WARNING: The following article is an account of how I discovered Tron. It's not that interesting. And it's very long. Read at the risk of your own sanity.
Sherman, set the wayback machine for... six years ago.
My brother was intrigued by the fanciful world of animation and CGI. He began to buy computer graphics magazines, and soon he had a wealth of knowledge on the subject. It seemed pretty interesting to me too, and seeing the various images and 3D renderings in the magazines had me hooked. We tried many of the software demos on the CDs that came with the magazines, and using scrap bits of plasticine and dad's old camcorder, we made our own animations by pressing the 'Record' button and then pressing the 'Stop' button in rapid succession, moving the models, then pressing 'Record' and 'Stop' again.
Believe it or not, the results were horrible and choppy, and eventually we burnt out the motor in the camera. Dad wasn't too happy, to say the least, but for a short time we were proud of our little animations.
A few months later...
...we saw an advert in a local newspaper for an 'Animation Station' being held at the
Lickey Hills Visitor Centre. There, me, my brother and two of my cousins made our first animation using semi-decent models with semi-decent armatures, a semi-decent camera and a semi-decent set (at least it seemed that way at the time - looking back on it now... it's just horrible
). Although the camera we were using had the capability for recording one frame at a time, to speed things up, we decided to record
five frames at a time, so the finished movie was just as choppy as our old camcorder movies (although the models fell over less). Also, as it was a hot summer's day, we filmed it outside over a period of two hours, so the shadows of the plasticine figures flick around the cardboard set, and our shadows, the shadow of the camera and the shadow of a nearby tree also falls on the set at several points. There are even a few frames where our hands are in the shot
'What does this have to do with Tron?', I hear you ask.
'Well', I tell you,
'err... um... absolutely nothing. Just a bit of backstory. Bear with me, alright?'
(About four years ago, we received a DVD in the post - the entire collection of animations made at the 'Animation Station' - two years late!
Because I'm nice, here's our lovely claymation, in all its glory. It's in four parts - a short introduction by a snake, voiced and performed by my brother (who's now 18!), followed by an animation made by some other people using the sacred art of card and butterfly pins, followed by another short snippet of the snake, finally followed by our claymation. The two animations weren't originally meant to be shown together, nor were they relating to the same story of a 'forest fire', but the producer type person (who also added all sounds and music) decided they fitted well together. Can you spot the plastic caterpillar, clay worm, clay dog and clay cat? This is a very long link! Click it already!)
Zap forward to 2002ish...
...when we moved house from Birmingham to Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. Me and my brother, by that point, had both gotten over the fad of animation and computer graphics we were enthralled in two years prior. We were walking around the (small) DVD and CD section of Gainsborough library, when a DVD caught my brother's eye. It was a black DVD, a Disney film, called 'TRON'.
'Hey', my brother said,
'I read about this in one of the Computer Arts magazines I collected years ago. I think it was one of the first films to use 3D computer graphics'.
'Cool', I said.
'Let's rent it!'
So we did. And played it on our brand new DVD player (we were a little behind the times - we didn't ha