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Tron Legacy (2010)
this is courtesy of Hilary Mason's twitter feed, @hmason.
- clicks 14y agoInteresting 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.
- greyfade 14y agoThis, I think, is what Daft Punk was born for.
- entropie 14y agoThis is so true. I know that band since i was 14. Homework from Daft Punk was absolutely great. But... This soundtrack, fits so perfect, and i still listen often to it while chilling or coding. So. Awesome.
- james-skemp 14y agoIf you haven't already, try the remix album. I love them both, but the remixes are amazing.
- arethuza 14y agoThe Tron Legacy now turns up in lots of other places - e.g. the Top Gear Mini vs. Amy Williams race: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzxS-3vO6Gw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzxS-3vO6Gw
- archangel_one 14y agoTop Gear used a whole bunch of the songs from it over a season or two - I guess they bought the rights to use the soundtrack and wanted to get their money's worth ;-)
- jlgreco 14y agoI think in this way it was a perfect successor to the original. Beautiful impressive visuals (each for their time, remember) with a 'cyberpunk-lite' plot to provide a reason for those visuals. As far as cyberpunk in media that dare actually include cyberspace aspects (so for example, not Blade Runner), I think it stacks up pretty well. The Matrix 'cheats' by explicitly declaring that their cyberspace was built to seem real, and Johnny Mnemonic, rather bluntly, falls on it's face when trying to pull it off (I do love that movie though).
- greggman 14y agoMaybe because I grew up with the original Tron but I found legacy in no way a perfect successor to the original. Rather than spam HN here's why http://blog.greggman.com/blog/tronlegacy/ http://blog.greggman.com/blog/tronlegacy/
- KVFinn 14y agoYou might enjoy Tron Uprising, the Disney cartoon, as a modern take on Tron. Brilliant sound and art design and the story makes more sense since taking place only in universe.
- jlgreco 14y agoOpinions are a very nebulous thing, there is no "right or wrong" in the subject. So while I disagree with all of those points (for reference: when I grew up Tron was in the same class of movies as the Star Wars trilogy and the Indiana Jones movies, I can't even begin to count how many times I watched them), those are nevertheless legitimate points for you.
- greggman 14y agoThere is objective vs subjective. Subjective: I thought the club scene sucked. Subjective: The vehicle scenes were not exciting. Objective: There's no reason to believe Flynn Jr is good at the games he's asked to play inside the computer. Objective: Holding a disc over your head in an i/o beam is not how you leave the computer in the universe of Tron.
- ihuman 14y agoIf you want to see another Daft Punk movie, I recommend checking out "Interstella 5555"
- pizza 14y agoThey also made 2 more movies, "D.A.F.T.: A Story About Dogs, Androids, Firemen and Tomatoes" (1999) and "Electroma" (2007).
- KVFinn 14y ago>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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjbwVzJR8w4 Rest on iTunes/Amazon/Xbox/whatever
- sp332 14y agoIt 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4047807
- FaisalAbid 14y agoThe text on this site hurts my eyes.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- kapilkale 14y agoIt borders on unreadable. I feel like I'm in the first row of a movie theater.
- joezydeco 14y agoI 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.
- peterjmag 14y agoAgreed. I gave up a couple sentences in and had to run it through Readability to read it. Hairline fonts (Helvetica Neue Ultra Light, in this case) are not really intended for body copy. Of course, the font choice is not the only thing that makes this practically illegible. It's too large, the leading's cramped, and it could probably use a max-width to prevent excessively long lines in larger viewports. Fascinating article, though!
- tripzilch 14y agoI really like how most browsers have a very usable webdev tool, so I just changed the font, line-spacing and document width until it was good. I don't always go through that trouble, but ihn this case the page was simple enough and the content seemed worth it.
- plorkyeran 14y agoIt was pretty obviously only tested on OS X: http://i.imgur.com/g1thFBk.png http://i.imgur.com/g1thFBk.png The OS X rendering is ugly, but the windows rendering is unreadably thin.
- mixmastamyk 14y ago
- stbullard 14y ago(2010) See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5088722 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5088722 3 comments http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404976 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404976 80 comments http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3212825 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3212825 0 comments http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3107258 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3107258 0 comments http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3598197 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3598197 0 comments
- rsingla 14y agoWell 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!
- ramayac 14y agoDon't worry, I'm not reading HN articles from 2010, so it's a rediscovery for me when this events occur.
- duck 14y agoIf you do want to read classics from HN checkout my http://waybackletter.com http://waybackletter.com project. :-)
- DigitalSea 14y agoIf 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 14y agoOf course if you really cared you might do a search. https://www.google.com/search?q=emacs+tron https://www.google.com/search?q=emacs+tron
- TallGuyShort 14y agoIn 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 14y agoI 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 14y agoIronically, Josh (the author) references The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when criticizing Hollywood's choice of using nmap almost ubiquitously.
- Andrex 14y agoI did see that, but like in the original Matrix, I think it was one of the few times it was appropriate.
- laumars 14y agoYeah, 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 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 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.
- 89a 14y agoThats one of my fave bits of movie trivia. Also the computers in the back of the server room which just look like fancy looking props are actually a real super computer design (but empty cases obviously) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine
- pyrhho 14y agoHow does he use Emacs without Ctrl, or Alt? edit: For that matter, how did he type "ps -ef | grep -i os12" with no "|" key?
