TRON Throne Room

August 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.

Sequence Overview

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During the Rectifier Extraction sequence, Clu gets his dirty hands on Flynn’s disc and attempts to extract all its vital data, unlocking the secrets of the TRON universe while powering up his army with extra special sauce, all of which would enable Clu to escape the computer world and to ultimately take over that planet earth place.

The team's task was to visually represent the immense amounts of information being extracted, first as a chaotic assemblage, then organizing the packets into concentric rings of decoded data as the camera gracefully pushes through them.

Design Process

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The team researched disc defragmentation diagrams and sought to greatly modernize the aesthetic, for the data required to create of the TRON universe was immense to say the least, requiring the defrag diagram to look like an other-worldly representation of data re-structuring.

So munkowitz and Jake Sargeant established a visual foundation, first designing a holographic representation of Flynn's identiftying boot-up hologram, which is then unlocked and dissipates bit by bit to initiate the data restructuring, which grows in complexity as each ensuing sector is filled with digital content.

Master Lewandowski

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Master David Lewandowski, the team's lead animator and best-looking member, then took the styleframed design foundation and elevated it to the next level and beyond, flexing his immensely insane C4D muscle to render a series of ridiculously detailed defragmentation simulations, pushing the limits of his C4D skillset while exceeding everyone's expectations for how visually stunning the sequence would become.

A fantastic breakdown of his animation process can be found on his site dlew.me

Sam's Disc Hologram

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Another component of the sequence is when Clu takes Sam's disc and views it's contents via a holographic video player. Maya particle systems formed the foundation and container for the video content, which was rendered using an Open-Frameworks Pixelation app written by code artist Keith Pasko.

Image Mapped Explosion

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An image sequence was fed into the app, which enabled controls for explosion rate, distance, resolution and breakup grid size. Multiple renders were composited together, graded and output to 3d to be integrated into the shots.

Throneship Window Pane

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The team also designed the uber-minimalistic Throneship glass, which certainly could have been much more detailed and balls out starTrek'ked, but seems like that notion lost steam when each subsequent iteration continued to be simplified.

Rectifier Extraction 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, Jake Sargeant, David Lewandowski
Graphics Lead Animator: David Lewandowski
Graphics Houdini Artist: Adam Swaab
Graphics Lead Compositor: Sonja Burchard


Sam's Disc Hologram Credit List

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Production Facility: Digital Domain
Executive Producer: Lisa Beroud
VFX Supervisor: Eric Barba
Graphics Design Director: Bradley G Munkowitz
Graphics Lead Designer: Bradley G Munkowitz
Graphics Lead Animators: Bradley G Munkowitz, Dylan Nathan
Graphics Lead Compositor: Bradley G Munkowitz
Graphics Code Artist: Keith Pasko


Throneship Glass Credit List

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Production Facility: Digital Domain
Executive Producer: Lisa Beroud
VFX Supervisor: Eric Barba
Graphics Design Director: Bradley G Munkowitz
Graphics Lead Designer: Bradley G Munkowitz
Graphics Lead Animators: David Lewandowski, Dylan Nathan
TRON: Legacy © Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.