“Tron” is a pioneer of computer graphics in cinema

The last time I was in a movie theater was about four years ago. I think it was the last part of “The Avengers.” And after watching it, I left with one question: “At what point did special effects start dominating cinema?” No, I am by no means a Marvel or superhero movie hater – as they say, there is a difference of taste. And yes, serious movies without an abundance of computer graphics continue to come out, like “Oppenheimer.” Everyone will find an option for themselves – that's not what I'm talking about at all.

I just can't shake the feeling that for the mass audience, a beautiful picture has begun to prevail over the meaning of what is happening. It seems like there is a coherent plot, and sometimes funny dialogues. But there is no feeling like from “The Matrix”, where the computer graphics were also up to par, but the meaning and idea of ​​the film were still in first place.

I decided to figure out where the craze for computer graphics in feature and animated films came from. So today's material is about the creation and role of the 1982 film “Tron”.

How Computer Animation Was Used Before Tron

Perhaps the first time computer animation (if you can call it that) was used was back in 1958. It happened in the film Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock. To make the credits more memorable and to show the main character's fear of heights, he turned to the famous animator John Whitney. He was actively experimenting with movie titles and commercials.

Whitney used a trick to shoot the shots: he used what was known as the M5 Gun Director. This is a computing device used on World War II aircraft to continuously calculate trigonometric calculations when shooting at moving targets. The Gun Director, weighing several hundred kilograms, was mounted under a pendulum, and used cameras to track its rotation along different spiral trajectories. Afterwards, designer Saul Bass processed each frame manually and superimposed it on the film.

In 1961, the BESK computer, an abbreviation for “Binary Electronic Sequence Calculator,” was created at the Royal Swedish Institute of Technology. The 40-bit machine, based on 2,400 vacuum tubes and 400 transistors, could perform addition in 56 µs and multiplication in 350 µs. Its power was often used for meteorological calculations and for designing, for example, aircraft wing profiles. However, at one point, the computer was used to create a 49-second animation of a car driving down a highway. The video was even shown on national television – unfortunately, it has not survived.

In the 1960s, the most advanced universities around the world began to follow the Swedes in experimenting with computers. In 1968, based on the BESM-4 computer Soviet engineers led by Nikolai Konstantinov created an animation of a kitten. To do this, a computer printed hundreds of frames, which were later superimposed on film.

In the 70s, with the advent of IBM microprocessors, there were more computers, and their computing power increased many times over. This is beginning to be used successfully.

In 1972, computer modeling enthusiasts Edwin Catmull and Fred Park created Computer Animated Hand animation as a thesis at the University of Utah. For him, students made a cast of Edwin's left hand and decomposed it into 350 polygons, representing geometric figures of different shapes. After that, they digitized the hand using a special device and created a three-dimensional model of it, which could be rotated in different planes and also moved: compressed and unclenched. The work was a real breakthrough for that time.

In 1973, science fiction writer Michael Crichton made the film Westworld, a science fiction western that would become the basis for the famous TV series 40 years later. One of the characters in the film is a cowboy android nicknamed “Shooter” who takes part in staged shootouts. To show his point of view, Crichton turns to the same John Whitney.

He decides to take a frame from the film and turn it into a pixelated image on the computer, as if it were happening inside an android. To do this, Whitney turns to the company Information International, Inccommonly referred to as Triple-I, whose lab is actively experimenting with recognizing images on film. The computers used were PDP-10 mainframes with several self-written programs.

This was the essence of the work:

• Each frame of the required portion of the film on 70mm film was scanned and digitized.

• The entire image visible in the frame was broken down into small squares.

• The average color in each region was calculated and assigned to the corresponding squares.

• The resulting pixel matrix was applied back to the film and then edited into the overall video sequence.

Essentially, the effect turned a high-resolution film image into a blocky, low-resolution image.

A similar technology was used in the sequel, the 1976 film Future World. For the animation, they decided to take a simpler path and used the work of Catmull and Park as a basis. We are talking about their short film Computer Animated Hand, which we discussed above, as well as the sequel Faces and Body Parts — 1974.

In 1977, the legendary “Star Wars” came out and forever changed the idea of ​​how to make science fiction films about space. Large-scale battle scenes of spaceships fighting, light swords and much more seemed unreal. But in fact, almost all of this was the result of clever work with models, high-speed shooting motion control and hand-animation by artists.

There wasn't much computer animation. For example, during the briefing where the pilots were told about the plan to attack Yavin 4, animated wireframe graphics were used. George Lucas's ILM studio then used computer graphics in the Star Wars sequels and many other films.

