Video Blog: Tron Legacy Set Visit

Earlier this year, I posted a brief Tron Legacy set visit preview, accompanied by a couple interviews we conducted on set with the cast and crew: Jeff Bridges, who reprises his role as Kevin Flynn in the Tron sequel, Steven Lisberger, the writer/director/creator of the original Tron, who is on board for Tron Legacy as a producer, writer, and actor, and Garrett Hedlund, the star of Tron Legacy, who plays Kevin Flynn's son Sean, who goes into the world of Tron in search of his long lost father.

Today, I'm finally able to post a 40-minute set visit video blog that Frosty from Collider and I recorded immediately after returning to the hotel from the set. As you might expect, this was recorded quite some time ago — before trailers, Comic-Con, footage — the movie was not yet titled Tron: Legacy, and still featured the horrible working title TR2N. But even so, we got to see a lot and learn a lot on set, and we present some information which has remained secret, lock and key, until now. Hit the jump to watch the video blog.

The day after the world learned of Michael Jackson's death, I found myself in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada revisiting my 1980's childhood. Its not what it sounds like. I was on the set of a sequel to a film I had first seen 27 years prior. If you had told me as a kid that I would someday have a chance to enter the world of Tron, I wouldn't have believed you.

But standing in a giant lounge called the "End of Line" club, consisting of glass floors and black and white lights, I watched Jeff Bridges reprise his role as Kevin Flynn. And while it wasn't filmed on the top floor of the highest building in the evolved world inside the computer, you certainly wouldn't know it walking around the giant and elaborate set. And that was a surprise — a big surprise.

When I received the invitation to visit the set of Tron Legacy, I had assumed that most of the production was to be filmed on green screen stages using performance capture and tennis balls on sticks. I could not have been more wrong. While on set I witnessed dozens of extras, all wearing real, glowing, rubber suits. An action scene took place with actors wielding real-life glowing light discs, which look just like you would imagine them to look if they actually existed.

I'm still not quite sure what happened in the action scene that played out, but I knew one thing – it looked cool. And not the fake, manufactured, trying too hard to be cool, but instead — authentically cool. And not only that, I could see it in front of me, without the help of computer generated magic. And better yet, I watched it 3D. Wearing special 3D glasses, I watched playback on the big flat screen monitors on set.

Watch the Video Blog now below:

0:00 – Starts off spoiler free

5:20 – we start really talking

10:00 – The boardroom and concept art. We talk about the new vehicles

13:00 – The costumes

15:00 – We talk about how it's the end of June 2009 when we are recording the video blog and Michael Jackson had died the day before

15:30 – The End of the Line Club and practical sets

19:35 – The costumes and suits

21:30 – Filming in 3D and what was that like to watch

23:30 – We talk about the props and weapons

26:00 – The look of the movie

30:00 – The rules of the Tron world

33:00 – We argue about the merits of Speed Racer

34:00 – The things Sean Bailey said the film needed

37:00 – What if one of us died...you'll need to watch this to understand. We lost our minds when we got to this point