Production
Because of the many special effects, Disney decided in 1981 to film Tron predominantly in the Super Panavision format, with real world scenes filmed in 65mm color and the electronic world scenes in 65mm black-and-white to later be colorized appropriately. Computer-generated and composited layers were shot in VistaVision and few other shots were filmed in anamorphic 35mm and full aperture 35mm, all of which were subsequently "blown up" to 65 mm. The film would be projected on 70mm prints in its original 2.20:1 aspect ratio, while 35mm prints were anamorphically reduced and cropped to a 2.40:1 composition.
Three designers were brought in to create the look of the computer world. French comic book artist Jean Giraud (also known as Mœbius) was the main set and costume designer for the film. Most of the vehicle designs (including Sark's aircraft carrier, the light cycles, the tank, and the solar sailer) were created by industrial designer Syd Mead. Peter Lloyd, a high-tech commercial artist, designed the environments. Nevertheless, these jobs often overlapped, leaving Giraud working on the solar sailer and Mead designing terrain, sets and the film's logo. The original 'Program' character design was inspired by Lisberger Studios' logo of a glowing bodybuilder hurling two discs.
To create the computer animation sequences of Tron, Disney turned to the four leading computer graphics firms of the day: Information International, Inc. of Culver City, California, who owned the Super Foonly F-1 (the fastest PDP-10 ever made and the only one of its kind); MAGI of Elmsford, New York; Robert Abel and Associates of California; and Digital Effects of New York City. Bill Kovacs worked on the film while working for Robert Abel before going on to found Wavefront Technologies. The work was not a collaboration, resulting in very different styles used by the firms.
Tron was one of the first films to make extensive use of any form of computer animation, and it is celebrated as a milestone in the industry, although only fifteen to twenty minutes of such animation were used (mostly scenes that show digital "terrain" or patterns, or include vehicles such as light-cycles, tanks and ships). Because the technology to combine computer animation and live action did not exist at the time, these sequences were interspersed with the filmed characters. One of the computers used had only 2 MB of memory and no more than 330 MB of storage. This put a limit on detail of background; and at a certain distance, they had a procedure of mixing in black to fade things out, a process called "depth cueing". The film's Computer Effects Supervisor Richard Taylor told them "When in doubt, black it out!", which became their motto. Originally the film was meant to use white backgrounds like in THX 1138 inside the Grid, but it would require such huge amounts of lights that it was decided to use black backgrounds instead.
The computers used at the time could not perform animation, so the frames had to be produced one by one. In some of the more complex sequences, like the Solar Sailer moving through metal canyons, each frame could take up to six hours to produce. There was no way to digitally print them on film, either; rather, a motion picture camera was placed in front of a computer screen to capture each individual frame.
Most of the scenes, backgrounds, and visual effects in the film were created using more traditional techniques and a unique process known as "backlit animation". In this process, live-action scenes inside the computer world were filmed in black-and-white on an entirely black set, placed in an enlarger for blow-ups and transferred to large format Kodalith high-contrast film. These negatives were then used to make Kodalith sheets with a reverse (positive) image. Clear cels were laid over each sheet and all portions of the figure except the areas that were exposed for the later camera passes were manually blacked out. Next the Kodalith sheets and cel overlays were placed over a light box while a VistaVision camera mounted above it made separate passes and different color filters. A typical shot normally required 12 passes, but some sequences, like the interior of the electronic tank, could need as many as 50 passes. About 300 matte paintings were made for the film, each photographed onto a large piece of Ektachrome film before colors were added by gelatin filters in a similar procedure as in the Kodaliths. The mattes, rotoscopic and CGI were then combined and composed together to give them a "technological" appearance. With multiple layers of high-contrast, large format positives and negatives, this process required truckloads of sheet film and a workload even greater than that of a conventional cel-animated feature. The Kodalith was specially produced as large sheets by Kodak for the film and came in numbered boxes so that each batch of the film could be used in order of manufacture for a consistent image. However, this was not understood by the filmmakers and, as a result, glowing outlines and circuit traces occasionally flicker as the film speed varied between batches. After the reason was discovered, this was no longer a problem as the batches were used in order and "zinger" sounds were used during the flickering parts to represent the computer world malfunctioning as Lisberger described it. Lisberger later had these flickers and sounds digitally corrected for the 2011 restored Blu-ray release as they were not included in his original vision of the film. Due to its difficulty and cost, this process of back-lit animation was not repeated for another feature film.
Sound design and creation for the film was assigned to Frank Serafine, who was responsible for the sound design on Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979. "There were over 750 units [separate tape segments] in the picture," said Serafine. He created all the sound effects in the movie exclusively by synthesizers and similar electronic devices.
At one point in the film, a small entity called "Bit" advises Flynn with only the words "yes" and "no" created by a Votrax speech synthesizer.
BYTE wrote: "Although this film is very much the personal expression of Steven Lisberger's vision, nevertheless [it] has certainly been a group effort". More than 569 people were involved in the post-production work, including 200 inkers and hand-painters, 85 of them from Taiwan's Cuckoo's Nest Studio. Unusual for an English-language production, in the end credits the Taiwanese personnel were listed with their names written in Chinese characters.
This film features parts of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; the multi-story ENCOM laser bay was the target area for the SHIVA solid-state multi-beamed laser. Also, the stairway that Alan, Lora, and Flynn use to reach Alan's office is the stairway in Building 451 near the entrance to the main machine room. The cubicle scenes were shot in another room of the lab. At the time, Tron was the only film to have scenes filmed inside this lab.
The original script called for "good" programs to be colored yellow and "evil" programs (those loyal to Sark and the MCP) to be colored blue. Partway into production, this coloring scheme was changed to blue for good and red for evil, but some scenes were produced using the original coloring scheme: Clu, who drives a tank, has yellow circuit lines, and all of Sark's tank commanders are blue (but appear green in some presentations). Also, the light-cycle sequence shows the heroes driving yellow (Flynn), orange (Tron), and red (Ram) cycles, while Sark's troops drive blue cycles; similarly, Clu's tank is red, while tanks driven by crews loyal to Sark are blue.
Because of all the personal information about citizens which exist inside computer networks, such as social security number and driver's license, the idea was that each real world person has a digital counterpart inside the Grid based on information about them, which is why it was decided to use some of the same actors in both worlds.
Budgeting the production was difficult by reason of breaking new ground in response to additional challenges, including an impending Directors Guild of America strike and a fixed release date. Disney predicted at least $400 million in domestic sales of merchandise, including an arcade game by Bally Midway and three Mattel Intellivision home video games.
The producers also added Easter eggs: during the scene where Tron and Ram escape from the Light Cycle arena into the system, Pac-Man can be seen behind Sark (with the corresponding sounds from the Pac-Man arcade game being heard in the background), while a "Hidden Mickey" outline (located at time 01:12:29 on the re-release Blu-ray) can be seen below the solar sailer during the protagonists' journey. The film set also included the arcade games Space Invaders (1978), Asteroids (1979) and Pac-Man (1980).
Tron was originally meant to be released during the Christmas season of 1982, but when chairman of the Disney board Card Walker found out the release date of Don Bluth's film The Secret of NIMH was in early July, he rushed it into a summer release to be able to compete with Bluth, and it ended up competing with films like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Blade Runner and Poltergeist.
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