[HN Gopher] 40 years ago, Tron changed sci-fi movies
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40 years ago, Tron changed sci-fi movies
Author : bryanrasmussen
Score : 63 points
Date : 2022-07-12 17:50 UTC (5 hours ago)
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| olivermarks wrote:
| I feel Tron was a masterpiece of style, art direction and graphic
| design. The color palettes are incredible.
| layer8 wrote:
| The music as well, which famously uses 7/8 meter:
| https://youtu.be/gWEU5apbY0E?t=38s
|
| There's also an 8-bit homage to the soundtrack:
| https://youtu.be/NzRWXn5KNFI
| olivermarks wrote:
| Much as I personally like the Wendy Carlos Tron work, I've
| got a feeling it didn't resonate with Disney audiences and
| that really hurt the film at the box office. The visuals were
| really slick but the music was very jarring and sometimes
| discordant for people used to saccharine soundtracks...
|
| https://www.wendycarlos.com/+tron.html
| mrandish wrote:
| TRON was technologically notable because it was the first wide-
| release film to extensively use high-res CGI. Getting high-res
| electronic images transferred cleanly to film was still being
| figured out. I remember reading in an effects magazine about how
| they cobbled together a workflow to get images from the 4096 line
| frame buffer onto film.
| layer8 wrote:
| This was mind-blowing to watch as a kid:
| https://youtu.be/jyqS4IS7h8Y
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Yup, especially when ones only exposure to computer graphics
| were things like Space Invaders and Asteroids. Definitely next
| level.
| gfxgirl wrote:
| I love the movie, but just FYI, pretty much every scene with
| people in it is not CGI. It's hand draw backgrounds and tripled
| exposed live actors who were then physically hand compositied
| together
|
| Watch a makng of movie to see
|
| There's pleny actual CGI like the light cycles, the recognizer
| scenes, the MCP, the light sail.
| layer8 wrote:
| What was mind-blowing was the aesthetics, and the concept of
| being "beamed" or digitized into a computer. I didn't care a
| lot as a kid what was CGI or not.
| gfxgirl wrote:
| neither did I. Only passing on how amazing it is that so
| much was hand made. Example, in the clip above: 2:15 to
| 3:10 and 4:35 to the end there's no CGI but it looks like
| CGI
| usrusr wrote:
| The aesthetic choices for those "not CGI" scenes rarely get
| the praise they deserve. That high contrast b/w film stock
| that looks like straight out of something Fritz Lang if you
| ignore the neon overlays, brilliant. That's why it's aging so
| well, it simply does not look as "1982" as it could have, it
| looks like the entire history and future of movies at once.
|
| Perhaps the most important role of the CGI is that of a
| distraction, because aesthetic choices like that tend to work
| best when you are not aware of them.
| LaserDiscMan wrote:
| I distinctly remember being mesmerized by this scene at the
| time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kyiQzc4134
|
| Super Mario 64 was a similar experience of "wow, this is new!".
| layer8 wrote:
| Tron led me to code a 2D version of the lightcycle game on
| the C64, but it was super slow because I didn't know assembly
| :). I then added random obstacles to the playing field to
| make it more interesting. A good friend later wrote
| Armagetron.
| js2 wrote:
| Semi-related:
|
| TANK - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEdQ3mwyrQ4
|
| And how it was made:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRkYP7wnD40
| W-Stool wrote:
| When Tron was first released I was in a grad level computer
| graphics class at a university in the USA midwest. I convinced
| our rather stuffy professor to take the class across the street
| to the "Cinema Twin" and watch the movie. In those days computer
| graphics consisted of mostly pen plotters and Tektronix vector
| displays - pretty dry stuff, lots of theory in the class but not
| much interesting output was generated. To say the collective
| minds of the class were blown away by the movie would be an
| understatement. In its own way it showed the future of CGI and
| what the this domain could look like. If you haven't seen it
| lately, give it spin - it holds up well.
| retcon wrote:
| Precisely because of the minimal gfx world I can't imagine it
| ageing. Ironically I think it's possible only Disney of the
| major studios could have understood the necessity as well as
| potential of audience imagination to fill out the emotional
| picture.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Yes. Tron still looks good, while Polar Express already does
| not.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| I take your polar express and raise you blade(1998)
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| So what was the professor's take on it?
| dekhn wrote:
| "Call me when they can do shaded polygons" :)
|
| IIRC James Clarke (who developed the early graphics chips SGI
| was famous for) said something like "reality is just 80M
| polygons a second" (at least, in a gross approximation of how
| the real world is presented to our neuro-optical system).
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| They did better than that and had curves as well. See the
| multiple youtube links on this page.
| dekhn wrote:
| I think I'm jaded, but even when I saw Tron originally, I
| was only modestly impressed with the CGI. It felt very
| wire-framey (similar to the Star Trek II genesis
| sequence) to me, even if (as you say) it had curves and
| filled polygons.
|
| After some time working in computer graphics I realized
| that what I really needed/wanted was renderman and an
| entire team of animators/technical directors, circa 2010.
| So, basically subsurface scattering, monte carlo
| sampling, many light sources, rich models and textures.
| Obviously, none of that was really accessible at the time
| Tron or Star Trek II was made, but those movies opened
| the path for the necessary brain and money investment to
| make the Pixar rendering computer and the rest is
| history.
| sammalloy wrote:
| > I think I'm jaded, but even when I saw Tron originally,
| I was only modestly impressed with the CGI.
