Tron Legacy (2010)

http://jtnimoy.net/?q=178&utm_source=buffer&buffer_share=254f1

by rsingla • 14 years ago

657 143 14 years ago

jtnimoy.net

this is courtesy of Hilary Mason's twitter feed, @hmason.

clicks2• 14 years ago

Interesting read, nice to see a movie making this kind of effort.

On a side note: I watched this movie on a streaming site... (i.e., I watched it in poor quality).

That was a bad choice.

The plot, storyline, and dialogue is kind of weak. The visuals certainly are not. Watch this in high-res quality, and think of it as an over-budgeted Daft Punk music video instead of a movie, and you'll have a great time watching it.

greyfade• 14 years ago

This, I think, is what Daft Punk was born for.

entropie• 14 years ago

This is so true. I know that band since i was 14. Homework from Daft Punk was absolutely great.

But... This soundtrack, fits so perfect, and i still listen often to it while chilling or coding. So. Awesome.

arethuza2• 14 years ago

The Tron Legacy now turns up in lots of other places - e.g. the Top Gear Mini vs. Amy Williams race:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzxS-3vO6Gw

jlgreco3• 14 years ago

I think in this way it was a perfect successor to the original. Beautiful impressive visuals (each for their time, remember) with a 'cyberpunk-lite' plot to provide a reason for those visuals.

As far as cyberpunk in media that dare actually include cyberspace aspects (so for example, not Blade Runner), I think it stacks up pretty well. The Matrix 'cheats' by explicitly declaring that their cyberspace was built to seem real, and Johnny Mnemonic, rather bluntly, falls on it's face when trying to pull it off (I do love that movie though).

greggman3• 14 years ago

Maybe because I grew up with the original Tron but I found legacy in no way a perfect successor to the original.

Rather than spam HN here's why http://blog.greggman.com/blog/tronlegacy/

ihuman• 14 years ago

If you want to see another Daft Punk movie, I recommend checking out "Interstella 5555"

pizza• 14 years ago

They also made 2 more movies, "D.A.F.T.: A Story About Dogs, Androids, Firemen and Tomatoes" (1999) and "Electroma" (2007).

KVFinn2• 14 years ago

>think of it as an over-budgeted Daft Punk music video instead of a movie

Check out the Disney cartoon Tron Uprising -- it has a similar but different visual style, a dash of Aeon Flux, and gorgoeus sound deisgn that builds directly off the Daft Punk soundtrack. The story is okay too especially as it gets much darker towards the end of the season.

The show is 5 seconds from being cancelled but the first episode is still free on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjbwVzJR8w4

Rest on iTunes/Amazon/Xbox/whatever

lectrick• 14 years ago

aw, man. I just discovered this. Looks really cool.

taggart• 14 years ago

Sadly, it has been canceled. Disney will let the season play out, but no more episodes after this season.

sp332• 14 years ago

It seems like movies are going to some trouble to get "real" computing into movies. I mean, real computers aren't dramatic so they don't get much screen time, but still. Another recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4047807

FaisalAbid• 14 years ago

The text on this site hurts my eyes.

kapilkale• 14 years ago

It borders on unreadable. I feel like I'm in the first row of a movie theater.

joezydeco• 14 years ago

I arrived late to the opening of Tron:Legacy (+IMAX/3D) and had to sit in the front row. THAT was a hurt on the eyes. This, I can deal with.

peterjmag• 14 years ago

Agreed. I gave up a couple sentences in and had to run it through Readability to read it. Hairline fonts (Helvetica Neue Ultra Light, in this case) are not really intended for body copy.

Of course, the font choice is not the only thing that makes this practically illegible. It's too large, the leading's cramped, and it could probably use a max-width to prevent excessively long lines in larger viewports.

