Tron Legacy: The Making of UI/Visual Effects / Cameron Moll / Designer, Speaker, Author

Monday 4 April 2011

Tron Legacy: The Making of UI/Visual Effects →

Josh Nimoy:

In addition to visual effects, I was asked to record myself using a unix terminal doing technologically feasible things. I took extra care in babysitting the elements through to final composite to ensure that the content would not be artistically altered beyond that feasibility. I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble….

In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance — splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie.

I still haven’t even seen the movie, and most of Josh’s programming jargon is beyond me. But his account of the software written exclusively for the movie is fascinating nonetheless.