More specifically, a review of the rapidly emerging news about the slice of nerd-vana that may or may not be named Tron 2.
Those of us who became devoted some classics of science fiction filmmaking between, oh, I don’t know, let’s say 1977 and 1983, have reasons to cast the stink eye in the direction of latter-day sequels, prequels and such. One of those classics is 1982’s “Tron,” and you don’t need me to explain why.
Yet even in this post-stink-eye era, the word on its sequel is nothing but good so far – including the news that it’s being shot in stereoscopic 3D. As soon as you hear that, your reaction is probably the same as mine – how could it NOT be?
Details have been coming fast of late, so it seems a good time to review where we are so far. Let’s start with a wonderful a bootleg clip of the trailer from 2008’s Comic Con. The quality is pretty nasty, because it’s, well, a bootleg. The clip itself drags a bit (less a well-paced trailer than a look at the “look” of the movie so far, I think), but you can definitely see where they were at the time.
The art and science of the final release will of course be light years (har har) ahead of this, but so far, so good!
A few things to note:
This is still online! Disney is notoriously protective of its properties, yet here this clip remains. I think they get that this barely embryonic footage is worth something, and was, after all shown publicly. I doubt any mercy will be shown for leaks…or to leakers…from here on.
I got chills hearing the roars of approval when the light cars, and especially Jeff Bridges, appear on screen. Even without the pictures, I’d have gotten chills just hearing it.
(Here’s an interview in The Guardian that includes some of Jeff’s very endearing enthusiasm for the project.)
No Bruce Boxleitner in the trailer? No worries. He didn’t sign on until later in 2008, although he’s still listed as “rumored” on IMDb.
It was at the time of the trailer called “TR2N.” Cool-looking, yes, but virtually unpronounceable.
The name has changed a few other times, but IMDB suggests that we may have landed on Tron 2.0 for now. I'm not convinced. Disney released a videogame called “Tron 2.0” in 2003.
It was generally well-received -- both the hardcore game nerds and the gen pop give it roughly a B -- but Disney seems like a creative-enough bunch to come up with a unique name. Indeed, reports as recent as a few weeks ago have said that the title is in fact NOT set. Read on for details.
Did I mention the roars of approval? That for me is the big takeaway from the trailer.
One of the first questions to come up is, who’s involved? One sign of the project’s legitimacy is the presence of Steve Lisberger, who directed and wrote the story for the original, now here as a writer and consultant. Here’s a wonderful intervie... with Lisberger, as well as the best discussion I've seen of the showing of the trailer at Comic Con.
Something to be truly excited about is that two of the screenwriters, Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis have done quite a bit of heavy lifting as both writers and producers for television’s “Lost,” my vote for richest storytelling in the history of the medium, by a pretty long shot.
The key name is of course the director, Joseph Kosinski. A speedy look at his IMDb profile shows…nothing, except a pre-production credit for Logan’s Run. To be released in 2010, sez IMDb?! I don’t think so! (Although it turns out that Kosinski did in fact sign to do “Logan’s Run” first.) And no mention of Kosinski at Wikipedia!
I'd actually heard of him a couple of years before he signed on for Tron, when me and millions of other folks were bowled over by his commercial for Gears of War. Hit the HQ button. Watch full screen. Turn it up.
I was actually a little skeptical about the Tron sequel before I found out that the guy who did THAT was directing the movie! And while you may be skeptical about a commercial director taking on Tron for his first feature, I've put together some of his spots and other shorts that relate to what he might be up to with Tron, and some of the striking things he has to say about it. You'll love it. Even if you'd never heard of Tron, Kosinski is one of the most creative people you'll have come across in a long, long time.
In the meantime, here are some more of stories that have put the Tron sequel back in the news of late. First comes this article at /film the week before last, featuring the first picture of a costumed actor. Later that day, a picture from the set in Vancouver, standing in for New York City.
(I’m only including a few photos from the articles I link to at /film. It’s a great resource for folks tracking stories like this for the entire “reel world” that you should check out.)
The fella who sent in the picture is breathless with wonder:
“I was in total awe of how much equipment and gadgets they had. Everything I’ve seen them doing in the last five days is easily some of the most expensive stuff I’ve ever seen. It’s probably is $300 million, even if it’s canadian dollars.”
(Presumably written by an American who hasn’t noticed that the US dollar is getting its ass handed to it by the Canadian dollar…although because they’re Canadian, they’re doing it very, very politely.)
It took Disney only 3 days to tell us that the budget of Tron 2.0 is NOT approaching $300 million, a figure that had also been mentioned in the Vancouver Sun.
