Tron is a wicked film. Forget the slightly shonky sequel, or that Strokes video which straight-up steals the unique visual style, the original Tron is the bomb. It's crazily ahead of its time, too, both in its taking computer technology and video games seriously enough to base a whole film around them (in 1982, no less), and by representing that setting with a look that has never been replicated, and rarely bettered. Again, this is 1982. Now, computer graphics certainly existed back then, but they weren't the norm as they are in the modern Hollywood blockbuster mainly because it would have looked, like, an Atari 2600 level of realistic. Which is to say, no very. So how did they do it with Tron? How did they give pretty much this entire film the weird, surreal visual style where everybody is grey-skinned and white-suited, the landscapes are black blocks, and everything is highlighted with the circuit board-like glow of electricity? Not with computers, as we say. So, obviously, the next logical method is to hand paint every individual frame of the film in post-production. They took each frame, blew it up to the size of a animation cell, and painted in all that detail. After filming the entire movie in black and white. Can we just highlight how bonkers that is? When Richard Linklater insisted his adaptation of Phillip K Dick's predictably druggy sci-fi A Scanner Darkly be rotoscoped, it took bloody ages, but at least the people doing it could use computers to paint over the film. The people who made Tron had to hand paint every frame. Tron isn't a particularly long film just shy of 75 minutes but if you go by the going rate of films running at 24 frames per second, that's around 108,000 individual cells. A two-minute reel of test footage took two months to produce. Which is probably why they shipped the rest of the work off to 85 poor suckers in Taiwan (although, in the end, more than 569 people were involved in the post-production work). At least it paid off...?
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
