Behind the chase scenes, light walls and that splitting police car in ‘TRON: Ares’. An extract from issue #44 of the magazine.
In the real world of TRON: Ares, Eve Kim (Greta Lee), the chief executive officer of ENCOM, is chased while riding a motorbike by Dillinger programs Ares and Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) on light cycles. Here we get the first glimpse of light walls when one splits a police car. Eve eventually manages to hijack the light cycle belonging to Athena, and a chase continues along the city streets. The action was filmed over many nights in Vancouver. Camera-ready light cycles were built by the special effects department to use for actors sitting on them, and for reference and scanning by the VFX teams.
“When you’re talking about making a TRON movie based in the real world, the number one thing on your list of what you have to do is have a light cycle chase in city streets,” suggests production visual effects supervisor David Seager. “We then strategized how to shoot the scene as practically as possible, using these proxy bikes on location. What we also shot were bluescreen or LED wall scenes with the actors on the hero light cycles for close reaction shots, and there were also a number of all-CG shots in there. But the vast majority of them were all for real over weeks of night shoots in Vancouver.”
The picture light cycles were built on a steel base with an aluminum frame and then clad with 3D printed parts that were coated in automotive paint finishes. “The light cycle base and substructure was fit with electric motors so the whole bike could tilt 40 degrees each direction which was also linked to the front wheel turning and the back shell tilting an additional 10 degrees,” explains special effects supervisor Cameron Waldbauer. “This movement could be programmed or run on the fly with a joystick. The light cycle was then mounted on various frames that would be towed by vehicles with cameras mounted to it. Most of the slow speed movement and accelerations from a standing stop were done this way.”
“For instance,” continues Waldbauer, “when Ares and Athena drove out of the transfer bay they were on a rig. During that sequence the bike transitioned from ‘High Mode’ to ‘Low Mode’. To do this, we had a set of proxy handlebars that would make the vertical movement for the performer. VFX then replaced the proxy bars with the picture bars to complete the movement. When Eve rode the light cycle up the car park and was being chased by Athena, that was her on the proxy light cycle on a trailer being towed by a tow vehicle.”
To depict the light cycles zooming through the streets, production filmed with electric Harley Davidson motorcycles as proxies, ridden by stunt performers. They were fitted with light banks and neon tubes that would serve as interactive light on the road surface and other vehicles. ILM would later replace the proxies with CG light cycles.
During filming in Vancouver, a data acquisition team utilized LiDAR and photography to survey locations. “They’d do things like go out into the middle of the street every 50 feet and do a LiDAR scan and plant the camera for a full 360 HDRi,” says Seager. “I think we have scanned almost half of Vancouver at this point! Then, we also had an array car that was built which we called the ‘Beast’. It was built on a Hummer chassis and it was massive and very loud. The real challenge was that it had to be low because that was the height of our riders. A lot of the array cars where you can mount on a roof, those weren’t low enough. The camera needed to be 18 inches off the road, so it needed to get really low. Half our camera array was on the front bumper and half was on the back. We also wanted to get up angles and not just flat coverage, and we had needs for different heights for different vehicles, so we had a multi-deck scenario going on via an adjustable rig that was made for it.”
Aerial views made use of helicopter plates and helicopter array shooting (which also came into play when the Super Recognizer later emerges over the city). ILM would ultimately re-create and supplement Vancouver for city views. “The director wanted more of an expansive view of the high risers, so we needed to make it feel bigger,” says Seager. “Our city build had to both accommodate those aerial scenes as well as the street level scenes.”
When it came time to build the CG light cycles, ILM matched the practical build, which had included a number of ‘real-world’ aspects such as panels and screws. “Our asset team further enhanced this by developing a wet shader and designing the gyro engine,” details ILM visual effects supervisor Vincent Papaix. “The process began with tracking the stunt bikes using digi-scans. The animation team, led by Michael Beaulieu and Jonathan Macintosh, faced the difficult task of animating the light cycles, occasionally overriding the stunt bikes’ performance for more dramatic effects.”
“A significant challenge arose from the light cycle’s width and the fact that its body concealed the wheels,” remarks Papaix. “Despite having good ground contact, they often appeared to float above the road. David Seager came up with an excellent solution: adding a dotted pattern to the wheels and meticulously registering the fluctuations of this pattern on the ground. This significantly helped anchor the light cycles to the tarmac.”
While chasing Eve, the Dillinger programs use a light wall emanating from a light cycle to take down a police car that has joined the pursuit, splitting it in half. ILM’s first challenge here was the look of the light wall itself, which would also be seen in later confrontations in the city and inside Dillinger’s Grid.
