43 years after the first “Tron” movie sped into theaters, the grid has once again reopened in “Tron: Ares.” The third film in the franchise follows Ares (Jared Leto), an intelligent computer program who begins to question his orders and directives from CEO Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), setting him on a collision course into the real world to find Eve Kim (Greta Lee), the current CEO of Encom. As both Encom and Dillinger Systems are in a race to find Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges)’s permanence code, the lines between software programs and reality begin to blur.
For production designer Darren Gilford, coming back 15 years after working as the production designer on “Tron: Legacy” offered the opportunity to revisit ideas that had been scrapped in the pre-production process for director Joseph Kosinski’s original sequel to the 2010 film. “There were a lot of things that carried over,” reveals Gilford. “Joe wanted to be [the sequel] to be more based in the real world, and the Dillinger grid was always there from the beginning. We started that in 2015 or 2016, and I had started the earliest concept art back then with a [different] team of concept artists and an art department. I was able to go back with Joachim [Rønning] and harvest some of those key elements.”
During a chase scene between Eve, Ares, and Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith), various life-size Dillinger lightcycles were created for the actors to ride on, alongside proxy motorcycles. Gilford explains that the bikes had to appear military-esque and practical, while also showing the aesthetic of Encom’s rival corporation.
“As we were developing the movie and learning about what the characters have to do, we had to figure out what are the rules of the light cycle. The most important things were that the light cycle had to have two critical riding positions and an aggressive high speed position, which is my favorite look of the bike. When the full canopy is deployed and the backpacks deployed, it really feels like the rider is enveloped and engulfed, like man and machine,” he says.
To program the bikes, Gilford and the production design team programmed special energy sources to keep the lightcycles running throughout filming. “We created a power source in the middle of the bike which was a yellow gyro that spins and animates,” says Gilford. “Throughout how the bike is moving, that telegraphs some of the motion of the bike. That yoke is the heart of the bike and what the hinges are, so the front fork and the front wheel actually rotate around that energy source.”
After working on both “Legacy” and “Ares,” Gilford says that “Tron: Ares” was the first time he got to create a practical light cycle for the franchise. “On “Legacy,” we never actually built a real bike until the end. We just built them for marketing. We built the original bikes [digitally] and we built gimbals and rigs for Garrett [Hedlund]. But for this film, Joachim was adamant that he wanted real bikes on the street being towed in any capacity we could. I have a transportation design background and I was a car designer originally, so it was an honor and a privilege for the opportunity to get to design these vehicles,” he says.
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