I haven’t seen Tron but I’m very aware of his cult status. Since I haven’t seen it on DVD around here, my options are going to Amazon (wait for a month) or downloading the Tron torrent.
Anyway, if you like a good story, head straight to Tom’s Hardware. This is a hardware reviews site that analyzes stuff like new CPU’s in 5-10 pages! The same methodical approach is taken towards Tron - a detailed 10 page+ story of how Tron was created. Most useful for aspiring filmmakers…
Science fiction films that are heavily visual are often a tough sell. When George Lucas tried to set up Star Wars, he had a hard time drumming up any interest because it was completely unintelligible in treatment form. The Wachowski Brothers reportedly had to create extensive graphic novel style storyboards for The Matrix before Warner Brothers really got it. When Lisberger and company went out to sell Tron, they were ready.
Note: Back then they didn’t have previsualization on a computer. For a sneak peak of drawing storyboards on paper, get Visual Storytelling with Iain McCaig from Gnomon.
Here’s the direct link.
tron was a seminal film for me. i saw a ‘making of’ on tv before i saw the film, which demonstrated how some of the effects were done. i was blown away. but it was in some ways the beginning of a disappointment. interestingly enough, i was just discussing tron in this very respect yesterday with a friend.
there are two early seminal moments in my sci-fi film-watching life where i really thought things were going to change. one was watching the making of tron, the other the making of the first all cg shot, the genesis effect from ’star trek II.’ both movies came out about the same time and i remembered thinking, “this is it. we’re going to see the most amazing movies now, because we can do anything - we can manipulate pixels!”
i thought we’d suddenly be deluged with amazing stories of far-away lands and incredible visuals. that now story-tellers could spin yarns with abandon.
but it turns out - no such thing happened. i guess in retrospect it was nieve of me to think that. story-tellers weren’t being held back this whole time by lack of cgi. the imagination limits of story-tellers have never been limited by technology, just the human capability for seeing the future.
Hi Christopher, thanks for the interesting (and thoughtful) comment. I definitely plan to see Tron. My only concern is that sci-fi movies usually age much quicker than other genre flicks (e.g. film noir)..
agreed. however tron is an exception. it’s still looks surprisingly good.