Levi McCallum
Christ follower, developer, curator, Milo & coffee connoisseur.
levi@levimccallum.com
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I’m not going to lie, I really liked Tron Legacy. Maybe the story lacked in a few areas, but overall the artistic style, musical score, and attention to detail made it one perfect cinema production in my mind. One part in particular that made me smile was the use of real terminal commands in a futuristic gui interface. I love it when movies get it right — re. Social Network.
To make this film even better, Jtnimoy, one of Tron’s developer artists, has come out and detailed all his development and design work on the production. Here’s one juicy quote from his experience:
In addition to visual effects, I was asked to record myself using a unix terminal doing technologically feasible things. I took extra care in babysitting the elements through to final composite to ensure that the content would not be artistically altered beyond that feasibility. I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble. I cringed during the part in Hackers (1995) when a screen saver with extruded “equations” is used to signify that the hacker has reached some sort of neural flow or ambiguous destination. I cringed for Swordfish and Jurassic Park as well. I cheered when Trinity in The Matrix used nmap and ssh (and so did you). Then I cringed again when I saw that inevitably, Hollywood had decided that nmap was the thing to use for all its hacker scenes (see Bourne Ultimatum, Die Hard 4, Girl with Dragon Tattoo, The Listening, 13: Game of Death, Battle Royale, Broken Saints, and on and on). In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance — splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie.
