Do You See What I See?

During the pioneering years of computer animation, I worked on the Disney feature film TRON, which was released in 1982. At the time I was employed by the Movie Group at Information International, Inc. and had responsibility for debugging and enhancing the software for image rendering and for a custom version of a film recorder that the company manufactured. Craig Reynolds wrote and maintained the animation software. Larry Malone wrote a smooth surface modeling program that he used to create the Solar Sailor object, and a separate interactive program for registering computer generated backgrounds with live action scenes.

Between the three of us we divvied up the majority of the animation for those scenes assigned to our company, which occurred during the latter half of the movie. Craig animated scenes with the Solar Sailor, Larry animated scenes with Sark’s Carrier, and I animated scenes with the Master Control Program (MCP). Mal McMillan had animated some preproduction tests, before I arrived in the Movie Group. Art Durinski, our resident artist, created the majority of objects we used. Art digitized our objects from plans he drew on paper, similar to blueprints, which were based upon concept art created for TRON by Syd Mead, Peter Lloyd, and Jean Giraud.

Jeremy Schwartz, who made high resolution, still frames for backgrounds, also managed to animate a few scenes while creating the building objects for his scenes. Jeremy’s scenes are the only computer generated scenes in the movie where you’ll actually see any shadows being cast. James Rapley maintained our hardware, a “state of the art dinosaur,” the Foonly F1. Our Creative Director, Richard Taylor, managed the Movie Group and also served as co-supervisor of Visual Effects for TRON, spending most of his time away at Disney throughout the duration of production.

Richard had a laissez-faire management style. He brought together people with talent and initiative. Richard said, “Reality is the most widely held fantasy.” He felt that the commercial marketplace of today for graphic artists is the equivalent of the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages for artists of that era. After TRON he told me, “There are two kinds of art directors. When you give the first kind what they ask, they’re satisfied. But the second kind uses that as a starting point to begin changing things.”

The Movie Group operated like an ecosystem where everyone found his ecological niche. To maximize usage of Foonly, Craig, Larry, and I worked three different shifts. I started at four in the morning, Craig came in at ten, and Larry followed in the evening. Technology in that era was less reliable than it is today. Foonly couldn’t run a week straight without crashing. It was Art’s original idea to get babysitters for Foonly to prevent crashes during the night from delaying our production schedule, but his suggestion had fallen on deaf ears.

One morning I came in and found Foonly idle. My shot had been stopped, but not restarted. I was incensed, so I wrote some flame mail, before the day of email, and posted it on the partition next to the desk of Lynn Wilkinson, our production assistant. That was my Cambrian explosion moment. In the flame mail I wrote about my frustration that my shot was not restarted and brought up Art’s suggestion about babysitters. Richard read my note and Art’s nighttime babysitter idea was put into action almost immediately with two of Art’s students from UCLA, Kathy Fisken and John Howard, and a young woman from Disney administration who volunteered, Rosalyn Fischer.

Over a period of about one year laboring on TRON, I completed my scene assignments first in the Movie Group. Then I was assigned scenes that were behind schedule from another company, MAGI. The transferred scenes were of high computational complexity as conceived, and took on the order of ten hours a frame for MAGI’s system to compute. When it comes to image rendering, our polygonal based approach was orders of magnitude faster than MAGI’s solid modeling approach. Conversely, solid modeling is orders of magnitude faster to create complex, mathematically definable objects than our polygonal system. Nevertheless, toward the end of production we had the advantage in putting scenes onto film, which is what counted at that point.

After completing all my assigned scenes, I felt rejuvenated. My stress level dissipated, and I got playful. I negotiated technical changes to the scenes catering to the strengths of our polygonal approach. One scene in particular, I thought, was ideal for embedding Mickey Mouse in the background. So I asked Art to make an object to support this whim of mine. Art responded favorably to the idea, but claimed he couldn’t draw Mickey Mouse. So I drew the plans and Art digitized the object.

The drawing caught the attention of my coworkers. Craig complained that he didn’t think it was right for people to do whatever they wanted. He felt strongly that it was the director’s movie and that he should have complete control. According to Craig, I shouldn’t be allowed to do what I was doing. In all fairness to Craig, he was under a lot of pressure. Not only hadn’t he finished his scenes yet, but he was under a deadline to publish his inaugural paper on his Lisp based animation software, and make a photo which eventually made the cover of the conference proceedings. Years later Craig pioneered the simulation of flocking behavior in computer animation and in artificial life circles.

At the time, I showed Richard my drawing and informed him of my scheme. He consented with one caveat: that no more than twenty percent of the audience caught on. He suggested that Mickey Mouse be oriented at an obscure angle to avoid appearing obvious. I set up the scene in accordance with his wishes. For every scene, our animation was supervised by a traditional animator. For most of my scenes with the MCP I worked with Jerry Rees, but for this scene Bill Kroyer served as my co-conspirator. Bill jettisoned the glancing angle idea straight away. He wanted Mickey Mouse to get noticed. So that’s the way I animated and filmed the scene. When completed days later, the exposed film went into the can and was sent to the lab for processing.

Motion picture film is developed at night. It’s screened the next day in a critical, peer review, group session called “Dailies.” The objective of Dailies is to catch mistakes as soon as possible. I’ve attended a few Dailies myself. Once I caught a continuity error. When the realization struck me, I blurted out, “The background’s not moving.” The scene had live action matted over one of Jeremy’s background stills, done by the traditional cell animation approach at Disney. I had finished the scenes just preceding this scene in question. In my scenes, new scenes I had gotten from MAGI, the background transitioned from static to moving. It was supposed to be moving, but the background was static in the scene being screened in Dailies. Richard, who usually supervised Dailies, checked the scene log and verified my claim. The scene needed to be redone with the correction - a moving background.

Another time Jeremy blurted out, “It worked!” when one of his background still scenes was shown. In it the actors were filmed jumping around on a black stage with marks that Jeremy had provided. It was supposed to be dangerous terrain, where one misstep was fatal. When the live action and background stills were matted together, it came off without a hitch. We were all surprised, but none more so than Jeremy.

I did not attend Dailies for my Mickey Mouse scene. Richard told me how it went later. Everybody focused on catching mistakes but overlooked Mickey Mouse, hidden in plain sight via a little misdirection. During Dailies the film for a scene is spliced head to tail in a closed loop, which is projected repeatedly on a big screen over and over again. Disney animators have a saying, “If you do everything right nobody notices, but when you do something wrong everybody notices.” I did everything right. Nobody noticed Mickey Mouse’s cameo in TRON.

Richard knew it was my scene so he tested those in attendance during Dailies, “What’s wrong with this scene?” Everybody in the screening room then knew that something was wrong, but nobody caught the slightest error. “Come on people. What’s wrong with this scene?” Silence. Everybody was afflicted by selective blindness. Zero percent caught on. The guest appearance of Mickey Mouse passed completely undetected under professional scrutiny until Richard clued them in, “There’s Mickey Mouse.” Then all at once, like a miracle, the blind could see.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Mickey
http://www.hiddenmickeys.org/Movies/Tron.html
http://www.eeggs.com/items/2351.html