One day, |ust a few months ago, two men were squeezed inside a cramped trailer on a Walt Disney studio backlot in Burbank, California. They were peering intently at a computer picture screen.
At first the screen was blank. Then glowing, darting imoges appeared: Giant, horseshoe-shaped flying battleships. Telephone receivers that raced across a fishnet of pure light. Squat, sleek tanks that fired deadly energy bolts.
The inside of the trailer echoed and rocked with the men's impromptu applause, laughter, and sudden arguments. Then silence.
One man scribbled notes on a sheet of paper. The other pushed buttons on a keyboard below the screen. The tanks moved forward, then backward, then forward, all in slow morion. The battleships — alias Recognizers — rotated and approached until they loomed on the screen.
The telephones — alias light cycles — froze in place on the infinite grid, then inched forward and collided in a burst of blinding light.
What were the men doing? It appeared as if they were playing a sophisticated video game. But they were not playing a game. They were making a movie.
The two men were Jerry Rees and Bill Kroyer, two Disney animators with impressive credits. Both had worked on a number of animated films for Disney and other producers. Rees recently worked on Pete's Dragon. Kroyer helped to animate The Fox and the Hound. Now the two were working on Tron, the story of a renegade video game designer's heroic battles in a microscopic fantasy world inside a computer.
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