Uploaded April 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
I've always wanted to make a Tron fanfilm, so while I've been stuck indoors for the past year or so I thought I might as well try and be a bit productive and make my dream come true... and to stop myself from going insane... hope you enjoy! :D
Tron Uprising was a brilliant 3d animated cartoon series developed back in 2012, which I thought was an amazing show and really showed off how good 3d assets could be tweaked to give the beautiful visual aesthetic of 2d animation. It also featured some incredible voice acting by Elijah Wood, Lance Henriksen, and Bruce Boxleitner back as Tron himself.
This short film is a recreation of the opening to the first episode where Beck meets Tron for the first time, and is my love letter to the entire Tron franchise.
I shot this film on my recently aquired Canon R5 at 8k (except the 120 fps slowmotion scenes) and then sampled down to 4k during editing and post production. This allowed me to gain the maximum amount of detail whilst keying out the greenscreen footage (which I plan on never doing again, LED walls is the future, had enough of meticulous greenscreen keying over the years...) Shooting this film was quite difficult though, as I had to be behind the camera and in front, framing shots while directing myself, although this was made easier using the Canon Camera App on my phone (conveniently placed just out of shot, or on my lap during filming) which allowed me to adjust settings from a distance, while the auto eye focus setting kept a constant lock on my face so I knew I'd always be sharp and in focus. Although if I was to ever do this again I''d prefer to have a seperate actor, it makes adjusting things on set so much easier.
I originally wanted to test out the latest Deepfake technology too and replace my face with Elijah Wood's face to match his voice, however I was never able to get it looking correct, mainly due to the low rez face captures I had and Elijah Wood's brilliantly bright eyes causing problems as the software couldn't figure out which way he was looking most of the time, but ohh well, maybe I'll post the results one of these days as an outtake reel...
The CG environments and vehicles were all created in Maya and then ported over to the Unreal Engine, I've been learning Unreal for a while now and found it's features to be incredibly useful for filmmaking, as well as a rendering tool that gives instant results when finessing lighting and reflection, something that would normally take hours to render, I can't wait to see how the program evolves in the future especially with raytracing and makes things easier for filmmakers :)
I've always wanted to make a Tron fanfilm, so while I've been stuck indoors for the past year or so I thought I might as well try and be a bit productive and make my dream come true... and to stop myself from going insane... hope you enjoy! :D
Tron Uprising was a brilliant 3d animated cartoon series developed back in 2012, which I thought was an amazing show and really showed off how good 3d assets could be tweaked to give the beautiful visual aesthetic of 2d animation. It also featured some incredible voice acting by Elijah Wood, Lance Henriksen, and Bruce Boxleitner back as Tron himself.
This short film is a recreation of the opening to the first episode where Beck meets Tron for the first time, and is my love letter to the entire Tron franchise.
I shot this film on my recently aquired Canon R5 at 8k (except the 120 fps slowmotion scenes) and then sampled down to 4k during editing and post production. This allowed me to gain the maximum amount of detail whilst keying out the greenscreen footage (which I plan on never doing again, LED walls is the future, had enough of meticulous greenscreen keying over the years...) Shooting this film was quite difficult though, as I had to be behind the camera and in front, framing shots while directing myself, although this was made easier using the Canon Camera App on my phone (conveniently placed just out of shot, or on my lap during filming) which allowed me to adjust settings from a distance, while the auto eye focus setting kept a constant lock on my face so I knew I'd always be sharp and in focus. Although if I was to ever do this again I''d prefer to have a seperate actor, it makes adjusting things on set so much easier.
I originally wanted to test out the latest Deepfake technology too and replace my face with Elijah Wood's face to match his voice, however I was never able to get it looking correct, mainly due to the low rez face captures I had and Elijah Wood's brilliantly bright eyes causing problems as the software couldn't figure out which way he was looking most of the time, but ohh well, maybe I'll post the results one of these days as an outtake reel...
The CG environments and vehicles were all created in Maya and then ported over to the Unreal Engine, I've been learning Unreal for a while now and found it's features to be incredibly useful for filmmaking, as well as a rendering tool that gives instant results when finessing lighting and reflection, something that would normally take hours to render, I can't wait to see how the program evolves in the future especially with raytracing and makes things easier for filmmakers :)