In 1979, computer graphics were used in the films Alien (the landing scene on LV-426) and The Black Hole (the opening title sequence).

After that, until 1982, the use of computers in cinema was forgotten. This is understandable: the cost of rendering even 30 seconds was hundreds of thousands of dollars and could take several weeks. Therefore, the idea of ​​making a film with large-scale use of computer graphics throughout the action seemed like a crazy idea.

And the computing power of the graphics stations of that time did not allow, for example, texture mapping or ray tracing – the picture did not look realistic. Although ILM have already experimented with such technologies for Pixar, which was bought out in 1986 by Steve Jobs.

At this point, dreamer Steven Lisberger enters the scene with his idea to create the film “Tron”.

How Tron Was Made

Lisberger didn't have a computer when he started thinking about the idea for Tron. He founded a small animation studio in 1975 and had a dream of one day combining film and computers, inspired by the arcade game Pong.

In 1978, Lisberger moved to Los Angeles to work on a feature film for NBC dedicated to the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Incidentally, nothing came of it due to the boycott after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Having lost the contract, Lisberger found himself on the verge of bankruptcy. However, fortune soon smiled on Steven: he met Ed Catmulla future Pixar co-founder who worked at New York Institute of Technology. And also with MIT's Phil Mitelman, whose MAGI company invented the SynthaVision method for 3D animation.

Lisberger was inspired by the possibilities of computer animation, and together with friend Donald Kushner, he came up with the idea of ​​a science fiction film with CGI elements.

According to the plot, the owner of a slot machine hall and video game creator, and part-time hacker Kevin Flynn, tries to hack the main computer of the ENCOM corporation. The goal is to find evidence that the vice president of ENCOM is stealing Flynn's games. To do this, the hacker penetrates the corporation's building, but due to the TRON security system, he ends up in a three-dimensional virtual world, where he is forced to fight for his life.

On the one hand, the film would allow for a breakthrough in terms of 3D graphics — showing the viewer the seamy side of computers that no one understands. On the other hand, it would demonstrate the protagonist's fight against a soulless corporation that doesn't care about human lives. A theme that was well received, for example, in 1979's Alien.

However, finding investors for such a project turned out to be no easy task – one after another, everyone refused because they did not want to deal with computer graphics due to the high cost.

“A lot of people thought I was crazy. I even met Marvel Comics head Stan Lee once and showed him a little piece of computer animation. He looked at me without enthusiasm and said, 'Okay, kid, good luck with all this,'” Lisberger recalls.

The only company with the desire and resources to make Tron was Disney. They were looking for something fresh. After Walt's death in 1966, the studio had been in decline and couldn't produce films that could compete with the popularity of something like Star Wars. After listening to Lisberg's proposal, Disney agreed, allocating a total of almost $17 million – for comparison, the budget for Star Wars was $11 million. At the same time, Tron was supposed to be a kind of testing ground that would show whether computer animation had a future and whether Disney should reorient itself in this direction.

Work on the film began in April 1981. Jeff Bridges was invited to play the lead role – who 17 years later would play “the dude” in the wonderful film “The Big Lebowski”. David Warner from “The Omen” was invited to play the antagonist, the vice president of the corporation.

The artists hired by Lisberger drew the visual scenes, spending a lot of time on the computer world. After all, the movement of the actors against the simulated image had to look up to standard.

It was decided to shoot all the scenes where the characters were in virtual reality in a special way – their suits had to have luminous inserts. The actors in the film wore black and white suits and moved against a black background. Then each frame on 70 mm black and white film was converted into a slide measuring 30 x 60 cm. Then each slide would be hand-painted, filmed again and sent for editing. It turned out to be something between filming and creating animation.

The work was truly enormous – the film features 540,000 slides, which were coloured by 450 people over 11 months. To reduce production costs, Disney even brought in people from Taiwan and China – how this contradicts the principles of inclusivity that it now promotes.

The main thing remained to be decided – who and how would superimpose computer graphics on a black background? According to the director's idea, it would be enough to make only 20 minutes of such scenes. But given the prices of those times, even keeping within such a huge budget of 17 million dollars was not the easiest task.

Lisberger turns to the aforementioned Information International, Inc. (aka Triple-I), which helped create the graphics for Westworld.

