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n n n n CG Environments Te narrative sequences filmed in the End of Line Club and inside Kevin Flynn’s house, on the other hand, take place on enormous sets built with glass floors. “I wanted to cap- ture as much in camera as possible,” Kosinski says, “the characters’ reflections in the floor, the sets, each other’s eyes.” Each actor on set wore a costume patterned with TRON ’s iconic glow lines, foam rubber suits laced with encapsulated wiring that con- nected to electroluminescent lamps on the sur- face. Te lamps, made from a flexible polymer film, emitted yellow glow lines on Clu’s suit, orange on the other bad guys, and white and blue for the heroes. Extras on set controlled their own suits, but principal actors had their glow lines operated by remote control. Costume designers conceived the Lightsuits using Autodesk’s Softimage and Pixologic’s ZBrush, and scaled the designs over digi- tized bodies of the actors. Quantum Creation Fx sent the data to computer numerical- controlled (CNC) manufacturing machines. “It was fun working out what sort of Pro- “Te key to this movie is how light inte- grates into every object,” says Darren Gilford, production designer. And that includes the CG characters. Clu 2.0 Two supervisors at Digital Domain, Jonathan Litt and Greg Teegarden, led lighting teams that altogether included approximately 40 artists. “We basically divided the work into the Jeff Bridges facial replacement shots and everything else, and it ended up pretty much equal,” Litt says. “Tere are around 170 head shots, so that’s a small part of the total work, but the amount of mental effort is high.” To create Clu 2.0—that is, the young Jeff Bridges—Digital Domain’s artists fitted an animated digital head onto a stunt actor’s body using many of the same methods they had developed to put an aged version of Brad Pitt’s face onto a child-sized body (see “What’s Old Is New Again,” January 2009), and many of the artists who worked on that film moved onto TRON: Legacy. But, there young Kevin Flynn shares a close-up scene with his clone. Capturing the Performance “We started with the same methods we had used and learned from on Benjamin Button,” Preeg says. “Te main difference was that with Brad [Pitt], we did everything post shoot, but Jeff wanted to be Clu in the moment.” As they had for Benjamin Button, the team began by capturing Bridges performing a set of FACS expressions with the Mova system to help modelers identify which facial muscles the actor moves and how much they move as he smiles, frowns, and creates other facial expressions, and as he enunciates particular phonemes. Modelers used Mova’s captured data to sculpt shapes they applied to a digital model of the younger Bridg- es/Clu. To build that model, they referenced a scanned Rick Baker maquette of a young Jeff Bridges’ head, “scanned into the computer like in the [first] film,” Kosinski says with a smile. “But we did it for real.” Te studio also captured lighting reference gram I was,” says actor Michael Sheen, who plays the flamboyant club owner Castor, pro- vider of any and all entertainment and diver- sions. “But, it took skill to make it look like I could breathe and move easily in the suit.” On each Lightsuit’s back is an all-important disc. Te disc contains the character’s identity, and when removed, becomes a dangerous, Frisbee-like weapon. Glow lines outline the discs, as they do for the suits, vehicles, and other objects and structures in TRON. Te prop discs housed batteries and inverters, and glowed thanks to 138 LEDs. Tese glow lines would become a major part of the visual effects effort: Artists fixed and enhanced the light on the real suits, imi- tated the light on the digital doubles, added a glowing jagged edge to the discs, and created the light for the vehicles and the CG environ- ments (see “Glow in the Dark” pg. 16). 10 December 2010 At left, the actor Jeff Bridges as he appears in the role of Kevin Flynn. At right, Clu 2.0, a digital clone of Bridges at age 35 created by Digital Domain and animated using dialog and facial expressions captured from Bridges. were differences, and the differences mattered. “Clu is the most difficult thing we’ve ever done,” Barba says. “We had just come off Ben- jamin Button, which was the most difficult thing then. Tis, however, proved to be much harder. No one knew what Brad Pitt would look like at age 80, but everyone knows what Jeff Bridges looked like when he was young- er. And little Benjamin was a bit passive; he moved through the world, but he wasn’t a driving force. Our character Clu is the oppo- site. He’s a major character who gives major speeches. He’s a bad guy, the one Jeff Bridges plays against.” It may be the first time that an actor has performed in scenes with a younger version of himself. And, in one flashback scene, Bridges does double digital duty when a from the maquette using a system from Light- Stage, but afterward, the filmmakers changed Clu’s age. “Te original maquette was no lon- ger valid for what we wanted to do, so we had to scrap it and rebuild the model at a younger age,” Barba says. Animators worked with a low-resolution version of the final model and blendshapes, while lighters received a higher- resolution version. For Button, after the director had filmed the shots, Pitt had watched the footage with the double playing his part, and then per- formed the dialog in a controlled environ- ment. “He was locked into position with four high-definition cameras shooting him,” Preeg says. Tat made it easier for Digital Domain to accurately motion-capture and track his performance. Bridges, however, performed