Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/22917
CG Environments n n n n In TRON Legacy, Sam Flynn battles Programs deep within his father’s digital world, a world once again created with state-of-the- art computer graphics By Barbara Robertson Images ©2010 Disney Enterprises, Inc. Lisberger [writer, director] envisioned people living as avatars in a digital world, and that was in 1982, when most people didn’t have computers.” Today, visual effects and computer graph- ics are synonymous, people live as avatars in digital worlds, computer games are nearly photorealistic, and the former writer/director has now taken the role of producer. “I made my TRON,” Lisberger says. “I didn’t want to compete with myself 28 years later.” Jeff Bridges, however, does compete with himself 28 years later. With the help of computer graphics, he plays two characters in TRON: Legacy. One is Kevin Flynn, at Bridges’ current age. Te other is Clu 2.0. In the story, we learn that Flynn re-entered the Grid and programmed a new version of Clu about two years after the first. Clu 2.0 looks like a clone of Jeff Bridges at about age 35. A team at Digital Domain—led by visual effects supervisors Eric Barba and Steve Preeg, who had won an Oscar for the effects in Ben- jamin Button—performed the technical and artistic magic. Tis time, not to imagine an el- derly Brad Pitt, but to replicate a familiar face. And this time, they created a digital human in stereoscopic 3D. “One of the freakiest things was when we scanned Jeff [Bridges],” Lisberger says, refer- ring to one step in Digital Domain’s Emotion system that was a facial capture of Bridges with Mova’s Contour software. Te scan produced a lifelike, animated digital doppelganger. “For the first film, I just made up that idea,” Lis- berger says. “Now, I could see it on the Grid.” December 2010 7