Fascinating article, though!

tripzilch• 14 years ago

I really like how most browsers have a very usable webdev tool, so I just changed the font, line-spacing and document width until it was good. I don't always go through that trouble, but ihn this case the page was simple enough and the content seemed worth it.

plorkyeran• 14 years ago

It was pretty obviously only tested on OS X: http://i.imgur.com/g1thFBk.png

The OS X rendering is ugly, but the windows rendering is unreadably thin.

mixmastamyk2• 14 years ago

In Firefox:

Alt+V, y, n

stbullard• 14 years ago

(2010)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404976 80 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3212825 0 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3107258 0 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3598197 0 comments

rsingla2• 14 years ago

Well that's embarrassing. Looks like I need to revamp my searching skills. I did do a search before posting, but evidently it was a poor one.

My bad!

ramayac• 14 years ago

Don't worry, I'm not reading HN articles from 2010, so it's a rediscovery for me when this events occur.

DigitalSea2• 14 years ago

If it makes you feel any better, this is the first time I've ever seen this before, so reposting isn't always a bad thing. Was an interesting read, love the effects in Tron and it's good to see some insight into it (especially those not on HN in 2010).

thechut• 14 years ago

I really enjoyed reading this an hadn't seen it before. I think that posting the date, like you did, should remove anybody's expectation that this was fresh content anyway. Regardless of previous posts on HN.

laureny• 14 years ago

> Well that's embarrassing. Looks like I need to revamp my searching skills.

Shouldn't be your job, the web site should take care of it.

Then again, Hacker News' code base looks like it hasn't been touched in six years.

vertis• 14 years ago

It's still awesome even if it is a couple of years old.

ed209• 14 years ago

I use Hacker News'd which is a pretty cool Chrome extension that tells you (and links to) HN submissions for any URL https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-newsd/njdnd...

pessimizer• 14 years ago

Just remove all of the weird cruft from the end of the query string, check to see if the link still works, and submit. HN will tell you if you've duplicated an old url.

Submitting "jtnimoy.net/?q=178" would have sent you to the original submission.

shawndumas• 14 years ago

posting the ones with comments is helpful; posting the others is not.

Xyzodiac• 14 years ago

I think it helps with the point, there's been a large influx of reposts lately.

kitsune_3• 14 years ago

I tried to pick up SideFX Houdini after this article was published the first time on here.

After a month I admitted total and utter failure.

Whoever came up with that program is a mad genius. It's absolutely mind blowing what you can achieve with procedural operators and networks.

It's somewhat similar in spirit to Cycling 74's MAX and other visual programming environments.

agumonkey2• 14 years ago

I wish this paradigm(*) was more mainstream, it open your minds and flip your view of computers.

The CmiVFX tutorials about building towns, nature.. anything procedurally were a long and dense brain rewiring. It's almost not about using Houdini, it's about solving a problem with generic functions.

Houdini earns a paradigm name as many things in Houdini are built in Houdini, which is .. well math with interfaces. At least back in 2005, the skeletal animation system component was a encapsulation of geometry primitives bound by some arithmetics, you could open and edit it as any other surface or object. Turtles all the way down. Beautiful. Reminds me of Emacs/Lisp actually, once inside, you won't leave.

TallGuyShort2• 14 years ago

In Tron and The Social Network it was very obvious that a real hacker had been involved in designing the terminal scenes. It makes a big difference to how seriously I take the rest of the movie - Kudos to them!

Andrex3• 14 years ago

I was also impressed with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (also by TSN's David Fincher), there was Ubuntu on Lisbeth's Macbook, SQL queries for searching through a crime database, and some other small touches. Really impressed with Fincher's commitment to detail even in the world of programming.

Cryode• 14 years ago

Ironically, Josh (the author) references The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when criticizing Hollywood's choice of using nmap almost ubiquitously.

buddy23• 14 years ago

Did you also watched the swedish (trilogy) version of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"? Can't remember which tools they used.

sopooneo• 14 years ago

Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, says that getting the technical details right ends up coming through even for those who don't know about the field. Somehow, it just reads better. They went to extraordinary lengths on the episode "Dead Freight" and I while I don't know anything about the stuff in that episode (no spoiler here) I agree. All the little touches add up and make it dramatically more engaging.

