TRON Opening Titles
November 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.
The Output
–– 01Opening Titles Overview
–– 02
The GFX team was deep in production on the epic Solar Sailor sequence when Joseph Kosinski awarded them the Opening Titles, enabling the opportunity of a lifetime coupled with a steady stream of intensely late evenings.
Joseph communicated the motivation of the opening titles as evoking the sensations of the original light bike battle while slowly evolving the iconic light-walls into more complex patterns in all dimensions, ultimately revealing a city wireframe that transitioned seamlessly to the Vancouver BC skyline.
Joseph communicated the motivation of the opening titles as evoking the sensations of the original light bike battle while slowly evolving the iconic light-walls into more complex patterns in all dimensions, ultimately revealing a city wireframe that transitioned seamlessly to the Vancouver BC skyline.
Design Process
–– 03The creation of the Opening Titles had munkowitz designing out the line work in Illustrator, then adding Z travel reliefs in Maya, and handing them over to master animator David Lewandowski to flex his Cinema4D muscle, bringing to life each path by hand using the mograph module and rendering using vray. The two exchanged scenes back and forth to ensure a design that adhered to a strict grid framework and a animation motif that perfectly synced to Flynn's voiceover during the sequence.
Many iterations of detailing techniques were explored, including a very intriguing 3D grid structure designed by Jake Sargeant in addition to a blanket of data point clouds, but in the end Kosinski kept the design clean and simple for fears that an overly detailed sequence would date easily.
Many iterations of detailing techniques were explored, including a very intriguing 3D grid structure designed by Jake Sargeant in addition to a blanket of data point clouds, but in the end Kosinski kept the design clean and simple for fears that an overly detailed sequence would date easily.
Architecture 101
–– 04Director Joseph Kosinski, with his Architecture degree from Columbia University, entrusted the GFX team ( and mostly Lewandowski ) to design all the graphic buildings from the ground up, having them reference the skyline of Vancouver but mostly innovating and designing from scratch. A terrifying proposition that miraculously came under very few revision cycles.
Food for Thought
–– 05Certainly would've been visually intriguing to put the camera at street level looking down the passageway of an emerging city, as the line work and graphic elements would have taken an immensely different aesthetic, mostly for beneficial results.
TRON Opening Titles Credit List
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, David Lewandowski
Graphics Designer: Jake Sargeant
Graphics Lead Animator: David Lewandowski
Graphics Compositor: Jake Maymudes
TRON: Legacy © Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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, David Lewandowski
Graphics Designer: Jake Sargeant
Graphics Lead Animator: David Lewandowski
Graphics Compositor: Jake Maymudes
TRON: Legacy © Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.