The bracket design had to accommodate multiple rounds of game play, so it was designed with a collapsable behavior in mind. The scoreboard was broken down into 8 bracketed matches, displaying 16 combatants in total for round 01. Munkowitz and Jake Sargeant designed and animated a library of 2d textures that were then passed on to the texturing team and layered on proxy geometry in more than 30 shots, ultimately being rendered from stereo cameras and fully integrating into each scene. The Disc Game Scoreboard was the team's first graphics task and was a fierce introduction to the Domain's pipeline integration. 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. 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. 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. In the end, all of this research informed the structural designs in the sequence.ĭuring 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 also researched infinite fractals, hexagonal mesh cages and studied data visualizations of voronoi noise algorithms and isometric surfaces. He was one of the primary inspirations since all of designs in the sequence had to look and behave like they could be living organisms, like flowers, while respecting a graphic structural rule book. The team referenced a lot of Ernst Haeckel, the German Biologist who rendered by hand surreal organisms that resembled graphic prismatic coral structures, if you will.
And conceptually, because she's an ISO – an isometric algorithm – her DNA and the outer layers of her data foundation had to all be super-unique, resembling artifacts from nature, yet still remaining very graphic and design driven. Once descending upon the DNA, Flynn was to identify the ‘damaged code’ in its composition and extract it, healing her data with a blow, allowing her arm to grow back.
The design exercise started with a very loose brief from Joe –– he wanted the representation of Quorra's DNA to be "beautiful, like a flower" and wanted layers of transforming and organic surfaces for Sam and Flynn to navigate through to unveil it. The Solar Sailor sequence was definitely the most conceptually challenging for the team and the output munko is most proud of. 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.
Also, they had the honor to spend hours in the dailies theater watching Kosinski and Barba critique every shot in the film, and those film sessions and the exposure to their process and refinement of craft was time that could never be duplicated in any other professional setting. Coming from the world of motion design, the team spent that year DEEP into their Visual Effects pipeline, meaning every deliverable from the team had to adhere to DD’s strict process, and that integration and those learnings were invaluable to the growth of the team. They worked under the legendary director Joseph Kosinski and VFX Supervisor Eric Barba, who always gave them a ton of freedom to experiment and impress the team with their unconventional approaches to the design challenges at hand.įor Munky, developing these visuals during the year inside the doors of Digital Domain was probably the most educational experience of his career. 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.