Trevor Hogg at VFX Voice talks to ILM about the effects created for Tron: Ares, moving from the digital realm of the first two movies to the real world for the third film in the franchise, where an advanced AI program known as Ares embarks on a dangerous mission.
“The core of our film is this contrast between the Real World and Grid World, which has been established within the first two Tron films,” notes VFX Supervisor David Seager. “The big challenge for us was, how do you bring the Grid into the real world in a believable fashion? There is a lot of embellishment that could be made when you’re inside the Grid because you can say, ‘This is inside of the computer, so Grid things can happen.’ But if you did some of those exact same things in the photography you shot in the real world, it would begin to break the illusion. Joachim Rønning drove it from the start by embracing, ‘What does a Light Cycle look like in the real world? How does it behave?’ There were all of these different things we had to embrace and answer for ourselves to find a language that first and foremost supports the story, but, also, the more believable the visual is, the more people are going to buy into the story.”
Light-emitting vehicles, weapons and suits are part of the visual language for Tron. “With the majority of our film being in the real world, we embraced shooting as much as possible in the real world,” Seager states. “The Light Cycles are the best example of that. You can sit there and go, ‘You want to shoot in the real world. Then go with a camera, shoot an empty road and imagine what’s happening.’ Or, what we decided to do, which is to say, ‘We’re going to have proxy bikes that represent Light Cycles.’ Our entire team worked together to find these electric Harley-Davidson bikes that were modified to have the same wheelbase of a Light Cycle and had the stunt team driving through the streets doing the action. I find you get that added reality of the real physics of the bike having to change lanes, pulling in front of a car and the camera car following. The speed is different, so the camera operator has to correct and keep his eye on the camera. All these million decisions go together to make a shot that looks like a motorcycle driving down a street. Then, our job is to go back, and over the top of that proxy we put our Light Cycle. We worked with the lighting department and put a bunch of LED bricks on bikes to have them emit light. Even the stunt riders’ safety suits had light lines. Our hope there is you might get some happy accidents. The fact that we had a real bike reflecting where it needed to reflect and casting that light where it needed to go was a guide. Were there times when we wanted to deviate from that motion? Absolutely! However, the number of wins we have far outweighed those times we had to go in there and paint some light out.”
Among over 2,000 visual effects shots produced by primary vendor ILM, as well as Distillery VFX, Image Engine, GMUNK, Lola VFX and Opsis, is the signature action sequence where a pursuing police car gets sliced in half by a Light Ribbon generated by a Light Cycle. “You see what they filmed practically and notice what you need to do,” remarks Vincent Papaix, VFX Supervisor at ILM. “There is postvis happening. We need to make it look photoreal, and for the way we see a Light Ribbon, it’s in its name. It’s light and Ribbon, so we make it an indestructible piece of glass emitting energy that can cut things. The special effects team had a precut police car, pulled it with two wires and then separated it. What we enhanced in CG was the Light Ribbon, but also the sparks, the piece of the engine falling down, dust and smoke. We also had to have a tight match to the police car because of all the interactive light and reflections that go in there. We could have done full CG, however, because of my compositing background, I am a big fan of trying to preserve the photography. It was meticulous work from the 3D and 2D departments to blend the plate and CG that was going on top to make it seamless.”
Image: Ares utilizes 3D printing technology to enter the real world
Appearing in the sky is the Recognizer. “What we did in order to make the Recognizer believable in the real world was to add a lot of details, like screws and an engine that was referenced from a rocket ship,” Papaix states. “It’s still the design of Tron, but with the technology of our real world to make sure this can fly in a believable way.” A larger issue was the environmental integration. “We used Burrard Street, one of the biggest avenues in Vancouver, but when we put the Recognizer in the scene, it would be in-between buildings when it’s supposed to move through the street. That’s because in the story the Recognizer is chasing a character, so it needs to be not just over the city but be able to go through the city. In order to do this, sometimes we had to widen the street, which was quite a challenge.” Vancouver is known for rain. Papaix says, “All of our photography work had wet ground, and wet means it reflects a lot. On set, they put a lot of LED tubes where the action was supposed to be. Most of the time it worked great. We built an entire Vancouver in CG and had a couple of blocks at the ground level that were a photoreal full CG asset. We put in the effort to have a CG replica of the real photography, so we were able to render our CG version of the city to patch things as needed or integrate things because the action got moved.”
Animators had to act like cinematographers. “At the end of the third act, there is a dogfight between some Tron Light Jets and a F-35, and besides animating the vehicles, we also animated all of the cameras,” states Mike Beaulieu, Animation Supervisor at ILM. “We looked at aerial footage of different films or documentaries, and made a list of what kinds of lenses we usually use when we’re shooting stuff like that. It also gets creative because our director has a sensibility for what kind of lenses he prefers and what types of shots he likes to have. We can make adjustments there. We would animate everything in 3D space first and then we would go in with an eye of, ‘How would we film all of this stuff?’ We would cover it with different camera angles and see what angles looked most interesting, which ones tell the story the best and still have an energy to it without getting too flat; 200mm to 400mm lenses tend to flatten everything, so to have a sense of traveling through 3D space with lenses like that is tricky. You can have a jet flying at you going 300 miles per hour, but with a 400mm lens, when you’re that far away, it doesn’t look like it’s changing that much. We had to get creative by covering it with a 100mm lens so we can actually read some of that travel of the jet flying around.”
Read the article in full here, and see Tron: Ares in cinemas now.
Images: Disney
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