said it was "Just like the first Tron, but for real!"

Bradley Munkowitz of Digital Domain recorded himself working on a Unix terminal doing "technologically feasible things". 
He didn't want the "hacker scenes" to be bogged down with the Hollywood idea of hacking, as nmap had been used to death since it's first appearance in The Matrix, which then found it's way into Bourne Ultimatum, Die Hard 4, Battle Royale and so on. He said, "In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process."
He used posix kill and piped PS into Grep. Using emacs eshell to make the terminal into a more "1337" style. The editor was split into nested panes and ran different modes.

In the battle arena scenes, the scoreboard was created using a line-generator which produces bursts of lines, which would turn at adjustable angles. The Radial Mode arranged the geometry in concentric circles. This would be used in a few different elements.
The design above and then in use in the scene.

Fireworks were simulated where a particle was given an upward force from generation. Gravity would pull it back down, resulting in a parabola (a two-dimensional, mirror-symmetrical curve, which is approximately U-shaped when oriented)
Particle children would be added as well as artistic styles, including what the team called "Egyptian", which is a side-stepping behaviour. This was done to give the fireworks a real firework feel, but also to give it a techno-aesthetic, so it would look as though it would belong in the world of Tron. As an homage to the original Tron, they had the fireworks explode in the shape of the character Bit.


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