

Tron Legacy (2010) - rsingla
http://jtnimoy.net/?q=178&utm_source=buffer&buffer_share=254f1
this is courtesy of Hilary Mason's twitter feed, @hmason.
======
stbullard
(2010)

See also:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5088722> 3 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404976> 80 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3212825> 0 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3107258> 0 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3598197> 0 comments

~~~
rsingla
Well that's embarrassing. Looks like I need to revamp my searching skills. I
did do a search before posting, but evidently it was a poor one.

My bad!

~~~
DigitalSea
If it makes you feel any better, this is the first time I've ever seen this
before, so reposting isn't always a bad thing. Was an interesting read, love
the effects in Tron and it's good to see some insight into it (especially
those not on HN in 2010).

~~~
rhizome
Of course if you really cared you might do a search.

<https://www.google.com/search?q=emacs+tron>

~~~
DigitalSea
Why on Earth would I ever think of searching for that? I didn't even know the
terminal screen was an Emacs terminal because guess what, I don't use Emacs.
No need to be an asshole buddy.

~~~
rhizome
Sure, the post was useful as passive entertainment. I get it.

~~~
Centigonal
Please calm down, you guys. This is a reposted article we're talking about.

------
jonathanmoore
From a slightly different perspective here are the detailed and technical case
studies from the movie's VFX designer Bradley "GMUNK" Munkowitz:

\- <http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Opening-Titles>

\- <http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Solar-Sailor>

\- <http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Rectifier-Globe>

\- <http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Throne-Room>

\- <http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Fireworks>

\- <http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Portal-Climax>

\- <http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Board-Room>

\- <http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Disc-Game>

~~~
s_husso
Thanks. I was wondering what tools they were using to create those effects
(openframeworks, cinema4d).

------
TallGuyShort
In Tron and The Social Network it was very obvious that a real hacker had been
involved in designing the terminal scenes. It makes a big difference to how
seriously I take the rest of the movie - Kudos to them!

~~~
Andrex
I was also impressed with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (also by TSN's David
Fincher), there was Ubuntu on Lisbeth's Macbook, SQL queries for searching
through a crime database, and some other small touches. Really impressed with
Fincher's commitment to detail even in the world of programming.

~~~
Cryode
Ironically, Josh (the author) references The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when
criticizing Hollywood's choice of using nmap almost ubiquitously.

~~~
laumars
Yeah, but he also criticized _Jurassic Park_ despite the fact that most of
Jurassic Park's OS views were genuinely Unix (SGI's IRIX, to be precise):

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y12_WrlPaw>

In that clip, you can see _fsn_ , which is a genuinely real 3D file manager
for IRIX:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaRHU1XxMJQ>

Granted it's fair to say that the average theme park wouldn't be running IRIX,
but _Jurassic Park_ wasn't the average theme park (movie quote: "no expense
spared"). So I think some of his criticisms are completely misplaced.

------
clicks
Interesting read, nice to see a movie making this kind of effort.

On a side note: I watched this movie on a streaming site... (i.e., I watched
it in poor quality).

That was a bad choice.

The plot, storyline, and dialogue is kind of weak. The visuals certainly are
not. Watch this in high-res quality, and think of it as an over-budgeted Daft
Punk music video instead of a movie, and you'll have a great time watching it.

~~~
KVFinn
>think of it as an over-budgeted Daft Punk music video instead of a movie

Check out the Disney cartoon Tron Uprising -- it has a similar but different
visual style, a dash of Aeon Flux, and gorgoeus sound deisgn that builds
directly off the Daft Punk soundtrack. The story is okay too especially as it
gets much darker towards the end of the season.

The show is 5 seconds from being cancelled but the first episode is still free
on youtube: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjbwVzJR8w4>

Rest on iTunes/Amazon/Xbox/whatever

~~~
taggart
Sadly, it has been canceled. Disney will let the season play out, but no more
episodes after this season.

------
adunk
A few weeks ago I watched the pilot episode of Lewis, a British TV
detective/crime drama that is set in the surroundings of Oxford university,
UK. One of the characters in the episode was a PhD student in mathematics and
the key to the mystery could be found in one of the papers for his PhD
dissertation. The detectives found the paper in question on the character's
computer and opened it up for the viewers to see. Lo and behold, the paper was
clearly typeset in LaTeX. Someone apparently went out of their way to make
this little detail look just right!

