Artists from ILM’s Sydney studio take us into the Grid to discuss their part in the cult classic’s latest chapter.
By Jay Stobie
(Credit: ILM & Disney).
Directed by Joachim Rønning, Disney’s Tron: Ares (2025) breaks the barrier between the physical and digital realms, as the Master Control Program known as Ares (Jared Leto) rebels against his creator, Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), and seeks the Permanence Code that would allow him to achieve a lasting existence in the real world. Ares finds an ally in Dillinger’s corporate rival, Encom executive Eve Kim (Greta Lee), whose empathetic nature is a stark contrast to the ruthless disposition of the Dillinger Systems leader. From the Grid’s luminous avenues to their concrete counterparts in our physical reality, Tron: Ares brims with astonishing visual effects that support its characters on their tumultuous journeys.
With Industrial Light & Magic’s own David Seager serving as the production’s overall visual effects supervisor, ILM proved uniquely suited to spread the visual effects work across its global studio sites in Sydney and Vancouver. Operating from the Sydney studio, ILM visual effects supervisor Jeff Capogreco (Jurassic World [2015]; Avengers: Infinity War [2018]; The Mandalorian [2019-23] and ILM animation supervisor Jhon Alvarado (Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves [2023]; Alien: Romulus [2024]; Star Wars: Skeleton Crew [2024-25]) sat down with ILM.com to discuss their behind-the-scenes insights into all things Tron: Ares.
Tron’s Legacy
“On TRON: Ares, I was the visual effects supervisor for ILM’s Sydney studio, and my partner in crime was ILM associate visual effects supervisor, Alex Popescu,” Jeff Capogreco shares with ILM.com. “Early on, we made a conscious decision to have two technical camps going at one time, and each of us took on different roles and responsibilities. As the ‘grandpa’ supervisor, or ‘Papa Jeff,’ I worked with Alex to make sure things ran smoothly. The Sydney studio did just over 800 shots, which I believe was the biggest show to date that our studio had delivered, so it was a proud milestone.”
Capogreco’s love for the Tron franchise stretches back to its initial cinematic installment. “I’m old enough to say that Tron (1982) was one of the first movies I ever watched on VHS. My father was really into technology, and having a VHS player was a status symbol in Canada in the 1980s,” Capogreco beams. “I was probably six or seven and didn’t fully understand what was happening in the movie, but it was spellbinding. I was fascinated by Tron, and that led me to want to do visual effects. What Tron did to me, I hope Tron: Ares does to other people.”
ILM animation supervisor Jhon Alvarado’s own affinity for Tron took off with the release of its sequel, Tron: Legacy (2010). “For me, Tron hit home when Legacy came out, primarily because of the visuals and the soundtrack,” Alvarado remarks. “I loved the marriage of the two elements and how well they came together. When Tron: Ares came up for ILM, I knew I had to be on it. We’re here for movies that take us into these awesome worlds, and Legacy delivered with its sound, music, and visuals. When Tron comes in, you know it’s Tron. It has an aesthetic that you can’t get in any other film.”
(Credit: ILM & Disney).
An Animation Approach
Turning to his tenure on Tron: Ares, Alvarado supplies an overview of what his duties entailed. “As the ILM animation supervisor, my work on the show covered quite a bit. I was involved in shot design and creating shots for the film. We’d receive sequences with a rough previs of what the idea would be, but once the previs was put into the cut, I’d occasionally get blank frames with descriptions of what was supposed to happen. My job became interpreting them, taking the shots that the director had in mind, and Tron-ifying them while making it all feel believable and realistic. I had to think like a cinematographer so that, even when the shots were full CG, they appeared as if they were filmed for real.
“I developed several vehicle animations, as well,” Alvarado continues. “For the light skimmer chase sequence, I partnered with our ILM animators to figure out the style and movement of how these vehicles skim through the water. We examined speedboat references so we could get the water spray right.” Alvarado’s mission extended to the laser printers that enabled Grid-based vehicles to be constructed in the real world. “We designed how the laser moved and collaborated with the rigging and effects departments to choreograph the printing. We had rigs which let us play with how the laser looked, its size, and where it was pointing.”
