Tag Archives: Eric Barba

“Tron” at 30: How Art Center Helped Power the Grid

A tender moment from "Tron," which this year celebrates its 30th anniversary.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of Disney’s Tron, the movie which introduced a generation to light cycles, identity discs and a glowing spandex-clad Jeff Bridges. It was also the first time most filmgoers marveled at computer-generated special effects.

The history and evolution of Tron wouldn’t be the same without the work of a number of members of the Art Center community who were involved in the groundbreaking film, its 2010 sequel Tron: Legacy and the current Disney XD animated series Tron: Uprising.

To celebrate three decades of “the grid,” let’s take a look at how Syd Mead TRAN ’59, Eric Barba TRAN ’92 and current Entertainment Design student Annis Naeem helped shaped Tron’s digital frontier. Continue reading →

A Legacy Revisited: Art Center Alumnus Eric Barba Envisions the World of Tron

For Art Center alumnus Eric Barba, things didn’t seem like they could get any better after he won an Oscar for his groundbreaking special effects work on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. That is, until he got the gig overseeing the special effects for Tron: Legacy, opening this weekend.

Courtesy of Disney

For Benjamin Button, Barba was tasked with making Brad Pitt appear older. For Tron: Legacy, his challenge was the opposite: to make a present-day Jeff Bridges appear as he did in the 1982 original. And, it had to appear authentic. Add to that the intense pressure of a cult-status 1982 film Tron (visualized by another Art Center alum, Syd Mead, who we also spoke to this week), and Barba had his work cut out for him.

Barba has been with the SoCal-based Digital Domain visual production studio for 13 years, and like many of the top directors he collaborates with, he’s equally comfortable working in film or advertising. He started at Digital Domain as a digital artist on The Fifth Element and CG supervisor on Supernova before rising to visual effects supervisor for David Fincher’s Zodiac.

As we count down to the opening of Tron: Legacy, the Dotted Line caught up with Barba to talk about his work as visual effects supervisor on this much-anticipated movie, his work and, of course, Art Center.

Dotted Line: How was working on the new Tron film different from others you’ve worked on?
Eric Barba: This was the most difficult project I’ve ever done, for many reasons. It was by far the most challenging. The work we had done on Benjamin Button was considered the holy grail of special effects because we were aging a human face, which hadn’t been done before. The [Jeff Bridges] character Clu pushes that envelope so far, and so much faster, than we expected. We didn’t know that these sorts of effects [such as portraying a decades-younger Bridges] were even possible to do. And working in 3D was new for me, too.

Dotted Line: What are the different considerations when working in 3D?
Barba: It’s incredibly challenging technically, because we’re still in the early stages of learning how to shoot 3D from a how-the-camera-works standpoint. I like to joke that the camera we used to film this will be in a museum at some point as a relic, because if you look at it, it’s actually two cameras strapped together.

And because of this there are a lot of technical challenges and mechanical imperfections, lens imperfections and the like. You have to continuously fix things and put stuff back together. For example, when we’re trying to shoot two actors playing a disc game, if they don’t stand in the correct space on a 50-foot screen, then the shot is ruined. All the techniques we use for tracking—making sure our CG and our studio camera line up—have to be rewritten because they have to be much, much more accurate for 3D. And you have to render everything twice, so it’s twice the disk space. Then you have to have development systems to look at it and judge it. It definitely raises the bar as far as technical difficulty.

Continue reading →

In Case You Missed It

As you know, there’s always something going on when it comes to Art Center alumni, students and faculty. Some of the latest:

  • Alumna and painter Theresa Paden is on a mission to save horses: Ventura County Star

    Theresa Paden

  • Visual effects supervisor and Art Center alum Eric Barba talks about the upcoming sci-fi extravaganza Tron: Legacy: Cnet
  • Francis Pollara is producer, founder and chief executive of Ladeson Productions—and also still a student at Art Center. La Canada Valley Sun
  • Broadcast Cinema alum Hilton Carter talks about his new short, Moth, and music video for Baltimore musicians including Blaqstarr:  Baltimore Sun
  • Pasadena Federal Credit Union unveils new 90-square-foot mural, “Building Pasadena,” painted by alumnus Jerry Ortega: Pasadena Star-News
  • Art Center alumna Denise Assad has done it all: industrial design, transportation design, public relations, advertising and now, baking: Brand X
  • An electric concept car created by Clemson University students and dubbed “Deep Orange” will be making an appearance at Art Center’s Car Classic (Art Center students collaborated on the design and styling): Fast Company
  • And speaking of Car Classic, it’s coming up Oct. 17: Car Classic ’10