In reporting that debunking, /film includes a picture of a camera, and some tantalizing tech details:
“[‘Benjamin Button’ cinematographer Claudio] Miranda has challenged his crew with the task of having all the flexibility of standard 2D cameras including ambitious use of shots as well as Steadicam in 3D.” … “Amongst other setups, we will be rigging an F-35 to a GF-8 crane and Mini-Scorpio head to get a bird’s eye view out over the night streets of Vancouver.”
Remember the stereoscopic part? I recently had a chance to speak to John Daro at FotoKem, where a number of recent stereo smashes have been posted. He was speaking generally about stereo 3D DI…most definitely NOT about Tron, I promise…but he gave me insights into how the Sony F35 CineAlta camera works for stereo features.
Quite a bit of footage from the F35 crosses his desk, most of it shot at 1920x1080, 4:2:2, recorded at 880 mbps to the Sony SRW-1 HDCAM tape recorder that you can see prominently docked to the back of the F35.
Yes, tape. There’s a ton of it out there, even for high-end digital cinema. And yes, 1920x1080. As Russell Lasson noted in 21st Century Cinema for Creative COW Magazine, virtually all digital cinema is 2K, and as Panavision’s John Galt noted for us in The Truth About 2K, 4K, and The Future of Pixels, the majority of 2K is shot at 1920x1080. Even the Academy aperture for a 2K scan is only 1728 pixels.
So don’t get your panties in a wad about the Tron sequel or anything else being shot at 1980 for the big screen. You’ve already seen a ton of movies shot this way.)
At 4:2:2 for a stereo 3D shoot, the SRW-1 takes two HD-SDI feeds, and records them to a single tape: left-eye/right-eye for frame one, left-eye/right-eye for frame two, etc. John digitizes via the Sony SRW 5800 into the Quantum Pablo, which splits out two separate streams in real time as it digitizes.
The SRW-1 records only – only! – a single stream of 4:4:4. Shooting that way would of course call for a dedicated deck for each eye.
So if the report about shooting Tron 2.0 is accurate, that’s almost certainly how it’s being recorded. In any case, John will be going into much, more detail on the 3D DI post process for the upcoming Stereoscopic Issue of Creative COW Magazine.
Another recent report about Tron 2.0 is that it will be scored by the masked electronica dance duo known as Daft Punk.
With the original scored by the iconic Wendy Carlos, they have as much to live up to as anybody involved in the production of Tron 2.0. They can be cheesy – not necessarily a bad thing in this context – but I think they’re a great choice.
The most-viewed Daft Punk clip I found is this bit of genius by a youngster named Austin Hall, set to their song, “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” also known in this permutation as “Daft Hands.”
The uber-geeks at Ain’t It Cool News got an updated report on the plot in the last few weeks, which you can take a couple of ways. One is that, far from being mere fanboys, the team at AICN have established themselves as a genuine force to be reckoned with. For example, site founder Harry Knowles emailed James Cameron about some of the “Avatar” rumors he’d been hearing, and Cameron replied.
So this wouldn’t be the first time that AICN has had info leaked to them...sometimes from official sources, intending to whip up a storm. It also wouldn’t be the first time that a studio has leaked something substantially true, but with important details obscured. And as the author points out, anything can change over the next two years. But his one rings true.
You can find plenty of other good stuff at AICN (as well as some adult language – step gingerly). I've been following it since early web adopter Roger Ebert – whose site remains one of the web’s great film resources -- pointed us to AICN back in 1996, when it was just Harry Knowles and his father. (Harry also co-hosted “At the Movies” with Roger a few times.)
And this story includes the news that the name of the movie is not Tron 2, but “something with a colon."
This week they've also posted another exterior shot from Vancouver this week. Below is greatly reduced from the original.
As with the other photos we’ve seen so far, admittedly not much to see, but trainspotters will note that this is in fact another train, and that it has indeed been spotted.
This little summary is far from complete, but it’s enough to catch you up on where we are so far. For more perspective on this news, especially on director Joseph Kosinski, see here.
PS. In an article for Creative COW Magazine, CGI pioneer Steve Wright tells how the effects in Tron actually set the industry back!
This is the sidebar in an article in on how commercials were actually the driving force in widespread adoption of CGI. Pretty slick stuff, and well worth a look.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Apr 26, 2009 at 9:48:02 am
Ron, just promise not to dress up like internet super-stud "tron guy" (GIS). I don't think we could take it.
