More Tron: Legacy

The first environment I worked on was the Game Grid. By the time I started the show the design had already been established and my job was to create a few "style guide" keyframes to set up the atmosphere, lighting and look-and-feel of the environment. Working over screencaps of Production Designer Darren Gilford's sketch-up models imported into Modo, I rendered these in Photoshop. David Levy had already found the sweet spot of heavy atmosphere and crushed blacks/blown out blues in his speedpaintings, so my job was really to find the moments and adapt that look into a more rendered finish.


Originally Rinzler's bike was going to follow Sam & Quora out into the wildlands, so this was a frame of that moment. Daniel Simon provided the model of his beautiful Light-runner for this frame.

I had fun with this one. A lot of the keyframes were painted over frames of lo-rez previs, so illos actually match exact moments in the film. Sam didn't have a final helmet design yet, so I took my own crack at it.


This one was a real struggle. Figurative work generally isn't my forte, so trying to come up with a likeness of Jeff Bridges from an unusual angle and lighting was nigh impossible for me. Needless to say I did not succeed! I'm happy if it looks remotely human.


Again, this was more of a digital matte painting than an illustration. Again, taking screencaps of model elements to paint over. I think the bkgd even includes some of Ben Proctor's city map!

This job was such a back-and-forth collaborative effort, I don't know that there was much that any of us could claim to have done solely by ourselves. This may sound limiting but in fact it was a really fun and free process, and I think we all grew a lot as artists from passing our work back and forth between us.