TRON Fireworks

July 2010 ––

For the entirety of 2010, munkowitz led a Black-Ops team of GFX All-Stars deep into the darkness at Digital Domain crafting over 12 minutes of holographic content for the feature film TRON: Legacy Copyright Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

During the infamous Light Bike battle, the arrival of Clu is accompanied by a grandiose fireworks display designed and animated by the team. The brief from Kosinski was to pay homage to states of 'Bit' from the original film, so each firework had to have a defined geometric structure from which the branching streams of light would emanate from.

The team built an open-frameworks application with Mr. Josh Nimoy that would load OBJ data, allowing the team to define the 3d structure from the outset and then enhance the base shape with a generation-based network of fireworks streamers and subsequent expansion.

For the deliverables, munkowitz created a library of 14 firework designs, the makeup of each saved out as slider favorite XML files and passed onward to the Houdini team, who successfully ported the app and were able to render it through the DD pipeline, adding atmospherics, light effects, and those sweet and final optical touches.

Fireworks Credit List

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Director: Joseph Kosinski
Production Facility: Digital Domain
Executive Producer: Lisa Beroud
VFX Supervisor: Eric Barba
Graphics Design Director: Bradley G Munkowitz
Graphics Lead Designers: Bradley G Munkowitz, Josh Nimoy
Graphics Houdini Artist: Andy King
Code Artist: Josh Nimoy

TRON: Legacy © Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.