Maybe its just me, but it seems like movies are getting better and better in
getting those tiny but ever so important technical details right.

~~~
transitionality
It's probably cheaper to pay a PhD candidate to create realistic visuals than
to pay a graphic designer to create bombastic claptrap.

------
mcescalante
Question for any graphics programmers or CG people: As a graphics programmer,
how appealing is the CG industry? Based on this, the picture I got was that a
lot of the programming he did was driven by shortcomings in the preexisting CG
software that artists in the field use.

I'm a Computer Engineering student interested in the field and I haven't
entirely decided if I'm interested in the applications of graphics programming
yet, although I don't have much to go on because I have limited graphics
programming experience.

~~~
greggman
My personal opinion is, it depends (how's that for a cop-out)

My take is as follows. You can have a restaurant with just a chef. You can
have a trading company with just a trader. You can have a tech company with
just a program. And you have have a CG animation company with just an
animation.

That means that at each of those types of companies, the rest of the people
are support staff for the company's main line of work.

At a trading company everyone not a trader is support staff for the traders.
At an animation company everyone is support staff for the animators. etc...

That's reflected in your position at the company.

Now for the "it depends" part. If it doesn't bother you to be support staff
because the stuff you do you enjoy or because being part of the team of
someone making that kind of entertainment is enough reward then fine.

There's also always exceptions. For example there are programmers who have
advanced the state of the art of CG while at those companies (the hair in
Monsters Ink, The water in The Perfect Storm, the crowds in Lord of the Rings)
etc.. so if you fancy yourself someone who can advance that state of the art
you might find that appealing. On the other hand I suspect it's getting harder
and harder to have a big contribution there.

------
brennenHN
The emacs part is cool, but this article mostly just illustrated how little I
understand about the effects in movies. Each thing he talked about making
seemed simple, but then the effect in the movie was mindblowing and
overwhelming. Great read (also, the font is so big and beautiful, love that).

~~~
Torn
If found the font pretty hard to read, being so big. Evernote Clearly made
quick work of it: <http://evernote.com/clearly/>

~~~
laumars
Just tried _Clearly_ and it worked brilliantly.

Thank you so much for the recommendation. I have a feeling it's going to be
used heavily.

------
pyrhho
How does he use Emacs without Ctrl, or Alt?

edit: For that matter, how did he type "ps -ef | grep -i os12" with no "|"
key?

~~~
Ogre
Alt (assuming you actually mean Meta ;) is completely unnecessary for emacs.
Meta-<Key> can always be produced by pressing ESC <Key>

I guess technically ctrl is also unnecessary since you could type out whole
commands with M-x (ESC x command). It wouldn't be fun, but you could do it.

~~~
cmckay
Although most keyboards nowadays use Alt for Meta, they were distinct keys on
some older keyboards. I personally never used an MIT Lisp machine, but I have
used Sun keyboards with a Meta key.

It's also fun to note that EMACS is an acronym for Escape Meta Alt Control
Shift, which generally describes the experience of using it.

~~~
Ogre
As joke acronyms go, I preferred "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping" back
when Eight Megs was a lot of memory. "Eighty Megs" worked for a while after
that. These days you'd have to rename it EGACS to use that joke.

------
sriramk
I just discovered Alias and my wife and I have been watching episodes back to
back. The show does a good job of making the contents of various displays
legitimate. In one scene, the 'tech guy' (Marshall) has to build some source
code - and I saw various familiar libtool/autoconf symbols scroll by.

~~~
daragh
It's been years since I've seen it, but I remember a hilarious scene where
Jack Bristow is talking to someone in an IM-like window; his choice of text is
giant red Comic Sans and his messages are devoid of grammar and punctuation.

You could argue that this is typical of the average IM user in the early
2000s, but it seemed incongruous for the character.

------
FaisalAbid
The text on this site hurts my eyes.

~~~
kapilkale
It borders on unreadable. I feel like I'm in the first row of a movie theater.

~~~
joezydeco
I arrived late to the opening of Tron:Legacy (+IMAX/3D) and had to sit in the
front row. _THAT_ was a hurt on the eyes. This, I can deal with.

------
subsystem
I'm always suprised by the inflexibility of window managers. I would imagine
we should be able to have something similar to this by now.

------
sergiotapia
I always dreamed how much fun a job making these computer "GUI" scenes would
be. You would go apeshit adding all sorts of dashboards and widgets and things
that look pretty but not work.

See: CSI, NCIS, Bones, etc.

~~~
deltasquared
Why don't you have fun making functional dashboards that look like they belong
in Hollywood?

------
nicholassmith
More importantly than emacs, design orientated people use wxWidgets? Frankly
that's far more surprising!

------
rvivek
This is pretty incredible stuff on the terminal. Aside, if you'd like to code
up tron bots (AI), you can try them here:
<https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/tron>

------
atdrummond
Why does he have an issue with Jurassic Park? Lex was using fsn, which would
have been available at the time for IRIX - although not used in any serious
production environments that I'm aware of.