|
| You're being downvoted, but most of us who saw it when it
| was originally released were not impressed. My thinking
| on this is because we were searching for a different
| aesthetic, likely what we would see much later with
| Avatar. However, today, the Tron aesthetic has come back
| in a big way as a retro art style. This is not
| surprising. It may very well be the case that as
| contemporaries of the original Tron, it was not intended
| for our generation, but for the ones who would come
| later. Perusing art history, this seems to be very much
| the case. Most generations do not properly appreciate the
| art from their own time, either because they can't or
| they are too focused on their own personal vision of what
| art should be. I can't tell you what the real reasons for
| this are, but I think that the audience is a prisoner of
| their time, while the artist has more freedom with their
| vision to see farther than the species is able to do on
| the level of the group, which is confined by the herd and
| the status quo.
| layer8 wrote:
| There's a short part of the solar sailer sequence with
| various landscapes that I always found particularly
| impressive for the time:
| https://youtu.be/8ruRruqKf5M?t=2m32s (the music isn't the
| original in that clip)
|
| For a long time I thought the sandy planes were a
| mandelbrot-like set, but it's really a Mickey Mouse logo.
| :)
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _Tron changed cinema, predicted the future of tech_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32033622 - July 2022 (107
| comments)
| js2 wrote:
| > While The Last Starfighter would push the boundaries of
| computer-generated special effects two years later.
|
| Glad this got a mention. It may be cheeseball, but I can watch
| TLS even today and suddenly I'm 12 years-old again.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| "Greetings, Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star
| League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-dan
| Armada."
| mikey_p wrote:
| It's been more than 40 years, but for some reason I thought
| Disney's weirdest failure would have been The Black Hole.
| chiph wrote:
| They got so much right with that film. And so much wrong. It
| could stand a remake, or even a sequel where the Cygnus
| reappears after surviving it's apparent destruction.
| LaserDiscMan wrote:
| Although different in many ways, I think Event Horizon shares
| some similarities with The Black Hole. The Gothic style of
| the ship, the setting, the plot etc...
| remoquete wrote:
| I was about to say that but... Turns out TBH grossed 35 million
| dollars, more than its cost.
| tcbawo wrote:
| Another strange failure for Disney was the Black Cauldron.
| Although, I knew it wouldn't have impacted science fiction.
| Legion wrote:
| > It also had the misfortune of trying to compete with two other
| huge sci-fi blockbusters in the summer of 1982: Star Trek II: The
| Wrath of Khan and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.
|
| I miss when "summer blockbuster" meant something other than the
| 40th Marvel comic movie and the 20th DC comic movie.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Blade Runner totally got hammered by those three.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Wow, '82 was a year for sci-fi:
|
| E.T.
|
| Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
|
| TRON
|
| Blade Runner
|
| The Road Warrior
|
| ...and Fantasy:
|
| Raiders of the lost Ark ('81 release, but stayed in the
| theater for 80 weeks)
|
| Conan The Barbarian
|
| The Secret of NIMH
|
| The Last Unicorn
|
| Beastmaster
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| > the 40th Marvel comic movie
|
| This is exactly how they lost me. I have no idea which ones
| I've seen and which I haven't, because from the title or a
| little blurb, they tend to smudge together. So rather than
| watching repeats, I just quit.
| walrus01 wrote:
| The 2010 Tron movie has a good bit of outdoor Vancouver, BC in
| it, standing in for whatever generic American city it's supposed
| to be set in.
|
| Fairly typical example of Hollywood North re-dressing a city to
| match its needs.
|
| The building with the parachute base jump is actually the
| Shangri-La condo tower downtown.
| gnulinux wrote:
| > generic American city
|
| Hmm, it's imho inaccurate to put it that way. I don't think
| there is a single "generic city" in the US. I think most
| American villages, towns and small cities look and feel the
| same (they all have the same CVS, Walgreens etc, you need a
| car) but when it comes to big cities, US cities are vastly,
| _vastly_ different. Living in NYC feels nothing like living in
| Boston, which feels nothing like SF, which feels nothing like
| LA etc... When someone says "generic American city" I really
| can't think of any streotypes... E.g. you can say American
| cities are very car-centric which is 100% correct for e.g. LA.
| But e.g. NYC and Boston ([1]) are very much the opposite, where
| arguably it's more comfortable to live _without_ a car
| (especially the case in Manhattan or Cambridge). Just a few
| data points, I realize this is not a very important discussion.
|
| [1] I was told Chicago is like this too, unfortunately never
| lived there myself.
| pchristensen wrote:
| Not the original commenter, but I presume they meant that if
| the location of the city isn't important to the story, then
| filmmakers can use buildings, streetscapes, etc to convey
| "city" without conveying "New York" or "Chicago". It didn't
| come off as disparaging American cities in general.
| walrus01 wrote:
| I don't know that Tron (2010) actually specifies any city
| name, so it's left up to the viewer's imagination what US
| city it's supposed to be. _Presumably_ ENCOM is a US company
| and their "headquarters" tower is supposed to be somewhere
| in the USA.
| schlauerfox wrote:
| Flynn's arcade exterior is in Culver City, California.
| Right around the corner from the hotel the actors for the
| Munchkins of The Wizard of Oz (1939) stayed.
| systemBuilder wrote:
| I remember it well (I was 20). It was a very boring movie. I
| think it's famous just for being 1st, i guess they poured all the
| money into the CGI because it's a 2-star story.
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