Putting the Original Tron’s Special Effects Together | Light and sound #adabox10 @adafruit
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“Disney is one of the very few studios that could have gotten behind a movie that was going to be done frame by frame,” he says. “No other studio could even imagine getting involved in it.”
When the actors enter the computer world of Tron, it was shot on 65mm black and white, with backlit color, a concept that came from the world of animation. “Think of it as stained glass,” Lisberger says. “Backlit animation is non-reflective, so when you shine light through the gels, the colors are so much brighter.”
It also gave the world of Tron a much warmer look. “So much of the traditional photographic analog shading gave it a soul,” Lisberger continues. “The light sabers in Star Wars were originally done with backlit glowing animation. Now they’re done digitally, and they don’t look as good as they did in the first movie, they have sort of a creepy, antiseptic vibe.”
“The people that are really into Tron love that analog technique,” says Logan. “It’s a really a snapshot in time, that movie will never be duplicated.”
Originally Tron was going to be done with all white backgrounds, like THX, but Logan was against it. As he recalled in the documentary The Making of Tron, “There weren’t enough lights in Hollywood to create the kind of white they needed.” Where black backgrounds don’t have to lit, everything needed to be lit on a white background, and it would be a cinematographer’s nightmare. “We were working at such incredible f-stops, low shutter angles,” Logan continued. “We were welding with light on that show.”
Lisberger had a buffer protecting him for the geriarchy at Disney with visual effects artist Harrison Ellenshaw. Harrison’s father is Peter Ellenshaw, who created the legendary special effects for The Absent Minded Professor, and Mary Poppins, just to name a few. Before Tron, Harrison had worked on Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back.
Combining real people and digital animation was a new, modernized version of what Ellenshaw’s father accomplished when he took Mary Poppins into a cartoon world.
“Those shots were generally done on an optical printer, which was basically a projector and a camera,” Ellenshaw explains. “The camera just re-photographs different images onto the same strip of film and you have what’s called a composite. You have the finished thing, you have the animated penguins with Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews against a painted background. But you would get matte lines, you’d get fringing around the people, and you’d have to balance the film. The photo chemical process is pretty clunky. A piece of film is pretty small, so you’re trying to build a watch with a sledge hammer!”
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