TRON: Ares — Vancouver City Build

I’m happy to finally share some of my work from TRON: Ares at ILM.

I had the chance to lead a big part of the full CG Vancouver city build, which was a pretty special project for us. Since ILM’s Vancouver office is here, we were basically building a stylized version of the city right outside our window. That made the whole thing feel very close to home.

The city was built from the ground up — literally. It was a huge environment that had to support many key sequences and work across a lot of different shots. Many artists were involved and later relied on that build to run their own shots, so it had to be flexible, consistent, and solid enough to hold up in wide aerial views as well as street-level action shots, from different angles and distances.

A lot of the challenge was finding the right balance between recognizable Vancouver and the more stylized, cinematic language of TRON. It was a lot of problem-solving, back and forth, and collaboration with other departments, but seeing it all come together was extremely rewarding.

Huge thanks to my supervisors Mickaël Ricciotti, as well as Folk Boje and Vincent Papaix for their guidance and support throughout the project.

Special thanks to Chris Burnes for modeling many buildings and to Julien Robyn for collaborating on some of the districts. Thank you as well to everyone involved! Many other artists were also running their shots based on this environment, so it was truly a team effort from start to finish.

You can watch ILM’s original breakdown here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Yru0AlLt28