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lynn, a young computer genius, breaks into the ENCOM computer
looking for evidence that the video game programs he wrote were
stolen by Dillinger, an ENCOM executive. Dillinger's Master Control
Program must stop Flynn, and it blasts him into its own computer
dimension. Flynn awakens in an electronic world, where computer
programs are the alter-egos of the programmers who created them,
and he is sentenced to die on the video game grid. Together with
Tron, an electronic security program, Flynn escapes and destroys
the MCP, and is able to return to the "real" world.
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Out of director Steven Lisberger's passion for computer games
grew the idea for "Tron." He and producer Donald Kushner
spent two years researching the technology to make the film, with
which he made his live-action directorial debut. The film was
the first motion picture to make extensive use of computer imagery,
requiring much expertise and imagination. Though computer imagery
had been previously seen as an effect in motion pictures such
as "Star Wars" and "West World," "Tron" was the
first film to use the technique to create a three-dimensional
world. The special effects team was headed by futuristic industrial
designer Syd Mead, comic artist "Moebius" Giraud, and
high-tech commercial artist Peter Lloyd. Harrison Ellenshaw supervised
the effects with Richard Taylor. Computer graphics were first
applied to aerospace and scientific research in the mid-1960s,
when methods of simulating objects digitally
proved as effective as building models. The technology was then
diverted into the entertainment field. Information International
Inc. (Triple-I) and Robert Able & Associates of Los Angeles,
and the Mathematic Applications Group Inc. (MAGI) and Digital
Effects of New York, produced the computer imagery for the film.
MAGI, the single largest contributor of computer imagery, speeded
up the process of supplying its work to Disney Studios in Burbank
via a transcontinental computer hook-up. The computer link cut
between two and a half and five days from the creation of each
scene. The electronic world was shot on sound stages at the Disney
Studio in Burbank. Photography for the real world took place at
locations around Los Angeles and at the U.S. Government's futuristic
Lawrence Livermore Laboratory outside Oakland, California. The
film was not the box office bonanza the Studio had hoped for,
but it did spawn a number of popular video games.
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