Alvarado selects a brawl between Ares and an army of Encom’s own Programs as another pivotal scene for his animation team. “We created digital doubles during the fight sequence where you see Ares being attacked by soldiers. At ILM, we have tools that permit us to get motion capture data integrated quickly, so we choreographed the movement alongside our animators and internal mo-cap team. I believe the filmmakers originally had a stunt performer do it, but he was only fighting maybe two or three guys, and the rest was air-fighting.” Along with adding in flying discs that caused the deresolution of Ares’s opponents, Alvarado’s team had a hand in mapping out the timing of each character’s ‘derez.’“
Scene management was important on Tron: Ares, especially for the light walls,” Alvarado notes. “In terms of animation, my role varied. People often associate animation with characters and creatures, but we’re also figuring out the timing, the choreography, and the cinematography so that we deliver a nice flow of the sequence to the director. Once that’s established, we pass it on to Jeff and all the other departments to use as a base to build upon.”
(Credit: ILM & Disney).
Going Into the Grid
Designing the Dillinger Systems Grid proved to be a monumental task for ILM’s Sydney studio. “We had a fantastic production model given to us from the client side that was visualized in real time with a neat flythrough,” Capogreco states. “That provided the basis of what we called the Motherboard, or the main facility that overlooked the whole Dillinger Grid. Once we started getting the Grid into shots, we realized it wasn’t nearly big enough for what Joachim wanted. We did a test where our layout folks put the characters on a light skimmer and drove them from one end of the Grid to the next. It turned out to be about four times too small, because they’re moving so fast. We ended up increasing the original size by a factor of two-and-a-half. It’s massive!”
Seeking to furnish the Grid with “scale and purpose,” Capogreco researched ports and military facilities as a way to subtly infuse features that would cause audiences to recognize distinct areas, such as factories and military zones, within the Dillinger Grid.
ILM relied on its expertise to know when it had to dial back the intricacy to fit the film’s setting. “Tron has a design language that’s all about shape and form – it’s not about being very busy. What I mean by that is, when you’re down at the water level, there’s an incredible amount of complexity that’s put into each shot. Every shot, to a degree, had to be designed,” Capogreco outlines. “We needed to translate what people see in the real world into Tron-like assets. What does a buoy look like in Tron? What about a crane or a shipping container?”
While the appropriate level of detail was required for scale at the surface perspective, Capogreco relays that “when we were up high, it became too busy and noisy, with many moving dots. So, we actually built two Grids. One sufficed for the wider views and was a more simplified version. Our team went in and hid much of the noise, guaranteeing the audience would at least see the shapes and silhouettes. When you’re down at water level, the geometric resolution needs to increase. Every section of the environment was fairly unique and required a huge design process to support the narrative.”
(Credit: ILM & Disney).
The Face of a Foe
Another key Grid-related component deals with the holographic avatar that Julian Dillinger projects to communicate with Ares within the Dillinger Grid. “They filmed Evan Peters saying Julian’s lines, and then we used ILM’s MEDUSA tool to generate a perfect match of Evan’s performance to incorporate into our asset,” Alvarado remembers. “Joachim and Dave asked us to experiment,” adds Capogreco, “so we tried making the eyes brighter, having no eyes at all, playing with the wireframe, and evaluating how much we wanted to see of Evan versus seeing the avatar of Evan.”
After numerous creative back-and-forths, ILM opted to stick closer to the original concept art that inspired the face’s depiction. Speaking to the experimental process, Capogreco notes, “We eventually did a cross-blend between a human skull and Evan’s face, which was important to the director. We wanted the mouth, nose, and brows to be genuinely Evan, but we also wanted to bring the creepy, evil avatar side out.” Alvarado adds, “I analyzed Evan’s eyebrows so the avatar would resemble him. Evan has a very specific and strong brow shape, but because the hologram didn’t have any eyebrows, we had to manipulate the model to make the shape of the brow a little more like Evan’s.”
(Credit: ILM & Disney).
