In 1982, computers had two meanings in the public imagination: either room-sized machines used to process military-industrial data and issues such as nuclear warfare and stock markets, or refrigerator-sized arcade games such as Space Invaders and Pacman; Sometimes Kraftwerk sang about computers. If you had a computer back then (probably a Sinclair ZX81), their power was only slightly more sophisticated than a calculator. However, in the summer of 1982, cinema faced the digital future. The movie “Tron” directed by Steven Lisberger was a model for future events, for the next forty years of cinema and even our real and virtual life.
The movie “Tron” predicted the issues we are dealing with today in 1982: issues such as artificial intelligence, digital identity, privacy, personal data and the dominance of technological superpowers. “Tron” was also the first attempt to visualize the digital world; What was then called Cyberspace and now called Metaverse. The virtual world of “Tron” was a minimalist, black and white and neon environment, similar to the clubs of the 80s; But its retro and distinctive style is still the model of many current movies and series.
The movie “Tron” entered the popular culture exactly when computers were released from the power of their military-industrial fortresses and became available to the people; The story of the film is the same. In Tron, we follow a genius programmer named Flynn (played by Jeff Bridges) who runs an arcade. But we find out that his former boss, Diligner (David Warner), stole his codes and finished everything in his own name. Flynn goes digital while hacking Dillinger’s company, ENCOM, guided by the company’s omniscient artificial intelligence, the Master Control Program, and takes a headache from the cyberworld of 80s nightclubs. In the computer, Flynn must fight alongside the “Programs” – avatars instead of the programmers who created them – to get to the bottom of the truth and find a way back to the real world. There, Flynn takes down the MPC and recovers his IP with video game combat to dump Dillinger on the water.
Leesberger didn’t have a computer when he thought of making Tron. He moved his successful animation company to Los Angeles in 1978 to work on a feature film for NBC for the 1980 Moscow Olympics (it never aired due to a US embargo). Lisberger became interested in computer graphics after seeing early video games like Pong.
Lisberger also wondered why the power of information is all in the hands of the government; Such as tax records, driver’s licenses, etc. Thus, he built “Tron” on this idea: the embodiment of the utopian dream of the early computer age or, in Lisberger’s own words, “a story of rebellion and revolution and the creation of a new frontier that allows a new civilization to take shape.” In these years Lisberger still did not know how he wanted to make such a film. He himself explained: “A lot of well-known filmmakers thought I was crazy. But I didn’t know enough about how Hollywood worked to know that what I was trying to do was impossible.” Lisberger even met Marvel Comics president Stan Lee once and showed him a small sample of the computer animation: “He looked at me like, ‘Okay, kid, good luck with all of this.’ He was not enthusiastic at all.”
The only company that had the will and resources to implement Liesberger’s idea was Disney; A company that was declining after the death of Walt Disney in 1966 and was willing to do trial and error in search of innovation. Especially at the time when George Lucas and Steven Spielberg completely removed Disney from the competition with their family adventure films, such as “Star Wars” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.
These films not only appealed to the Disney audience, which provided more content than the numerous Herbie the Love Bug sequels and Mickey Mouse reruns and the stuff Disney churned out every day. Disney’s only achievement in the competition in the post-Star Wars era was a science-fiction drama in 1979 called “The Black Hole”, which did not sell well at the box office and had impressive visual effects, but could not attract the audience as it should have.
“Black Hole” was a gamble that Disney did not win; But Tron was another giant. In the late 1970s, before Steven Lisberger directed Tron, he began experimenting with backlit animation; A technique in which they make a negative from each frame and paint by hand on the light parts. Lisberger had found success using this technique in commercials and educational films, but at the same time he was also closely monitoring developments in the relatively fledgling field of computer animation. In the meantime, he wondered if there was a way to use this technology in a feature film. With the expansion of video games, Liesberger realized the potential of this new world; A world that could present the techniques he had mastered in a different form.
Influenced by the world of video games and computers, Liesberger named his story “Tron”, derived from the word “electronic”. He thus began the first steps to write and direct a film that was to become the most groundbreaking fantasy and science-fiction film of 1982; A year that happens to have no shortage of good sci-fi movies.
In the beginning, Lisberger wanted to create everything that happened inside the computer, in other words, most of the film, with a combination of CGI (computer generated images) and backlit animation. However, when Liesberger thought more seriously about a way to tell his story, he came up with an even more ambitious plan.
Technically, Tron is a combination of live action, traditional animation and CGI. All three elements were challenging. All of the special effects were added in post-production, so the actors played on empty sets, only to have everything but their faces and bodies added manually or computerized later; Almost like what Robert Rodriguez did years later in “Sin City” or you’ve seen its peak in James Cameron’s “Avatar” movies.
Leesberger said Jeff Bridges welcomed the film’s quirky idea, and David Warner (who played Dillinger and Flynn’s main antagonist) didn’t see much of a difference between playing these empty sets and performing on a British theater stage. Lisberger’s plan was to shoot in live action and use this footage as the basis for backlit animation; That is, real actors (not animated characters) are shown on the image and integrated into a fully animated environment.
“Tron” is the first movie that uses computer graphics to such an extent and it uses it in combination with live action and backlit animation. Except for a few scenes at the beginning and end of the film that take place in the real world, most of “Tron” takes place inside a computer; That is, for more than an hour of the movie, some kind of special effects or animation has been used for each frame.
Lisberger used a black-and-white 70mm camera to film the actors, all dressed in white with black shapes, so that later in post-production, electronic circuits would be drawn on the image via backlit animation. Each frame of this live-action film, which again made up more than an hour of the entire film, was then blown up to be used as the basis of a Kodalith—a high-contrast black-and-white photograph like a kind of live-action animation tube.