Click Episode 505 for relevant making-of podcast:http://www.amctv.com/shows/breaking-bad/insider-podcast-seas...

surrealize• 14 years ago

Ha, I cracked up when they said they had to repaint all the train cars because they were covered with graffiti. They didn't have a problem with the graffiti itself, the problem was that they couldn't get copyright clearances from all the graffiti artists!

pyrhho• 14 years ago

How does he use Emacs without Ctrl, or Alt?

edit: For that matter, how did he type "ps -ef | grep -i os12" with no "|" key?

jlgreco3• 14 years ago

Maybe his keyboard is modal, but we never see it change. ;)

fafner• 14 years ago

https://github.com/greboide/emacs-gestures

Ogre2• 14 years ago

Alt (assuming you actually mean Meta ;) is completely unnecessary for emacs. Meta-<Key> can always be produced by pressing ESC <Key>

I guess technically ctrl is also unnecessary since you could type out whole commands with M-x (ESC x command). It wouldn't be fun, but you could do it.

cmckay• 14 years ago

Although most keyboards nowadays use Alt for Meta, they were distinct keys on some older keyboards. I personally never used an MIT Lisp machine, but I have used Sun keyboards with a Meta key.

It's also fun to note that EMACS is an acronym for Escape Meta Alt Control Shift, which generally describes the experience of using it.

deltasquared3• 14 years ago

Also there is the totally useless capslock key, it could be mapped to meta just fine ^_^

See point 1 on Steve Yeggies's list of things to consider with emacs.

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs

esrauch• 14 years ago

He could have remapped the keys arbitrarily, and he also could have used unicode input methods to type | with more than one keystroke.

jcl• 14 years ago

http://emacswiki.org/emacs/FootSwitches :)

martinced2• 14 years ago

For what it is worth I use an "otaku" Happy Hacking KeyBoard Pro 2 (HHKB Pro 2) with "blank" black keys and I remapped | to HYPER+[ (and I'm of course using right alt as a "new" modifier, HYPER).

tl;dr: you can't never be sure how Emacs hacker have configured their keys/modifiers ; )

sergiotapia• 14 years ago

I always dreamed how much fun a job making these computer "GUI" scenes would be. You would go apeshit adding all sorts of dashboards and widgets and things that look pretty but not work.

See: CSI, NCIS, Bones, etc.

deltasquared3• 14 years ago

Why don't you have fun making functional dashboards that look like they belong in Hollywood?

brennenHN• 14 years ago

The emacs part is cool, but this article mostly just illustrated how little I understand about the effects in movies. Each thing he talked about making seemed simple, but then the effect in the movie was mindblowing and overwhelming. Great read (also, the font is so big and beautiful, love that).

laumars3• 14 years ago

I hate the font. It's practically unreadable in Chrome on Windows. Not eased by the fact that I'm dyslexic so struggle to follow a line of text anyway.

I really wish web developers stopped cocking about with type-faces. Most of the time they don't test it on other platforms, and nearly all of the time they don't consider the usability for people with either poorer eye site or other reading difficulties.

Quite frankly, I'm gutted and annoyed at this site because the content looks interesting but I can't read more than 2 lines of the fucking thing (thus ended up having to edit the CSS in Chromes inspect tool). Very annoying and completely necessary.

Torn• 14 years ago

If found the font pretty hard to read, being so big. Evernote Clearly made quick work of it: http://evernote.com/clearly/

laumars3• 14 years ago

Just tried Clearly and it worked brilliantly.

