Tron: Legacy and Unix

April 6, 2011

Josh Nimoy, a special effects artist who worked on Tron: Legacy, recently released these images (among others) and talked about the process used to generate the final product and how he gave it authenticity.

“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.”

This is why I geeked out when I saw Tron. I look at a unix terminal every day, and seeing legit commands in the film made my job seem somewhat cool and redeemable.





2 Comments
  1. This Hack Turns Your iPad(s) Into a Tron-Style Keyboard | Tux Doc says:
    April 25, 2012 at 12:39 pm

    [...] science-fiction hit Tron: Legacy, the protagonist Sam Flynn is seen typing with ease on a virtual keyboard. Now, a self-confessed keyboard geek took it upon himself to [...]

  2. This Hack Turns Your iPad(s) Into a Tron-Style Keyboard says:
    April 29, 2012 at 9:44 pm

    [...] science-fiction hit Tron: Legacy, the protagonist Sam Flynn is seen typing with ease on a virtual keyboard. Now, a self-confessed keyboard geek took it upon himself to [...]

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