Tron suits
“A company called Quantum built the suits working with the costume designer. The challenge there was creating these costumes that were form fitting and looked great but also lit up. They created these costumes with small light strips and they literally had inverters on their backs, they had batter packs. They were controlled wirelessly and right before we would roll and Joe would yell, “Action!” you’d hear, “Suits on!” and the suits would all light up. Because they had to put in a lot of power into the suits to get them to light up like we needed them to, they would get hot. We’d have to cool them down in between takes. We were constantly swapping out batteries or lamps, it was a lot of work. In between takes they had to use these mini fans on the inverters to cool them down because they sit right there on your back.”
The Grid
“The original idea that Joe had given the art department was that Kevin Flynn, working with Clu and Tron had built this new world on a server from scratch. The Grid itself is a flat, glass-like surface with a grid pattern on it. We mapped everything out. They had a map of the entire city, which is really beautiful to look at design wise. It inspired all of us. We used their map as an outline and to build the models, but then we also had to make it look like it had aged and grown over the years.
Joe had very specific ideas of how he wanted this one to look. The idea was that this server was set up independently from the other film and the design all stems from Kevin Flynn. The first film had those sensibilities, and then the art department was inspired by the design of the first film. The suits themselves are a huge homage to the original suits.”