Thank you so much for the recommendation. I have a feeling it's going to be used heavily.

nicholassmith• 14 years ago

More importantly than emacs, design orientated people use wxWidgets? Frankly that's far more surprising!

draftable• 14 years ago

How can someone who is a designer choose such a poor font for their won website? Specially given that he is talking about designing text graphics

rschmitty• 14 years ago

I thought I was the only one who suddenly felt like I needed glasses. Very blurry/out of focus looking

sriramk• 14 years ago

I just discovered Alias and my wife and I have been watching episodes back to back. The show does a good job of making the contents of various displays legitimate. In one scene, the 'tech guy' (Marshall) has to build some source code - and I saw various familiar libtool/autoconf symbols scroll by.

daragh• 14 years ago

It's been years since I've seen it, but I remember a hilarious scene where Jack Bristow is talking to someone in an IM-like window; his choice of text is giant red Comic Sans and his messages are devoid of grammar and punctuation.

You could argue that this is typical of the average IM user in the early 2000s, but it seemed incongruous for the character.

mcescalante• 14 years ago

Question for any graphics programmers or CG people: As a graphics programmer, how appealing is the CG industry? Based on this, the picture I got was that a lot of the programming he did was driven by shortcomings in the preexisting CG software that artists in the field use.

I'm a Computer Engineering student interested in the field and I haven't entirely decided if I'm interested in the applications of graphics programming yet, although I don't have much to go on because I have limited graphics programming experience.

greggman3• 14 years ago

My personal opinion is, it depends (how's that for a cop-out)

My take is as follows. You can have a restaurant with just a chef. You can have a trading company with just a trader. You can have a tech company with just a program. And you have have a CG animation company with just an animation.

That means that at each of those types of companies, the rest of the people are support staff for the company's main line of work.

At a trading company everyone not a trader is support staff for the traders. At an animation company everyone is support staff for the animators. etc...

That's reflected in your position at the company.

Now for the "it depends" part. If it doesn't bother you to be support staff because the stuff you do you enjoy or because being part of the team of someone making that kind of entertainment is enough reward then fine.

There's also always exceptions. For example there are programmers who have advanced the state of the art of CG while at those companies (the hair in Monsters Ink, The water in The Perfect Storm, the crowds in Lord of the Rings) etc.. so if you fancy yourself someone who can advance that state of the art you might find that appealing. On the other hand I suspect it's getting harder and harder to have a big contribution there.

mixmastamyk2• 14 years ago

The work is tedious, the industry a sweatshop, but the final output awesome.

confluence• 14 years ago

If you start a shop or work there early on and you take off - it's about the same as any startup - big highs, big lows, big work, impressive product, big impact, big money.

If you work there after it becomes big - it's like working at any game dev shop for EA.

deltasquared3• 14 years ago

I wonder why he used eshell not term.

RexRollman2• 14 years ago

The article doesn't say but it has piqued my interest in it. Is eshell of any usefulness? Can it be used to create scripts?

taltman1• 14 years ago

You can think of Eshell as a Unix shell that is 100% customizable, and those customizations are done in a very high level language like Elisp, not in C. Sometimes it's great to use macros in a shell script.

Yes, it can be used for running scripts: https://github.com/emk/eshell/blob/master/em-script.el

josephriley• 14 years ago

I wish there was an OS for a tablet with this UI. I would be in heaven.

Andrex3• 14 years ago

Same, maybe someone can make a good Android skin, but I doubt it would have the commitment to detail the movie showed. I was thinking it would also be cool to have a table-computer like Dilinger Jr. was using (sort of like the original MS Surface), but then I wondered whether looking down all the time would be bad posture...

jonathanmoore• 14 years ago

From a slightly different perspective here are the detailed and technical case studies from the movie's VFX designer Bradley "GMUNK" Munkowitz:

- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Opening-Titles

- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Solar-Sailor

- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Rectifier-Globe

- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Throne-Room

- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Fireworks

- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Portal-Climax

- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Board-Room

- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Disc-Game

s_husso• 14 years ago

Thanks. I was wondering what tools they were using to create those effects (openframeworks, cinema4d).

atdrummond2• 14 years ago

Why does he have an issue with Jurassic Park? Lex was using fsn, which would have been available at the time for IRIX - although not used in any serious production environments that I'm aware of.

scott_karana• 14 years ago

I suspect it was more the "I know UNIX!" child hacking that threw him off. :)

newman314• 14 years ago

Exactly, I cringed at that scene.

