In 1982, Disney studios released Tron, one of the first films from a major studio to feature extensive computer graphics. The movie is about a programmer (Jeff Bridges) who gets “digitized” and finds himself inside a computer where he is forced to play the gladiatorial games he wrote. (Bridges’ character eventually escapes and sets out to topple the despotic Master Control Program, or MCP.) Even though Tron was something of a milestone for computer-generated imagery, it met with little success at the box office and failed to garner a special effects nomination from the Motion Picture Academy. At the time, the Academy considered the use of computers in films as “cheating.”
Monday marked the 25th anniversary of of the release of Tron, whose computer graphics were seen as revolutionary at the time. With that anniversary in mind, Computerworld spoke with John Knoll, a visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM). Knoll, who served as visual effects supervisor for such films as Star Wars
Episode III: Revenge of the Sith; Pirates of the Caribbean; Star Trek: First Contact, and Mission: Impossible, weighed in on the limitations of CG back then and how far it’s come in the last quarter century. (Knoll may also be known in the IT world for his role in the creation of Photoshop, which he developed with his brother Thomas.)
Excerpts from that interview follow:
Tell me about your first encounter with Tron.
I saw Tron when it came out and thought it was really cool—something unique and different that hadn’t been seen in the cinema before. I was really captivated by the imagery. I was working in visual effects at the time as a model maker, and then as a cameraman, and computer graphics was something I thought was really fascinating. But Tron and The Last Starfighter were two things that definitely got me thinking in those lines.
When did you become involved in computer graphics?
I was hired at ILM as a motion control camera assistant, working as a camera operator for awhile before I moved over to the computer graphics department. Part of it was just convenience: ILM was the first place I’d ever worked at that had a computer graphics department, so there was the opportunity to go over and visit.
Was ILM cutting-edge at the time, by having such a department?
None of the other big visual effects places like Apogee or Boss or Dreamquest, none of those places had computer graphics departments. There were other computer graphics companies, but not in Hollywood.
Tron was unique in that it not only used computers, but was also about computers; it was very transparent in what it was trying to do. Why do you think they used that approach?
The type of imagery that was possible to create at the time was very clearly computer generated; it wasn’t going to fool anybody into thinking it was live action. That was a limitation of the technology that worked very well within the story, that fit right in and made a lot of sense: if you’re telling a story about events taking place inside a computer, inside a big virtual environment, what techniques should you use? Parts of the film were done by shooting live action then doing rotoscope and other optical techniques over the top of it, but the stuff that really looked cool and stood out was the stuff that was computer generated.
What was the perception of computers’ roles and their future in Hollywood 25 years ago?
There were a lot of people who were watching it. I had a friend who would get the SIGGRAPH film and video show tapes. I borrowed a bunch of them from him and was really intrigued by the imagery—some of it was mind-bending. I thought, ‘This is related to what I do; someday this is going to have an influence on visual effects.’ We were watching it very closely.
Did Tron vindicate the use of computer graphics and influence the direction ILM was taking?
I think it was an appropriate use of computer graphics at the time—that they probably couldn’t have reached a whole lot further than they did at the time. It opened everyone’s eyes to something they should be watching because it had a lot of potential.
Yet despite the film’s brilliance, it was a box office flop. Why was that?
I’m sure it’s not because of the technology involved. I don’t know—maybe the story didn’t grab people, or they felt like it was too juvenile. I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t technique-related.
Was there a tipping point for computer graphics, both for general audiences and for actors?
I think people just got used to it. When computer graphics was a very new technique, I think a lot of people didn’t know what to make of it, and as it’s become more and more ubiquitous and the quality has gone up, I think it’s inspired less fear.
For example, I had a very fruitful and friendly relationship with Bill Nighy [who plays Davy Jones] on the Pirates pictures because we were both contributing our best to the creation of a character. He was very much the author of the performance and so he didn’t feel he was a cog in the machine, or that his artistic contribution would then somehow be adulterated by a bunch of computer graphics geeks. We understood what he was doing and tried to preserve it to the best extent possible. I think when actors see those kinds of relationships and collaborations working, they see it as a creative possibility as opposed to something that’s destroying the craft of filmmaking and storytelling.
Genius is rarely recognized in its day. What films like Tron may not have been box office successes, yet were pioneers in their field?
Young Sherlock Holmes, for me, had a big impact. The stained-glass man in Young Sherlock Holmes, I thought, was amazing. I was super-impressed by that, yet the film got very little attention.
The last five years or so there has been renaissance around Tron: a Tron 2.0 computer game, a Tron level in the Kingdom Hearts video game, a 20th anniversary DVD set. To what do you attribute the staying power of the franchise?