Colors were added to black spaces with the help of backlighting, and Kodalites made it possible to add lightcycles, weapons and computer-generated sets to the picture; Of course, this was a very laborious task because the combination of live action image with computer images had to be done frame by frame. The decision to shoot Tron with a 70mm camera took advantage of the format’s higher resolution to implement special effects, making Lisberger’s film a fascinating mix of old and futuristic techniques.
Not since David Lean used 70mm film in 1970’s Ryan’s Daughter has it been used for a motion picture. Even until auteur filmmakers like Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, and Paul Thomas Anderson brought it back to cinema in the 2010s, 70mm film was rarely used. Thus, Leesberger literally used a dying technology to facilitate the birth of a new one (mostly computer generated films) and became one of cinema’s most influential special effects films.
Of course, movies have long used green and blue screen techniques to combine live-action scenes with backgrounds and other elements created in post-production. Digital technology has refined this method and made it ubiquitous in the Marvel era. But how the movie “Tron” was made in the pre-production and post-production stages is exceptional. With the help of Liesberger’s detailed, frame-by-frame storyboards and designs by artists such as Mobius and Sid Mead (whose creations can be found in another 1982 film, Blade Runner), Tron became a unique film; Especially since until then computer animations were, if not never, at least rarely used in motion pictures.
For example, in the 1973 film Westworld, there is a clip of a pixelated view of a robot’s eye. Star Wars and Alien both have 3D graphics displayed on the screen. Only a few companies could produce such images, and each had room-sized computers and custom software.
In 1982, the process was still tedious. “We had to figure out how to position and render objects 24 times to create one second of perceptible motion on the image,” said Bill Croyer, director of computer animation for Tron. “Tron” animators had to draw the CGI scenes on grid paper, then calculate the coordinates and angles of each element in each frame and input all the numbers by hand. Again, until the images were printed on 35mm film and shown in the cinema, there was no way to see the final image.
About 15 minutes of “Tron” feature entirely computer-generated imagery, in addition to hundreds of other frames that combine computer-generated backgrounds with live-action footage. For the fully computer-generated scenes, Liesberger and his team turned to another old format that has been revived today thanks to Paul Thomas Anderson: VistaVision. Computer images were printed directly on Vistavision negatives and placed on film; While the backgrounds were combined on the basis of animation and frame by frame.
Apart from the fact that making a film about computers with the help of computers was reason enough to use this technology, there was another advantage. In traditional animation, perspective change was a difficult task; The camera could move from top to bottom, and from right to left, but more complex perspective changes required complex cameras and processes.
Lisberger and his colleagues quickly realized what Pixar’s animators discovered and perfected years later: that the camera on the computer could be programmed to move in computer-generated environments with the same freedom of action as in live-action filming. Of course, even more freely than live action, because the only limitation is the creativity of the filmmaker. In addition, objects and backgrounds could be changed much more easily.
However, the adjective “easy” and the movie “Tron” should not be used in the same sentence. As Liesberger points out in the DVD version of Tron, they built Tron with computers that have less computing and processing power than what we have in our cell phones now. They had to work day and night on 76,320 frames of film; Each frame had several elements and some frames required 12 to 50 processing times to produce the final shots.
If you go back and watch Tron today, it’s really amazing how well the computer graphics have held up. Indeed, Tron is as stunning now as it was in 1982. The special effects also leave a greater emotional impact on you than the special effects heavy movies that are made today. The reason is that CGI was the basis of Liesberger’s idea. In Tron, as in James Cameron’s Avatar films, CGI is not one of several different ways to tell a story; Rather, it is the only possible method.
Tron pioneered technology that would be used in nearly every major sci-fi film of the following years, but surprisingly, when the Academy Awards nominations were announced on February 17, 1983, there was no recognition or nomination for Tron’s special effects. Although “Tron” was nominated for an Oscar in the categories of costume design and sound design, the Academy disqualified Lisberger for best special effects. the reason In a world still dominated by practical special effects, according to the logic of the Academy, using a computer was considered cheating!
Obviously, it was a different time. The creators of the movie “Tron” could console themselves a little that 1982 was one of the best years in the history of cinema for science-fiction movies and full of good special effects, and as a result, the Oscar competition was tough. That year, other films were ignored by the Academy in the field of special effects; Such as “The Thing”, “Conan the Barbarian” and “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan”, which, like “Tron”, was considered a turning point in computer special effects due to the genesis sequence that was created by computer.
As soon as he was informed, “E. Steven Spielberg’s ET took home the special effects award in 1983, alongside Blade Runner and Poltergeist. All are spectacular films, but only “Blade Runner” can claim to come close to “Tron” in terms of innovation and impact; Because the current world is closer to the cyberpunk dystopia of “Blade Runner” than to the technological idealism Lisberger envisioned in “Tron.” Liesberger said about this:
“Tron is very idealistic: ‘If we just put the tools in the hands of the people, democracy will be guaranteed forever!’ The irony is that computers have been used to overthrow democracy. If someone had said that when we get these tools out to the public, they’re going to come out with conspiracy theories, misinformation, stupidity, and the most violent video games you can imagine, we’d be like, ‘Oh no, it’s going to be awesome!’ “(Time showed) that we can predict the tools of the future, but we can’t really predict the philosophies or ethics of the future.”
However, even if Lisberger went wrong in predicting the philosophical and moral course of mankind, it cannot be denied that without Tron, we would not have films like Jurassic Park, Toy Story or many other Pixar classics; At least not as we know it today. Tron inspired a generation of filmmakers and special effects artists who changed cinema forever, and it’s a much sweeter award than the 1983 Special Effects Oscar.
Source: Indie Wire
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