Going Off the Grid: The VFX of ‘Tron: Ares’

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A sentient AI being uploads itself into the real world and embarks on a dangerous mission in Disney’s fall release Tron: Ares. This is the new wrinkle in director Joachim Rønning’s fresh take on the franchise, which originated with the 1982 trailblazing film about a young computer engineer who finds himself in a digital world. While much of the action of the new movie takes place outside the virtual realm, the visual effects shots still totaled over 2,000 — with contributions made by ILM, Gmunk, Distillery, Image Engine, Lola VFX and Opsis under the supervision of David Seager.

Tron: Ares’ visual elements had to look consistent with the franchise’s past but be reconfigured to fit within a more grounded environment. “If you were to do a close comparison between our Light Cycles next [to] the ones from Tron: Legacy [2010], we have bolts, seams, handle lines, carbon fiber, plastic and metal,” says Seager, the film’s VFX supervisor. “Real-world materials and thoughts have gone into, ‘How would you build this?’ All of these different things that have their real-world analogue[s]. Darren Gilford, our amazing production designer, worked on Tron: Legacy and he drove this as far as trying to find that link. You can still look at it and go, ‘That’s a Light Cycle, Recognizer or an Identity Disc.’ But if you pick it up and look closely at it, it has those textures.”

Reflections of Reality

Seager admits that the visual effects did not always closely follow the laws of physics, as the narrative ultimately reigned supreme. “There were embellishments,” says Seager. “You can’t have Tron without a Light Ribbon, which is something bigger than real-world technology. But we treated it for real. We looked at the Light Ribbons and went, ‘What are we going to pretend this is made of? It’s in the middle of the street.’ We shot all of our photography in real-world locations, so it has reflections and refractions of the real street.”

The team used state-of-the-art visual effects tricks to put the fictional high-tech inventions in a real, believable space. “We have some vehicles that fly, lay down Light Ribbons, and those Light Ribbons magically stay put in the air, much like the aerial scene at the end of Tron: Legacy,” explains Seager. “There are those times where you tip the cap and go, ‘Yes, we are still Tron.’ What I appreciate about what Joachim brought to the film was [his] being purposeful about that and not letting everyone be random.”

Seager points out that in the first two Tron films, Light Cycles seem to appear out of nowhere. “There’s that amazing shot in Legacy of Sam jumping, [and] it forms around him and off they go,” he recalls. “However, that couldn’t happen in the real world, so we dealt with that in a different way. It’s those kinds of things that are truly a violation of physics in that respect. We’re like, ‘No. Let’s look at some 3D-printing technology, where it’s at, and come up with our sci-fi version of how 3D printing might work on a large industrial scale in the sci-fi world.’ That’s how the vehicles get printed in the real world.”

Of course, visual effects work is made easier when it’s based on detailed, realistic concept art. “Tron: Ares is the first film that I’ve worked on where I saw real-time methods used in a design sense as much as they were,” notes Seager. “Darren had artists on his team who worked exclusively in Unreal Engine. They don’t work in 2D at all. In some of these cases with ILM, we would be able to go to them and say, ‘Here is this world that we have to build for this Grid and here is this Unreal Engine file where it is modeled to a degree.’ Those artists aren’t working to a level of precision that we need for final visual effects, but it’s way better than just a 2D image where you have to go and extrapolate from that. Even to review the Light Cycle, at times Darren would bring me into his office and have the director put on the VR helmet; he would sit there, walk around and look at the latest 3D art.”

Real-world locations and geographical details had a significant impact on the script and what was filmed during principal photography in Vancouver. “You have to sit there, and [the] location manager goes, ‘We can get this or that intersection.’ Then you look at the two and go, ‘This doesn’t fit.’ Then you start to modify and fit the locations. In the post-vis, you try to make it as real-world-centric as possible. There was a lot of scouting around Vancouver. I live in Vancouver, so I’m familiar with it. All of us up here were going and trying to find locations. There is one major location in the film that we happened upon. We were going between two of the locations that we were scouting for and literally all of us were going, ‘Ooh ... What’s that?’ The location manager did her job, and we secured that location for the film.”

“You can still look at it and go, ‘That’s a Light Cycle, Recognizer or an Identity Disc. But if you pick it up and look closely at it, it has those textures.”

— VFX supervisor David Seager

Seager also notes that a full spectrum of sets was constructed for the Grid environments. “At the far end of the spectrum, we had the smallest percentage,” he says. “It was the blue room, which is a blue floor and walls, and we’re only getting the people. Next up, there were a couple of sets where we had a camera-ready floor and then blue screen. But we had a handful of sets, one of which was almost complete. There is the point where you have to expose the ceiling for the lighting department, but it was fully encompassed outside of that and built to the aesthetic that Darren and his team had created.

“That set was the reddest room you have ever seen,” he continues. “Every line was red. I remember when I got my first tour of it as it was being built here in Vancouver at Mammoth Studios. I took some photos which were shared with some other supervisors at ILM. One of them said, ‘That art looks great,’ and I replied, ‘That’s not art. That’s a photograph of our set.’ It’s almost so otherworldly that your brain doesn’t look at that [and] believe that it’s a real thing.”

Chasing the Perfect Visuals

The special effects team, led by Cameron Waldbauer, made major contributions to a scene where a police car in pursuit gets sliced in half by a Light Ribbon emitted from a Light Cycle. “They built a cop car that was pre-sliced, we drove it, it was somewhat steerable, and special effects had it so it would divide,” explains Seager. “We cranked the frame rate on the camera, put as many cameras on it as possible and [shot] it on a bridge in the middle of the night. One take, the car flops weird. ‘Let’s do that again.’ We kept at it. I can confidently say the final product uses what we shot. There might be times that you replace a lot of things, but I find that if your first step is trying to do it in reality, it’s the best thing you can do to have a solid product. You’re not starting from the world of fantasy. You’re beginning from, ‘This is what the lighting and wetness on the pavement was like.’

“We have a big vehicle called the Dart, which is a giant tank that we drove through downtown Vancouver, crashed cars with and replaced it later with a digital version,” he adds. “Economics play into it: The practicality of shooting and trying to find that threshold of, ‘You can get this far and then I’ll build upon what you were able to achieve.’”

Disney’s Tron: Ares is currently playing in theaters and IMAX nationwide.