- jlgreco 14y agoMaybe his keyboard is modal, but we never see it change. ;)
- fafner 14y agohttps://github.com/greboide/emacs-gestures https://github.com/greboide/emacs-gestures
- Ogre 14y agoAlt (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 14y agoAlthough 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 14y agoAs 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.
- dstorrs 14y agoActually, it stood for "Editing MACroS" [1]. There are other expansions though -- see [2] below. [1] http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-faq.html#Origin-of-the-term-Emacs http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-faq.html#Origin-of-t... [2] http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/gnuemacs.acro.exp.html http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/gnuemacs.acro.exp.html
- sergiotapia 14y agoI 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 14y agoWhy don't you have fun making functional dashboards that look like they belong in Hollywood?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- brennenHN 14y agoThe 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).
- laumars 14y agoI hate the font. It's practically unreadable in Chrome on Windows. Not eased by the fact that I'm dyslexic so struggle to follow a line of text anyway. I really wish web developers stopped cocking about with type-faces. Most of the time they don't test it on other platforms, and nearly all of the time they don't consider the usability for people with either poorer eye site or other reading difficulties. Quite frankly, I'm gutted and annoyed at this site because the content looks interesting but I can't read more than 2 lines of the fucking thing (thus ended up having to edit the CSS in Chromes inspect tool). Very annoying and completely necessary.
- Torn 14y agoIf found the font pretty hard to read, being so big. Evernote Clearly made quick work of it: http://evernote.com/clearly/ http://evernote.com/clearly/
- laumars 14y agoJust tried Clearly and it worked brilliantly. Thank you so much for the recommendation. I have a feeling it's going to be used heavily.
- nicholassmith 14y agoMore importantly than emacs, design orientated people use wxWidgets? Frankly that's far more surprising!
- draftable 14y agoHow 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 14y agoI thought I was the only one who suddenly felt like I needed glasses. Very blurry/out of focus looking
- sriramk 14y agoI 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 14y agoIt'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.
- mcescalante 14y agoQuestion 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 14y agoMy 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.
- mixmastamyk 14y agoThe work is tedious, the industry a sweatshop, but the final output awesome.
- confluence 14y agoIf you start a shop or work there early on and you take off - it's about the same as any startup - big highs, big lows, big work, impressive product, big impact, big money. If you work there after it becomes big - it's like working at any game dev shop for EA.
- deltasquared 14y agoI wonder why he used eshell not term.
- RexRollman 14y agoThe 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 14y agoYou 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 https://github.com/emk/eshell/blob/master/em-script.el
- josephriley 14y agoI wish there was an OS for a tablet with this UI. I would be in heaven.
- Andrex 14y agoSame, 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...
- jonathanmoore 14y agoFrom 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-Opening-Titles - http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Solar-Sailor http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Solar-Sailor - http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Rectifier-Globe http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Rectifier-Globe - http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Throne-Room http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Throne-Room - http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Fireworks http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Fireworks - http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Portal-Climax http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Portal-Climax - http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Board-Room http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Board-Room - http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Disc-Game http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Disc-Game
- s_husso 14y agoThanks. I was wondering what tools they were using to create those effects (openframeworks, cinema4d).
- atdrummond 14y agoWhy 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 14y agoI suspect it was more the "I know UNIX!" child hacking that threw him off. :)
- newman314 14y agoExactly, I cringed at that scene.
- atdrummond 14y agoI'd be surprised if there weren't more than a few HN users who'd installed a Linux distribution by age 12.
- ynniv 14y agoProbably not when the movie came out in '93 tho. The easiest Linux install was a sad chore until at least '95 or '96.
- loudandskittish 14y agoBut...her grandfather clones dinosaurs. Why is so beyond belief that she'd have used Unix at some point?
- nthj 14y agoBecause 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.
- 14y ago
- RexRollman 14y agoI think it would be interesting to see an open source OS for mobile touch devices that worked like that.
- morefranco 14y agoincredible. simply incredible.
- rvivek 14y agoThis 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 https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/tron
- tobyjsullivan 14y ago"So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep" http://devopsreactions.tumblr.com/post/39827269109/when-one-uses-ps-grep-instead-of-pgrep-in-scripts http://devopsreactions.tumblr.com/post/39827269109/when-one-... Hehehe
- ynniv 14y agoI'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... :-)
- adunk 14y agoA 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 14y agoIt's probably cheaper to pay a PhD candidate to create realistic visuals than to pay a graphic designer to create bombastic claptrap.
- jthomp 14y agoFascinating read.
- martinced 14y agoOften 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 14y agoThe 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 14y agoMost 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 14y agoSome do, some don't. I've had a car bomb go off near me and there were plenty of flames to go around.
- tedunangst 14y agoA giant fireball erupting from the bomb? Or random stuff around the blast catching fire?
- anigbrowl 14y agoSorry 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.
- thoughtpalette 14y agoFirst thing I did was go into the Chrome inspector and change the font.
- Wingman4l7 14y agoFor more of this sort of thing: http://www.reddit.com/r/FUI http://www.reddit.com/r/FUI (that's short for Fantasy/Fake User Interface)
- subsystem 14y agoI'm always suprised by the inflexibility of window managers. I would imagine we should be able to have something similar to this by now.
- antsam 14y agoOne more Tron movie please.
- coob 14y agoBattle Royale used nmap before The Matrix trilogy did…
- nathannecro 14y agoHoly cripes, I cannot actually read the copy at all. It does look like an interesting read though.