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.




PC ish: ASUS ENGT430

March 7, 2011

My trusty, dusty graphics card died on me last week. I had to go to Fry’s and pick up a new one. Apparently, this got less than stellar reviews. I normally would do some research and order a card from Newegg, but I was feeling impulsive. Hopefully, this will last me through the Mayan Apocalypse or until I sell my soul to Apple. Which ever comes first.