SeppoErviala• 14 years ago

Maybe she hadn't used fsn ever but could tell from the file system structure that it was in fact a UNIX system. Then she concluded that she need to find the correct file - which is how UNIX does things.

I did find the scene ridiculous at the time but it was because I didn't know UNIX or fsn. Now I find it very plausible.

RexRollman2• 14 years ago

I think it would be interesting to see an open source OS for mobile touch devices that worked like that.

morefranco• 14 years ago

incredible. simply incredible.

rvivek• 14 years ago

This is pretty incredible stuff on the terminal. Aside, if you'd like to code up tron bots (AI), you can try them here: https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/tron

tobyjsullivan• 14 years ago

"So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep"

http://devopsreactions.tumblr.com/post/39827269109/when-one-...

Hehehe

ynniv2• 14 years ago

I'm horrible about remembering specialized commands, so I "ps | grep" all the time. Sometimes grep shows up in the output, sometimes it doesn't, and yet life goes on... :-)

adunk• 14 years ago

A few weeks ago I watched the pilot episode of Lewis, a British TV detective/crime drama that is set in the surroundings of Oxford university, UK. One of the characters in the episode was a PhD student in mathematics and the key to the mystery could be found in one of the papers for his PhD dissertation. The detectives found the paper in question on the character's computer and opened it up for the viewers to see. Lo and behold, the paper was clearly typeset in LaTeX. Someone apparently went out of their way to make this little detail look just right!

Maybe its just me, but it seems like movies are getting better and better in getting those tiny but ever so important technical details right.

transitionality• 14 years ago

It's probably cheaper to pay a PhD candidate to create realistic visuals than to pay a graphic designer to create bombastic claptrap.

jthomp• 14 years ago

Fascinating read.

martinced2• 14 years ago

Often when there's some coding stuff like a terminal inside movies, it's not only the programmers paying attention anymore. Very often because I'm the "computer guy" my entourage ask me: "Is it realistic?" or "Do you really use stuff like that?".

So it's not just to please "us" that they pay a little attention to being "correct". People like it when you answer "yes, we do this kind of stuff" and hate it when you say "no, it's complete utter rubbish bullshit". It's like if the movie creators where making fun of them by showing them bullshit and that they didn't like that.

In a way I care less than them: because I know when a movie is bullshitting me on a computer-related scene. Non programmers don't.

dbpatterson• 14 years ago

The problem is that if you notice that they are bullshitting you on computers, it makes you wonder how much other stuff is bullshit too, that you might not have the expertise to recognize.

defrost• 14 years ago

Most things - eg: practically every "destructive" explosion in a movie is BS - "real" explosions lack flames and tend to make objects (like cars) cease to exist.

mprovost2• 14 years ago

Programmers have entourages now?

thoughtpalette• 14 years ago

First thing I did was go into the Chrome inspector and change the font.

Wingman4l7• 14 years ago

For more of this sort of thing: http://www.reddit.com/r/FUI (that's short for Fantasy/Fake User Interface)

subsystem• 14 years ago

I'm always suprised by the inflexibility of window managers. I would imagine we should be able to have something similar to this by now.

antsam• 14 years ago

One more Tron movie please.

coob2• 14 years ago

Battle Royale used nmap before The Matrix trilogy did…

nathannecro• 14 years ago

Holy cripes, I cannot actually read the copy at all. It does look like an interesting read though.

Tron Legacy (2010)

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