~~~
scott_karana
I suspect it was more the "I know UNIX!" child hacking that threw him off. :)

~~~
newman314
Exactly, I cringed at that scene.

~~~
atdrummond
I'd be surprised if there weren't more than a few HN users who'd installed a
Linux distribution by age 12.

~~~
ynniv
Probably not when the movie came out in '93 tho. The easiest Linux install was
a sad chore until at least '95 or '96.

~~~
loudandskittish
But...her grandfather clones dinosaurs. Why is so beyond belief that she'd
have used Unix at some point?

~~~
nthj
Because it's a click-and-point graphical 3D maze-like diagram thing.

If she'd piped ps through grep into kill then nobody would have ever mentioned
it again.

------
draftable
How can someone who is a designer choose such a poor font for their won
website? Specially given that he is talking about designing text graphics

~~~
rschmitty
I thought I was the only one who suddenly felt like I needed glasses. Very
blurry/out of focus looking

------
sp332
It seems like movies are going to some trouble to get "real" computing into
movies. I mean, real computers aren't dramatic so they don't get much screen
time, but still. Another recent example:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4047807>

------
tobyjsullivan
"So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep"

[http://devopsreactions.tumblr.com/post/39827269109/when-
one-...](http://devopsreactions.tumblr.com/post/39827269109/when-one-uses-ps-
grep-instead-of-pgrep-in-scripts)

Hehehe

~~~
ynniv
I'm horrible about remembering specialized commands, so I "ps | grep" all the
time. Sometimes grep shows up in the output, sometimes it doesn't, and yet
life goes on... :-)

------
Wingman4l7
For more of this sort of thing: <http://www.reddit.com/r/FUI> _(that's short
for Fantasy/Fake User Interface)_

------
RexRollman
I think it would be interesting to see an open source OS for mobile touch
devices that worked like that.

------
nathannecro
Holy cripes, I cannot actually read the copy at all. It does look like an
interesting read though.

------
josephriley
I wish there was an OS for a tablet with this UI. I would be in heaven.

~~~
Andrex
Same, maybe someone can make a good Android skin, but I doubt it would have
the commitment to detail the movie showed. I was thinking it would also be
cool to have a table-computer like Dilinger Jr. was using (sort of like the
original MS Surface), but then I wondered whether looking down all the time
would be bad posture...

------
coob
Battle Royale used nmap before The Matrix trilogy did…

------
jthomp
Fascinating read.

------
deltasquared
I wonder why he used eshell not term.

~~~
RexRollman
The article doesn't say but it has piqued my interest in it. Is eshell of any
usefulness? Can it be used to create scripts?

~~~
taltman1
You can think of Eshell as a Unix shell that is 100% customizable, and those
customizations are done in a very high level language like Elisp, not in C.
Sometimes it's great to use macros in a shell script.

Yes, it can be used for running scripts:
<https://github.com/emk/eshell/blob/master/em-script.el>

------
morefranco
incredible. simply incredible.

------
antsam
One more Tron movie please.

------
thoughtpalette
First thing I did was go into the Chrome inspector and change the font.

------
martinced
Often when there's some coding stuff like a terminal inside movies, it's not
only the programmers paying attention anymore. Very often because I'm the
"computer guy" my entourage ask me: "Is it realistic?" or "Do you really use
stuff like that?".

So it's not just to please "us" that they pay a little attention to being
"correct". People like it when you answer "yes, we do this kind of stuff" and
hate it when you say "no, it's complete utter rubbish bullshit". It's like if
the movie creators where making fun of them by showing them bullshit and that
they didn't like that.

In a way I care less than them: because I _know_ when a movie is bullshitting
me on a computer-related scene. Non programmers don't.

~~~
dbpatterson
The problem is that if you notice that they are bullshitting you on computers,
it makes you wonder how much other stuff is bullshit too, that you might not
have the expertise to recognize.

~~~
defrost
Most things - eg: practically every "destructive" explosion in a movie is BS -
"real" explosions lack flames and tend to make objects (like cars) cease to
exist.

~~~
anigbrowl
Some do, some don't. I've had a car bomb go off near me and there were plenty
of flames to go around.

~~~
tedunangst
A giant fireball erupting from the bomb? Or random stuff around the blast
catching fire?

~~~
anigbrowl
Sorry for the late reply, I missed this. A giant fireball from the bomb - or
more accurately, from the contents of the gas tank when the bomb exploded.