The Vaunted Vehicles
The production built a life-sized light cycle that helped define that particular vehicle’s mechanics, but other assets – such as the light skimmer, jump jet, and drones – left room for ILM artists to rely upon their imaginations. “We studied speedboat footage for the light skimmer in an effort to get its rooster tail to match the reference,” Capogreco explains. “Finding something you can anchor to is a terrific starting point for visual effects, and then it evolves. What can we do to make this weird? I welcomed ‘weird’ in dailies. The weirder the comments, the better. It was fun to experiment in that playground. If you pause on frames in the movie, you’ll see that the flares actually have texture – they have Grid patterns. Usually, when water is on a lens they’re circular, but one of our ideas played with the notion that – when the splash hits the lens – we actually refracted cubes onto the lens.”
“The light skimmer scene was heavily influenced by older Star Wars cinematography, especially the speeder bike sequence and the Millennium Falcon exiting the Death Star as it exploded,” Alvarado notes, in reference to Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983). “We used ILM’s work on Return of the Jedi as a reference and evaluated what made those scenes so special. You may notice that Skywalker Sound even added some of the speeder bikesque sound effects to the light skimmer in some of the shots [laughs]. There’s a lot of ILM’s DNA in Tron.”
Although director Joachim Rønning wished to ground the drones that pursued the light skimmer in realism, he enjoyed Alvarado’s suggestion to have them rotate. “In the real world, the drones wouldn’t spin, but when Joachim saw them in the chase, he thought it looked great. It’s all about making everything fun for the audience.”The jump jet flown by Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) opened another creative door for the team. “
The jump jet design was never a practical build so it wasn’t as defined as the light cycle, so we were left to figure out how it would take off and fly. At first, the pieces didn’t move in an aesthetically pleasing way – it was too mechanical and simple. The director wanted the movement to be realistic, but he trusted us to make it look cool. So, we utilized tools we had originally developed for the Transformers films that let us dynamically move pieces around. When Athena gets in the jump jet, she presses a button and the pieces are sort of Transformer-y,” Alvarado professes. “Joachim loved it. If you analyze it, the movement of the pieces doesn’t necessarily make sense, but there is an element of believability to it.”
(Credit: ILM & Disney).
Assisting Ares
From the Grid to the jump jets and beyond, ILM delivered a visual effects extravaganza to Tron: Ares. However, while the vehicle assets and other prominent action sequences tend to receive the bulk of the audience’s praise, a significant portion of ILM’s assignment revolved around visual effects that are virtually invisible in the final cut. One example of this centers on Ares’s appearance throughout the beginning of the film. “For the entire Dillinger board presentation, Jared Leto was filmed without a helmet on. We were tasked with creating the visor that went over top of him. The decision to add a helmet onto Ares served the story and led to his big reveal moment,” Capogreco conveys.
The actor’s hair turned out to be a slight obstacle for ILM’s Sydney studio, as the team sought ways to cover up the parts that would have stuck out from under a helmet. “Jared had long hair that came over his costume, so we augmented parts of his collar and costume to tuck that hair back in,” Capogreco asserts. Alvarado concurs, recounting, “It also aided us in the early battle sequence, because that too was meant to be Jared Leto with no helmet. When the choice was made to use a helmet, we were able to go full CG with the character. When Ares stands up and walks over is Jared’s performance, but I don’t think people are able to tell that the other parts are full CG. Hopefully, they believe it’s a photographed suit!”
As with Julian Dillinger’s avatar, the filmmakers ensured that the Ares actor’s performance remained. “We wanted to keep Jared’s nuances in the close-up shots, but the digital double freed up Jhon for the wide and action shots,” Capogreco affirms.
(Credit: Disney).
A World of Work
As a global studio with multiple sites around the world, ILM spread its Tron: Ares responsibilities across its Sydney and Vancouver locations. “[ILM visual effects supervisor] Vincent Papaix and [ILM associate visual effects supervisor] Falk Boje at ILM’s Vancouver studio were wonderful collaborators, and Jhon often touched base with [ILM animation supervisor] Mike Beaulieu,” Capogreco underscores. “The wonderful thing about Tron: Ares is that the workflow was intended to be fairly autonomous, where we could do our own thing but still share our vehicle assets and digital doubles. Each studio took on different aspects of the film. It was nicely split out in a way that we could complement each other’s work.