For work company connected her supercomputer Foonly F1which worked on the basis of DEC PDP-10. Each element was built manually in the form of polygons, and then transferred to the program. The data was loaded into the TRANEW program and contained thousands of lines of information: coordinates of the corners of the polygon, texture colors in RGB format, axis rotation angles, etc. In general, everything that the computer needed to build an image at the desired angle. Rendering one frame on a supercomputer with a processor frequency of 11.1 MHz and a speed of 4.5 MIPS, as well as RAM up to 18 MB took 10-15 minutes.

With Triple-I's resources almost entirely devoted to Tron, the company eventually recognized that it was running out of steam and needed help. Lisberger then remembered a MAGI guy he'd met in Los Angeles, Phil Mitelman. Not only was help needed to finish the backgrounds of each shot, but it was also needed to create an animated sequence with Light Cycle — an animated light motorcycle that was used to conduct one of the tests within the program.

To create the model, MAGI used its own method and Synthavision software. It already had a large library of simple 3D shapes like cylinders and prisms. MAGI literally assembled the motorcycle from them, and the result was very smooth – the corners are completely invisible.

In total, the production of computer scenes, including editing, took a little over a year, which amounted to about 30 minutes of screen time. Most of the scenes with live actors were filmed in just a few weeks. The titanic efforts were rewarded by the fact that the film was released on July 9, 1982.

How Tron Influenced Cinema History

Unfortunately, the film was a box office flop and was not well received by audiences. All because of the release date – a little earlier, the films “Blade Runner” (June 25, 1982) and “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan” (June 4, 1982) were released. In the latter, by the way, the ILM studio first used fractal graphics – as if the camera flies over the surface of the planet. In terms of the level of rendering, this was not inferior to “Tron”.

The scene really looks on point

Another major reason for Tron's failure was that it felt like the design and graphics in the film took precedence over the message. It felt like an advertisement for CGI studios, completely forgetting about the characters and the plot. Steven Lisberger later acknowledged this mistake:

“The plot and visuals of the film were made simultaneously, although it shouldn't be like that. Because of this, there was a discrepancy – animators and designers were drawing characters, and at that moment it turned out that according to the plot, some prepared scene had to be replaced. But doing this is stupid, because tens of thousands of dollars were spent on creating these few seconds. Perhaps that is why the film turned out a little crumpled.”

Surprisingly, the film “Tron” was even nominated for two Oscars: Best Costume Design and Best Sound. It is noteworthy that the Academy specifically did not include “Tron” in the nomination for Best Visual Effects, since such a strong use of computers can be considered cheating.

The commercial failure of Tron (the box office receipts were $50 million, which is very little for such an ambitious project) showed Disney that it was too early to mess with computer graphics. Audiences will not appreciate it yet.

But Tron pointed to the direction the mainstream film industry would take over the next 40 years. In 1985, ILM, at the forefront of CGI, created the Pixar supercomputer for its animation studio. In 1988, it released the entire 3D short film “Tin Toy”.

Only then did Disney turn its attention to the use of computer graphics again and agreed with Pixar to create a joint full-length cartoon. Thus, in 1995, Toy Story was released and changed the animation industry forever.

And when in 1989 the film “The Abyss” was released, and in 1991 “Terminator 2: Judgment Day”, in which James Cameron's studio demonstrated new possibilities of computer animation in cinema, no one remembered the failure of the film “Tron”. Everyone began to use CGI in their films.

But the Tron universe itself is becoming truly legendary:

• In 1982, the arcade game Tron was released by Bally Midway, inspired by the events of the science fiction film. Thousands of teenagers enjoyed playing it and were inspired by Lisberger's idea.

• Based on the arcade game, a game was released in 2003. computer game “Tron 2.0” on different platforms.

• In 2010, the film Tron: Legacy was released, with Steven Lisberger as a producer. With a budget of $127 million, the film grossed $400 million, which was perceived by Disney as an undoubted success.

• In 2012-2013, the 19-episode series Tron: Uprising was released.

And in general, fans of retro sci-fi films now perceive the original 1982 film with unfailing warmth. And indeed, there is something attractive in the atmosphere of the film: from the strangely glowing lines on the black-and-white body to the eye-catching strange animation.

But it is worth noting that it was Tron that set the trend for films in which computer graphics play a significant role. Is this a good thing? I don’t think so. But the ratings and box office receipts of the Avengers franchise certainly refute my opinion. It is important to understand that the success of these films is not only in the graphics, but in the fact that they were able to make viewers fall in love with the characters and create interesting story arcs. However, in recent years, interest in Marvel has been declining, as the arcs of beloved characters have ended, leaving only less interesting stories.

People don't go to the movies for the graphics, they go to see how the story ends. And while Tron set the trend for using computer graphics, its impact on the industry is hard to overstate.

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