Did you know immediately, off the bat, how you were going to do the lightsuits?

Christine Clark, associate costume designer for Tron: Legacy: The answer is a resounding no. We were completely freaked out by it. I think the collective response was, Oh my god." We had no idea what technology would be able to satisfy what the filmmakers neededlight that can move and stretch and not break. We could have put light on something inanimate, but to put it on moving bodies with a self-contained power source had never been done before.

Why did you have to put lights in the suits at all? Why not just do it in post?

There were a lot of reasons. One of them had to do with the 3D filming. The double optic of that makes it incredibly hard to do post-effects in light afterwardsparticularly to the degree that we were going to do it on the suits.

How did you research to find the right technology?

We contracted three special-effects companies in Los Angeles to research and try out any available technologies that might be remotely applicable to what we were doing. And we found a lot of things that didn't work! We did some camera tests and things were falling apartit was tragic. But eventually we did find one viable material that wasn't quite right for us, but we knew if we worked with the company that we could get something we could use.

And what was the material?

It's called Polylight, an elastomer-based, polymer flexible light that was being used in Asia. We started playing with it, and basically rebaked the cake over and over and over again. We made the material wider and bigger, stretchier, and in custom colors.

The lights are electroluminescence. Sort of like flat lights, but that's rigid, glossy stuff; we used a silk-screening, screen-printing process, so nothing is rigid. There are phosphorescent metal powders that go in part of the printing process and that's what conducts electricity. From the first camera tests until we started building probably took us 2.5 months. And then we had 3 minutes left to make the suits. When we figured out how we were going to do it, we had so little time.

Let's talk a little bit about how you made the suits themselves. Did you take scans of the actors?

We did digitally scan everybodyfull body scans of our cast and high-density head scans to create the helmets off of.

How did you take the suit from a computer design to a physical thing?

We started with Photoshop illustrations of everything. When we got the body scans, we took our 2D illustrations and made them 3D illustrations on top of the actors' bodies. It's like topographical mapping. Then we did mini outputs called prints12-inch-scale models in resin. We use those to make sure all the details are right.

Then we created an output that's life-size. We broke it in halftorsos and legsand did a computer numerical cutting (CNC) of that in foam. So we take the whole suit, all the data, and we put a big block of foam in the machine, and it cut out the shape of the suit. Then we made molds off of that, and injected our molds with foam to make the suits. And that life-size outputting process has never been done on this scale before. No one's ever been able to successfully do a foam latex suit with rapid outputting. We're blazing trails on Tron.

There are other parts on the suits. Are they also made of foam latex?

Yeah, almost all of our principle suits are 100 percent foam latex. Even things that seem like they're rigid shapes are usually foam, just for mobility. We play all kinds of tricks.

How did you pull off the self-contained power?

First, we figured out how to conceal the wires and the wiring harnesses in the foam. So that's all embedded in the suits, and there are connectors that we pulled through the foam and attach to each of the lamps. Then we designed custom inverters to get them as small as we could, and to get as much power out of them as we could. One inverter was the size of half a Snickers bar, and some of the suits took two invertersfor instance, Clu's character at the beginning took more than one inverter. And then we used seven little tiny lithium-ion batteries, together about the size of a deck of cards, for each inverter. And this is all buried inside the hubs in the identity discs on the backs of the suits.

So do you have to apply the lights, or are they woven in?

e dressed them in the suits firstwhich took about 45 minutes, because it's like putting on a wetsuit times a millionand then we would lay the lights into little channels in the foam suits and secure them with Velcro.

How did you turn them on?

It was all done wirelessly. We used the remotes that you would use for your key entry for your car to turn the power on. And we had a computer system that monitored the batteries' energy levels, so we knew who would have to be changed out at the next take. The batteries would only power the suits for about 12 minutes, so we would do a couple of takes and then have to change the batteries again.

How many suits did you make?

We had several kinds of suits that we made, but we made 150 of the foam ones with this kind of lighting. But for our background extras we used off-the-shelf electroluminescent flat light that was a little more economical, and we made a little over 130 of those.

How many parts do the suits have?

Everyone was definitely at least in two piecesthere's always at least a top and a bottom. The gloves, boots and discs are separate. But a suit could be anywhere from six to 20 parts.

Wow, 20 parts?

Some of them are tricky! Those black guard costumes have a lot of batons and grenades.

The suits are awesome. Before, it was just spandex unitards. And if you've looked at Tron guy

Oh, Jay. Yes, we're very familiar with him. Somebody asked me if I thought the Tron guy was going to do an updated version of the suit.

Maybe you should make him a suit and send it to him!

No, I want to see what he does. I'm terribly excited to see what Jay is going to do with the contemporary version of the Tron suit! I hope he does it. I'll be kind of insulted if he doesn't do one.

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