“The deresolution – or the black sand effect – in the real world was an excellent example of that,” Capogreco continues. “Vancouver handled most of the end battle sequences, and they pioneered Ares’s time-out effect inside the Dillinger facility when we first see a Program turn to ash after 29 minutes. Subsequently, we handled the shots that were closer to Athena’s face by using the Vancouver team’s shot setups and adapting them to what they needed to be for the close-up.” The same held true for assets, which Vancouver required, that had been designed by ILM’s Sydney studio, such as the jump jet used for a shot where two guards land just before Athena and Ares square off towards the end of the film.
Capogreco broadly summarizes the delegation between sites, stating, “Vancouver covered the bluer and sleeker Encom Grid, and they owned the light cycle chase and the majority of the city work. On the other hand, in terms of the real world, Sydney had the mountain test site and the printing of the orange tree, as well as a substantial number of shots coming and going from the Grids. ILM’s Sydney studio was also involved with everything around the Dillinger Grid, even the on-set segment where partial sets were built. To film, they had to poke lights into the set, so we’d go in to top up the shots by augmenting roofs, set extensions, and other small cosmetic fixes here and there.”
“The biggest elements that the two studios collaborated on directly were the light walls and the tools to generate them,” Alvarado adds. “Even when we were dealing with different assets, we all needed to have light walls for the vehicles, drones, and staff weapons.” Capogreco delivers an additional shout-out to ILM StageCraft, saying, “ILM StageCraft was used for shots where you’re up in Dillinger’s office peering out. Sections of the office were built and filmed, so that’s all in-camera work. That and the mountain test site, which they shot on an ILM StageCraft volume before we went in and did extensions on top of that.”
(Credit: ILM & Disney).
Taking Pride in the Project
Reflecting on the project as a whole, Capogreco notes, “Without hesitation, I would say that Tron: Ares was one of the hardest shows I’ve done. Not just because it is such a crazy technical achievement, but because it pushed our creativity to the limit. Joachim Rønning and Dave Seager weren’t necessarily aiming for formulated shots. They were open to ideas from Jhon, Alex, and I. That’s what made Tron: Ares extra special – we went on a journey together to find the best possible shots. Joachim had a good eye for motion, and he challenged the ILM teams in Sydney and Vancouver. He kept us honest about having designs be as realistic as possible without sacrificing the ‘weird.’ He emphasized that, when you’re in the Grid, it’s okay to allow some stuff that’s strange.”
When asked for his thoughts on the film, Alvarado replies, “Although Tron: Ares looks real and we were going for realism, there is a large amount of it that is computer graphics. For example, the city that Vancouver built for the light-cycle chase and the fighter-jet flight seems so realistic that I don’t think people realize a ton of it is computer graphics. It demonstrates the artistry at ILM, and the love and care we put into the details to make Ares as believable as possible. Every pixel, every camera, and every full-CG shot had to live in that world. Everyone gave it their best, and it looks fantastic. There were so many full-CG shots, and they are as good as the live-action photography. It’s a testament to the team.”
In a year where visual effects-heavy releases have been plentiful, Capogreco considers Tron: Ares to be a standout, concluding, “Tron: Ares is so different and out there. It’s not something you can say you’ve seen much of before, and I think that’s a feat for ILM to be proud of as a studio. I’ve been catching up on movies, and they all seem to have similar themes. That’s what’s quite cool about this one – it’s bananas. Celebrate it!”
Read more about the ILM Art Department’s work on Tron: Ares here on ILM.com.
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Jay Stobie (he/him) is a writer, author, and consultant who has contributed articles to ILM.com, Skysound.com, Star Wars Insider, StarWars.com, Star Trek Explorer, Star Trek Magazine, and StarTrek.com. Jay loves sci-fi, fantasy, and film, and you can learn more about him by visiting JayStobie.com or finding him on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms at @StobiesGalaxy.
