Tron: Legacy, shot by Claudio Miranda, ASC, mixes 2-D and 3-D to update the environments of the 1982 sci-fi hit.
It’s been nearly three decades since Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) first entered the high-stakes digital world of the Grid in Tron. The sequel Tron: Legacy reveals that Kevin disappeared in the Grid 20 years ago, leaving behind his son, Sam (Garrett Hedlund), who has become an aimless extreme-sports enthusiast. Legacy, directed by first-timer Joseph Kosinski and shot by Claudio Miranda, ASC, takes Sam into the Grid, where he is finally reunited with his father. Among other challenges, the action-packed journey required Miranda to shoot both 2-D and 3-D and help to further evolve the digital facial-replacement techniques that played heavily into his previous feature, David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (AC Jan.’09).
Fincher introduced Kosinski to Miranda in 2005 when Kosinski was looking for a cinematographer to shoot a commercial in Los Angeles. “Claudio and I have done another 14 or so commercials together since then,” says Kosinski. “He has been a great friend and partner. He’s an amazing artist with a great technical mind, and he’s always up for tinkering with something new.”
The first steps toward realizing Legacy included the creation of a teaser trailer, which premiered at Comic-Con in 2008. “At the time, [Disney] wasn’t sure there was demand for a Tron sequel, and we knew that if we failed [at Comic-Con], the project would be put on hold,” says Kosinski. But the trailer was a hit, and the feature received a green light.
Principal photography commenced in April 2009 and was done primarily onstage at the Canadian Motion Picture Park outside Vancouver; location work for sequences set in the real world was done around the city.
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