Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Tron's second life in video games

Now I think it's pretty much a futility in secrecy to pretend there's no sequel to Tron coming your way. I posted a video of the trailer there, along several remarks.

Now is just a good opportunity to link to this nice "sum up" article from Gameroom magazine, titled TRON: Coin-op Classic ... Box-office Bomb!

A small extract:

[Many] people are not aware that this colorful film was mostly shot in black & white. The 53 minutes of effects footage was filmed with a rarely used high-quality 65mm black & white film format. Each frame was then enlarged and printed on 16" x 20" Kodaliths. To understand the enormity and scope of this, each of these 76,320 frames had to then be re-photographed under a traditional back-lit animation process. This technique required each Kodalith to be lit from behind and photographed with colored lenses/filters, producing the spectacular 'glowing' effect. Most frames passed in front of the camera 12-15 times, with complicated shots 40-50 times! The estimated $4-5 million production figure was quickly bumped up to $10-12 million by Disney execs, finally costing the studio $20 million to produce.

[...]

TRON fell face first at the box office bringing in around $30 million by summer's end. In retrospect, the hype may have actually worked against the movie, for how often can a film live up to such unrealistic expectations? Some filmgoers (mostly kids) found it eternally magical, while others utterly forgettable. What remains irrefutable is the fact that TRON was indeed a visual masterpiece, forever changing the face of the film industry with its groundbreaking use of computer generated imagery.

Regardless of the film's performance, TRON was a success in the arcades.

Go read the rest at the other end of the link, User.

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