“The light walls were an area where we wanted to really feel like there was a lineage with TRON: Legacy,” states Seager. “We went with the palette of Dillinger, that kind of golden red, orange, yellow color, very keeping in with the warm palettes of Dillinger equipment. One tricky aspect was that with something that had those hot edges and then a clear center that was refractive and reflective, we found it could go very glassy very quickly. It’s easy for glass to somehow feel too brittle and weak, so a lot of the look development was about the refraction and reflection and dialing all that in.”
“We also introduced something for when things impacted the wall,” adds Seager. “The first time we did it, we just had something hit the wall. When something’s clear or glowy, there’s not a lot of shadow cast and you can do some reflection, but not much. So, we found we were just missing the contact. There were times—there was a shot in one of the original trailers, it didn’t make it into the final movie, where a car ran into the light wall and we wanted that punctuation of impact. And so then we started to explore this idea of almost like a ripple or an energy disturbance in the wall that happens when things impact it. It really helped to sell what was happening.”
“Our concept defined the light walls as indestructible glass emitting a powerful orange energy glow,” notes Papaix. “Brent Elliott, our look development supervisor, meticulously refined the light wall to achieve photorealism. The process began by applying accurate IOR (index of refraction) to the glass for realistic refraction. Next, we incorporated the orange energy as an emissive light, creating dynamic interactions with surrounding objects. In static shots featuring the active light wall, we introduced subtle heat distortion to amplify its powerful effect. Crucially, to ensure seamless integration, we created digital twins of surrounding elements like cars, benches and trees. This interactive component immediately made the light wall feel integrated into the environment.”
The first light wall hits the police car, splitting down the middle of the vehicle that is occupied by two officers, and sending its two halves into separate directions. Incredibly, the splitting of the police car was orchestrated practically on set on a bridge in Vancouver by the special effects team. “We took a functional vehicle and pulled the mechanics out of it,” describes Waldbauer. “We then welded a frame under the vehicle that we could use to align the two sides of the car when it traveled down the road in one piece. We then cut down the length of the car to split it into two and held it together with the subframe we installed.”
“The two halves had independent steering systems installed so each half could be steered independently,” adds Waldbauer. “One steering wheel was the master that steered the car while it was connected and the second one was the slave that only took control of its half when the car disconnected. Once on the bridge we pulled the two halves of the car with a tow vehicle and then disconnected them by opening latches that were holding the car together. The halves were then steered away from each other and crashed into the sides of the bridge.”
ILM enhanced the moment with sparks and CG pieces of the vehicle and engine falling out, even including some fast food wrappers. “We also had the red hot edges of the car to add in where the light wall had gone through,” notes Seager. “Interestingly enough, when we first started, the wheel of the light cycle was not as tall as the cop car, but we needed the light wall to be taller than the cop car. So you’ll actually see that we built in this roostertail to the light wall so that it would go up over the top of the police car.”
“Finally,” adds Seager, “we had a corresponding bluescreen shoot where we took that same car and second unit had it on a rig with the police officer actors that could be filmed in a more controlled fashion to separate them. This was for a shot inside the car to show one side of it pulling away with the light wall in between. That was a case where the car camera array came in handy for us in terms of what’s outside the car.”
Towards the end of the light cycle chase, two of the cycles crash through a waste facility. This was achieved during shooting by placing proxy light cycles on a dolly with bogey wheels that would capture the guide rails of a ‘roller coaster’ track set up by SFX. “These bikes were camera ready bikes with 90% of the lighting of the bike built into it,” details Waldbauer. “The bikes were fitted with pick points to allow us to safely attach riders to them for the gag. The bikes were then accelerated down the 200 foot track for the first 40 feet with a rope attached to a pneumatic ram that got them up to a speed of approximately 50 km/hr.”
“They then traveled down the track under their own momentum through preset bails of paper recycling until they came to the end of the track where we decelerated them over a 15 foot distance with the use of magnetic decelerators. When the bikes passed through the paper bails we hid air cannons inside the adjacent bails to blast paper out as though the bikes had hit actual bails. The cannons were triggered with limit switches installed on the track which were set during testing so the timing was good enough for slow motion photography.”
A view looking towards the bails involved some clean-up work on the rails and roadway by OPSIS, with the final shots of the light cycles shown coming through the bails a mix of practical photography and recycling waste simulation done by ILM. Says Seager: “It was always about, let’s shoot as much as we can practically, but the team at ILM did an incredible amount of rotoscoping and then matching the actual paper on set with the sims to be able to blend it altogether.”
