Clayton Sandell, writing at ILM.com, talks to ILM’s David Seager on the visual effects of Tron: Ares on how cutting-edge digital artistry, modern inspiration, and retro callbacks helped to launch the latest Tron adventure from the cyber world into reality.
ILM’s David Seager served as the production visual effects supervisor for the third entry in a franchise that began with the original 1982 film Tron and continued with 2010’s Tron: Legacy. The first Tron movie follows the adventures of software engineer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), who is trapped inside a neon digital realm where computer programs appear as human avatars.
Then-nine-year-old Seager became an instant Tron devotee. “I was very excited when this opportunity came along, so I definitely jumped at it,” he tells ILM.com. “Tron, for me, was right up there with the Star Wars franchise and many of those types of films.”
Directed by Joachim Rønning, Tron: Ares stars Jared Leto as the titular hero, a sophisticated Master Control Program reporting to Dillinger Systems executive Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters). Ares is billed as the ultimate soldier and the first artificial intelligence being – or construct – to appear in the real world. But outside of the Grid, Ares can only live for 29 minutes, sending Dillinger and rival company ENCOM on a quest to find Flynn’s long-lost Permanence Code that will extend a construct’s lifespan. When ENCOM CEO Eve Kim (Greta Lee) discovers the code first, Dillinger dispatches Ares and his second-in-command, Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith), to track her down and steal it.
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Inside a massive Dillinger complex hangar, Ares and Athena– along with their Light Cycles – are brought into physical form by an array of rapid-firing red particle lasers attached to robotic arms.
“Using lasers to get to and from the Grid has been part of Tron since the beginning,” Seager explains. “So we knew there was going to be a laser component to it. But also, I thought it was a great opportunity to show that the Dillinger company isn’t making games anymore. They’re more a part of the military-industrial complex, so it was always important that it had an industrial feel.”
During preproduction, design inspiration came from a 3D printer purring away in the art department. “It was in one of our meetings where we just happened to look over, and there was a print in progress,” recalls Seager. “And it had the support structure surrounding it, this kind of ‘jig’ structure, as we called it.”
Incorporating the concept of 3D printing helped ground the sequence in a visual language people are familiar with, Seager explains. There’s even an added storytelling flourish when the mass of rough, excess jig pieces builds up and suddenly collapses, exposing the object underneath. “We wanted it to feel messy, and then it just falls away, and there’s the creation. It was one of those happy accidents,” Seager says. “It became a really great reveal.”
Concept art by Jason Horley (Credit: ILM & Disney)
(Credit: ILM & Disney).
Cycles and Walls of Light
Riding their Light Cycles at high speed through nighttime city streets and across bridges, Ares and Athena pursue Eve in a sequence largely shot on location in Vancouver, Canada. “It became very evident that we all wanted to go shoot as much as possible on location,” Seager recalls. “You get a million little things that happen organically.”
On set, modified Harley Davidson electric motorcycles stood in as proxies for the Light Cycles, outfitted with practical lighting to cast realistic reflections and glow onto the wet pavement. “It became our job in visual effects to go in and replace the proxies that we created for the Light Cycles,” says Seager. “We had to replace 100% of them.” The special effects department also built hero versions of the Light Cycles for shooting close-ups of the actors, either against a blue screen or an LED screen.
During the chase, the Light Cycles emit a signature Tron element in their wake: lethal ribbons of reddish, semi-transparent light. The challenge, Seager explains, was making the light walls work visually in a non-Grid environment.
“That was more traditional look development work – adjusting the amount of refraction, reflection, and brightness and those types of things,” according to Seager. “There’s a little bit of heat distortion. We want it to feel hot. And because it was very easy for it to feel glassy, and there’s a certain brittleness that comes with glass, you’re like, ‘Oh, we don’t want that.’”
(Credit: Disney).
In one of the film’s most memorable shots, a light wall slices a police cruiser into perfect halves, an effect that uses a combination of practical and digital techniques.
“That was a real car,” Seager reveals. “The special effects team was like, ‘Oh, we could build this!’ So they took a car and chopped it right down the middle lengthwise. It was a repeatable stunt, and there was limited steering they could do after the split. We ended up having to shoot it a couple of times, but the vast majority of what you see is the stunt that we shot. And then we have to go in and make the edges seem glowing hot – like it just got cut – and add steam and those types of things coming out.
“Light Cycles are to Tron like lightsabers are to Star Wars,” Seager adds with a smile. “I’m so proud of what we achieved in the Light Cycle chase.”
One of Seager’s favorite moments in the sequence is a Light Cycle sideways slide that pays homage to an iconic shot in the landmark 1988 anime action film, Akira. “I’m a lifelong anime fan and fell in love with Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga of Akira and was one of the first kids in town to obtain a VHS copy of the anime,” Seager says. “Needless to say, it is very rare to be able to work on a project that combines two influential films from your childhood.”
A climactic street battle between Ares’s and Athena’s armed Dillinger sentries features a weapon that proved to be one of the more challenging effects to pull off: the Light Staff.
“It’s the fun new weapon that was introduced in our film. The idea is a staff that you could fight with, and the ends emit a white ribbon four or five inches wide,” Seager explains. “We came up with the idea that you’d have this almost dial-up lifespan, so the light ribbon could last a second, or two seconds, or five. We knew Joachim always wanted them as long as possible, but there were times when they had to go away.”
The Light Staff fight required complex coordination between the actors and stunt performers on set, but the frenetic pace of the action sometimes created unavoidable visual conflicts. “I’d be sitting there going, ‘Wait a second, if they swipe like this and then they run forward, their head just hit the thing,’” remembers Seager. “You have to almost think in terms of, ‘Oh, I need to duck under this.’ I think everyone did a great job of trying to choreograph the fights.
“We got as close as we could during shooting,” Seager continues. “And then in postproduction, we went in there and started tracking the staff and emitting the beam from it. We just started going, ‘Oh, there’s a problem there.’ And you just have to go try other things.”
Seager says some fun and unexpected ideas also popped up during shooting. “The stunt team came up with the idea of characters making a light ribbon and using it to jump off of,” he says. “So there are cool moments where Ares basically creates terrain for himself.”
Another visual quandary came with the Super Recognizer, a massive flying security transport that Athena pilots into the city as she searches for Eve. “The design work was beautiful. I think our biggest challenge was how big it was,” Seager says. “We had our LiDAR and survey data of real Vancouver streets, and when we put those two together for the first time, we’re like, ‘Okay, the Recognizer doesn’t fit into any street.’
“There’s a fair amount of digital surgery where we had to kind of wipe the city away because if you make the Recognizer too small, the threat goes away,” continues Seager. “So we were trying to find that balance. But the main work we did there was trying to find ways to make it fit.”
(Credit: Disney)
Read the article in full here, and stream Tron: Ares on Disney+.
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