I think it was really different. It was something new and different, and there were a lot of things that were really cool about it: the imagery, the design. Given the lack of sophistication of some of the tools they had to work with, there was a very clever design done to work within the capabilities. The Light Cycles, and the Tanks, and the Recognizers and all that stuff were very clever designs. They’re super-minimal and there were really great art direction choices made about color and camera angles. I thought the Wendy Carlos music was really memorable. All those things leave a lasting impression.
The movie came out at the same time as the arcade game, and whereas the movie was not a financial success, the game was. Do you think a Tron movie could succeed nowadays?
I don’t know! Whatever made it not successful in the first place would probably still be present in a remake, if they went with the same story. The fundamental plot devices are anachronistic now, so it’d need to be updated to be Internet-aware, with much less emphasis on mainframe computers and a much higher emphasis on personal computers and small portable devices. You could go in the Matrix direction where some aspect of his personality is transferred over into the computer and they’re linked in a way.
Was your involvement in computer graphics tied to your role in Photoshop, or vice versa?
It was sort of happening at the same time. The way I’ve patterned my whole career is by starting with hobbies. When I was a kid, I had a whole series of hobbies, and one of them was model-making. I got my first job in the industry as a modelmaker, because it was a skill I could demonstrate. As soon as you’re doing your hobby as a profession, it kind of kills it as a hobby, and so it’s time for a new hobby. I was going to school at the time and started taking more interest in camerawork. Most of the models I was doing stage support for were built and shot at the time on motion-control systems, so I took up an interest in motion control. I started [putting] together my own motion control system as a hobby project, and then I got hired at ILM doing motion control and it was time for a new hobby. I took up computer graphics as a hobby and started writing a ray-tracing program. That led to the interest in computer graphics, and Photoshop came of that at the same time.
Do you still create your own computer graphics software, or is the industry standardized?
That’s one of the things that’s really fun about ILM: we have a big R&D staff. We will use off-the-shelf tools…, but we’re frequently asked to do things that are on the cutting edge, that are new, that you can’t do with existing tools. That’s why people come to us in the first place. I love working at a place where we’re constantly asked to do something new and different and that’s beyond the capabilities of what you can do with off-the-shelf software.
What’s an example of something ILM can do that off-the-shelf software can’t?
It’s a year-and-a-half old now, but the iMoCap system we used on Pirates 2 and Pirates 3 is an on-site motion capture that was something there was no commercial solution for. It was to solve a particular production problem and get a level of quality we didn’t think we could attain otherwise. We got together with the R&D department and said, ‘Here are the constraints on our problem—what solution can we come up with?’
What off-the-shelf packages does ILM use?
We use Shake for compositing, Renderman for rendering, Maya
for a whole variety of things—skeletal animation, particle systems.
Twenty-five years ago, the collaboration between live action and computer animation was innovative. Today, Pixar is making films that are wholly computer-generated; on the other end of the spectrum, Indiana Jones is going back to its roots with stunt doubles and traditional special effects. Are live action and computer graphics merging or splitting? Will one replace the other?
Oh, no—there’s good complementary tools. Any new technology goes through a fad phase; gradually, as the technology matures and people become facile and used to the process, it becomes an accepted creative tool when used appropriately. We’re starting to get to that—it’s a gradual process, but we’re settling on less gimmicky stuff. One of the analogies I like to use is, when the Macintosh first came out, suddenly you could put twelve different fonts in a letter—and people would! Just because you had this new freedom, it was horribly abused. The novelty started wearing off, and it started being used tastefully. Over the last few years, I’ve seen a number of cases where people have tried really interesting, different photographic looks for movies. Some of these have gone overboard, about 50 percent too far. It’s the same thing where it’s kind of a fad: ‘Look at all this power! I can do this with the movie!’ As people get more used to having this kind of control, it’s going to settle down into a more tasteful use and will just be a tool like anything else, and you won’t see the extreme fringes quite as much.
How long until we reach that point?
I keep predicting that we’re sort of here now, then I still see examples of overuse or abuse. I think we’re close, if we’re not there.
Is there anything that CGI can’t be used for yet?
There’re things that it can’t be used for well yet. There’re loads and loads of room for improvement. It can’t be used well on low-budget productions; it’s still kind of expensive and time-consuming to do. One of the directions that computer graphics is heading is that it’s gradually going to become easier and easier to do and that should drive costs down just because you’ll be able to do it quicker on faster machines. The stuff that’s mid-level expensive now will hopefully be cheaper and easier to do in the not-too-distant future so tools won’t be out of the hands of lower-budget filmmakers.
; editing professionals will be able to get an idea of what’s to come with Furnace for Final Cut Pro; and those looking to enhance their OFX-compatible DI and compositing solutions will get a good look at the new Furnace 4 for OFX collection.
Diary