Tron is one of those movies that becomes a lingua franca between fellow nerds. I have certain friends that will bend over in stitches if I pick the right time to intone: "Bring up the logic probe!" or "End of Line". One time our CE and I were driving past some unusual electrical distribution towers. We looked at each other, both thinking: "What do these look like?" A few beats. Eyes widened. Then as one, we shouted:
My most-watched movie is Tron. I've seen it somewhere around 50 times or so. It is the reason that I started getting into computers back in the early 80s. I had been doinking around with computers since the days of the Commodore VIC20, and had graduated up to the Ataris by the time that Tron came along. Once I saw it, I rushed out and financed myself into poverty buying an Apple IIe, only to find out that nothing that I could find or do would get me into anything even remotely as cool as Tron. I was devastated and then in 1984 came the Mac and so I went there. Still, nothing like Tron. All that changed in 1994 when I got a box of After Effects and a Media 100. Ahhh...nerdly nirvana, at last! Great article, Tim. (I believe that I bought you your copy of the 20th Anniversary Edition of Tron, didn't I? I know that I bough a bunch of copies of it when it came out and gave them to a bunch of my friends. I am such a Tron freak.) :o)
What's so ironic about Tron, is that if you watch "The Making of.." from the 20th anniversary edition DVD you picture, is that so much of the movie was NOT made in a computer, but rather using layers upon layers of traditional matte painting/cell animation, so much so they had to send out of the country to get all the mattes made and would actually receive prints back that were still wet! There was a mask just for the eyes alone. Crazy.
Here's a movie basically about digitizing our lives as we know it, and it was all made by hand (except for the famous 15 minutes). Can't wait to see this, even if it doesn't live up to the nerd hype. I'm hyped, I'm a nerd, but purism cuts out a lot of fun sometimes.
I played Tron 2.0. I really really liked it. Was it the best most well designed game? Heck no. Was the story line air tight? Heck no. Was it really fun to get immersed in a tron world in 3D? Heck yes. Quirks are reality, perfection is not, you know the whole shades of grey (which also fits in to matte making). I truly enjoyed playing Tron 2.0, even though it got pretty bad reviews. That's my kind of game.
Watching Tron, you see how bad some of the acting is, or how weird some of the sets look, or how imperfect some of the characters and story line are, but the over arching concept down to the floating bit that's either yes or no does the inside of a computer a lot of justice, flaws and all. That still holds true even today. To me, this personified look to the inside of a computer is actually a look inside the inner workings of our minds.
Thanks for this. Can't wait to find the time to follow all of the links.
I saw Tron as a double feature at the Braintree Drive-In with Splash. Admittedly, at the time, I cared less about computers than I did about Darryl Hannah's back side. These days I would say the two subjects are about even. I recently viewed Tron in its entirety for the first time since my youth. I was impressed not only with the early CGI, but with the way in which non-CGI elements were made to look appropriate in a computer world - namely the costumes. Reminds me of the outfits worn by Jor-El and his buddies in the opening scenes of Superman I.
I also recall wanting the Tron game for the Intellivision - I never got it, but the snakes game SNAFU was quite similar to the light cycle game.
There were a couple of links to leaked plot details in the story, with this one being the most recent. What do you think?
Agreed on Gondry's video. EMI has requested no embedding, and in exchange has given us a really nice HQ version for your bouncing pleasure.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8lYWYFNh6w
I just love how well that kid's DIY aesthetic, complete with blurred camera at the end, both fit and contrasted with the polished song.
And funny you should mention music in this context. Kosinski has done some work with music that's truly amazing. More specifically, he's used music in his commercials in really interesting ways, but at this point, mostly spots. They're really, really good ones though, which is why I devoted a whole article to them, which I just added a link to in the article above.
In that article, I also touch on other commercial directors who worked their way into features. I could have also talked about people like Gondry who did more work in music videos on their way to becoming feature directors, since a lot of them (again, like Gondry) mostly skipped spots, or got to them after features.
Anyway, here's the link to the full piece on Kosinski's commercial work, and how it relates to Tron. While there's a lot of technology, I think you'll also see a nice slice of his cinematic storytelling impulses.
Tim, the nerd force is strong in you:-) I well remember how cool the original was when I saw it in my youth, And I lost many a hard-earned quarter on the arcade machine based on that movie, where I was great at Lightcycles and disks, not so great at the other mini-games. Two of the actors in the original, Bruce Boxlightner and a young Peter Jurassic, wound up together in the "Babylon 5" TV series. The female lead was also in "Caddyshack" as "Lacey".
While I'm always interested in film technology, it should always be in service to telling the story first, so I'm actually a little more curious at this stage about the script and the plot they have created, than the hardware, no matter how groundbreaking it may be. I can think of a couple good ways to go, but am worried that, this being Hollywood, it may turn out to be a beautiful to watch, but impossible to listen to.
Daft Punk are cool, but I think Gondry's video for "Around the World" is a cooler example of one of DP's videos.
