David Seager: The VFX of Tron: Ares

This interview was conducted in partnership with VIEW Conference. David Seager was a featured speaker at VIEW Conference 2025 in Turin, Italy.

Since 1982, Tron has set itself apart with its groundbreaking visuals–each installment a true spectacle of science fiction. The original film became a cult classic with its extensive use of CGI, and it took nearly thirty years for the sequel to materialize in theaters. Legacy was ahead of its time, once again shocking the audience by showcasing a new and improved digital world, paired with outstanding costumes and futuristic beats by none other than Daft Punk. Fifteen years later, the franchise is back with Tron: Ares, this time taking the Grid into the real world. The film is an outstanding achievement in visual effects–the blend of practical and digital is incredibly seamless and immersive, perfectly serving the story. ILM production visual effects supervisor David Seager explained the importance of honoring the foundation of Tron before breaking new ground: “It’s a very conscious decision of what areas you’re going to be very true to the previous and what areas you’re going to break out. In our case, the big thing that separates the film is obviously that a lot of it takes place in the real world, but at the same time, we really tried to pick up where Legacy left off. We had the same production designer on it … it’s one of those things that ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Then we had our visit to the old Grid as well, and that was really a passion project.”

Manufacturing Grid objects and programs into our reality utilizing Dillinger’s new lasers was inspired by modern 3D printing technology. Seager and team “wanted to expand upon it, and the director was very interested in it being industrial because Dillinger Corporation isn’t a games company anymore like ENCOM was–they are a military supply,” adding sparks and mechanical movement while surrounding each entity in 3D print-like support structures that would crumble to reveal the temporary program to the real world.

To further ground these objects, director Joachim Rønning decided early on that the generation of a light cycle from the baton was going to break the fabric of reality a little too far, so each vehicle would be printed already assembled to be physically accurate. On the other hand, the derezzing (or timeout) had to be approached differently in the real world–introducing crumbled ceramic-like material as opposed to the Grid’s perfect cubes. These programs are not flesh and blood, so David Seager explained that “it was decided really early that we didn’t want it to be grotesque. Would they have a skull? Would they have a spine and a rib cage? Would they have organs? Instead, we wanted it to feel synthetic. As they crumble, we introduced a little bit of a hot core energy which is similar to what we do in the Grid, almost as if there’s a furnace inside of them, like a beating heart. Just a way to have both ends of the spectrum in one film, so you can see in the digital world how clean and shiny the deaths are and then how dirty and grimy they feel in the real world.”

The light cycle chase between Eve, Ares, and Athena is the perfect marriage of practical and digital effects. Seager proudly revealed that the sequence was shot on location as much as possible: “We didn’t want to start from a place that was overly reliant on digital methods … We wanted to shoot real photography. For the light cycle chase, that meant a lot of planning. It wasn’t that dissimilar from us shooting a motorcycle chase in a spy film. By having an actual practical bike representing the light cycle, it becomes the pivot for the entire action–the stunt team can coordinate the driving, the camera operation team is focused on operating based upon that bike. I say that is in comparison to if the road was just empty and everyone’s pretending to do a thing … The falseness kind of bleeds in when you’re doing that, whereas if you’re shooting it for real, looking at a real bike, it really just grounds you in that reality.” In the end, the filmmakers blended together the entire spectrum of shots–location, blue screen, and LED–trying to stay as real as possible.

Another fascinating fact about the chase shoot was the practicality of the tight turns that are iconic to the light cycles. Tron: Legacy had bigger arcing turns compared to the magical 90 degree ones of the original film, and since Ares’ cycles were shot with real bikes, the task was up to the stunt team. Seager shared, “How extreme do we want to be? We sat there with the stunt drivers challenging them: ‘We want to do this as real as possible, give us your best go at a 90 degree turn.’ It’s a hard break in a skid and then a rapid acceleration, not this instantaneous turn.” Another challenge was incorporating the light wall to the cycles, something that was very much inspired by Legacy but Seager confessed required quite a bit of planning for bringing this additional level of complexity into the chase.

To take the fight scenes to the next level, Tron: Ares introduced the light staff, a deadly weapon capable of producing ribbon-like light walls. The execution of the choreography quickly became a challenge in and of itself: “We talked about putting things in place so people duck under, but it’s dynamic … you don’t want to have all these C-stands with different shapes so they can’t feel as open to do their stunt work. In the end we tried to work with them and visualize where those [light ribbons] were going to be, but there were also cases where it was intentionally in their choreography.” Seager added that Rønning wanted the ribbons to be as long as possible, but to avoid getting the fighters encased in the walls, the team “ended up with a workflow where the light ribbons had a lifespan so that they would only last for a couple seconds.”

Ares’ visit to Flynn’s old server was a nostalgic moment that finally connected Tron’s old and new style in a cohesive way. David Seager compared the surreal moment to Dorothy going to Oz or a character made in Unreal Engine tossed into an 8-bit game. He explained, “I like to call it a ‘VFX haiku’ … it was about trying to be minimal. A lot of times modern rendering techniques and tools by default often do all of the modern good things–motion blur, reflections, advanced shading. If you turn all of that on, it immediately doesn’t look like Tron, and so it became a fun exercise to really dissect the original film.” For example, “You turn [motion blur] on and the Grid lines on the ground become these blurry streaks, then you turn it off and it’s these crisp, stuttering lines, but that’s what the original looked like! They didn’t have reflections. They couldn’t do ray tracing back then. Another example is the desaturation of the faces … There’s a scene when Flynn is in a room that’s quite purple and the interactive light on his face is still purple, but his face is black and white, where in the original film it would have been just all black and white.” Seager admitted that it was an interesting exercise in creating an authentic experience while adding a bit of polish to the environment (depth of field included). The team affectionately coined their effort “1982+”.

David Seager ended the interview reflecting on technology and the next visual evolution in the Tron franchise. Would we have to wait another 10-15 years to be wowed in the theater once again? “Ultimately for me it always comes down to a story. Visually, I will always be up for the challenge. I tend to think you don’t need to wait for a specific technological breakthrough to do it. It’s more about the story you want to tell and where you want to go with these characters. We’ll see where it goes, hopefully it stays alive.” Catch Tron: Ares again when it arrives on digital December 2!