Prologue designed the main title credits that play over the opening sequence depicting Ares’ construction. One of the primary challenges was animating and coloring the typography so it remained legible against a predominantly red, flashing background. The team conducted extensive font research and experimented with multiple animation, color, and compositing approaches to arrive at the final iteration. The credits ultimately became an extension of the film’s visual language, treating typography as a living system rather than static text, seamlessly integrated into the film’s opening sequence.
TRON : Ares
Designed @ Prologue
For over a year, Prologue Films collaborated on visual contributions for TRON: Ares, designing sequences that introduce the world, establish the identity of Ares, and evolve the visual language of AI within the TRON universe. While our finalized work in the film was limited to the Main Title Logo, credits, and the introduction TV scene, our original designs and concept art span multiple narrative sequences alongside an extensive research and experimentation phase exploring how artificial intelligence learns, organizes information, and perceives the world when visualized beyond code.
Logo Design Process
Designed to be traveled through, the TRON: Ares logo functions as both typography and architecture. This process breaks down how from, scale, and motion were engineered to act as a gateway into the Grid.
Flynn TV Intro Design Process
The film opens with a shot of an old television playing an interview with Kevin Flynn, bridging the Legacy of TRON with the emergence of Ares.This process explores how live-action footage, 3D-design, and subtle compositing were combined to create a moment that feels grounded, archival, and distinctly of this world. The television was shot in live action by director Joachim Rønning. Two paths were available; we could rotoscope and integrate the altered interview footage within the filmed TV, or recreate the TV and camera motion for a fully 3D sequence. Prologue moved forward with the latter which offered us more control and a greater ability to ensure it felt seamless as the camera moves toward the screen . The camera then enters the television, transitioning into the Grid, where a sequence of newscasters brings the audience up to speed on the events following TRON: Legacy.
Newscaster Sequence Design Process
Though Prologue finished this sequence for Tron: Ares, ultimately another company’s animation developed in parallel to ours took its place in the final cut. This sequence was designed to be a curious and investigative journey, as if the camera itself were an audience member moving through a dense stream of information. Newscasters fly past alongside images, archival footage, and cultural touchstones, contextualizing the evolution of technology over the past decade.The sequence bridges the real world and the Grid, illustrating how AI has advanced and how Ares came to exist. Live-action newscaster footage was animated and placed into a fully realized 3D environment, constructing a digital world built from information and data. Prologue created many different designs referencing the RGB phosphor triads in the original CRT Television, AI image analysis, and glass cubes filled with information just like the cubes that make up the programs on the Grid.
Abstract Experiments Design Process
Prologue’s early 3D concepts pushed beyond literal interpretation. These abstract studies tested rhythm, texture, and motion to discover new ways of representing intelligence, learning, and emergence. These experiments helped our creative team define how AI is visualized throughout our contributions to the film.
AI-Generated Visualizations Design Process
All of Prologue’s final designs and 3D animations were made by our team of exceptional artists. And alongside traditional design methods, out of sheer curiosity to see how one of today’s real AI might visualize themselves, Prologue experimented with AI-generated imagery to develop beautiful abstract technical imagery. As our 3D concept art progressed, AI was used again to visualize theoretical camera motion through the environments of the concept stills so that our editorial department could quickly craft a sense of pace and acceleration that could inspire the speed of the actual 3D camera movements thus saving render power and time so that the 3D artists could create the final animations faster with fewer iterations.
Code-Based Simulations Design Process
All of Prologue’s final designs and 3D animations were made by our team of exceptional artists. And alongside traditional design methods, out of sheer curiosity to see how one of today’s real AI might visualize themselves, Prologue experimented with AI-generated imagery to develop beautiful abstract technical imagery. As our 3D concept art progressed, AI was used again to visualize theoretical camera motion through the environments of the concept stills so that our editorial department could quickly craft a sense of pace and acceleration that could inspire the speed of the actual 3D camera movements thus saving render power and time so that the 3D artists could create the final animations faster with fewer iterations.
Network Universe Design Process
These concept animations focus on the massive scale and connectivity of Ares’ fully developed consciousness and processing power. Modes, pathways, and expanding systems were developed to represent Ares’ internal universe, where information is constantly reorganizing and recombining.
Machine Learning – Data Cubes Design Process
This film’s focus on Artificial Intelligence provided us with an opportunity as well as a challenge to imagine how AI might process information and how that process could be visualized in a stylized, cinematic way. This turned into an exploration of data as physical structure. Information is visualized as modular units, forming systems that reflect accumulation, memory, and transformation. What sets Ares apart from the other Dillinger programs is explored here as these cubes contain not only Ares’ memories of fighting inside the Grid but of all of the martial, tactical, leadership, and ultimately worldly information that Dillinger allows his AI to scrape from the internet and incorporate into its identity.
Machine Learning – Decision Tree Design Process
To visualize how Ares processes choices and consequences in an earlier extended cut of his training sequence, we explored decision trees as spatial systems. This reel shows how branching logic, hierarchy, and flow were translated into a cinematic visual language, moving from simple cause and effect and weighing between several options to an elaborate and nearly organic neural tree and root system calculating thousands and millions of compounding variables to chart a path and ultimately reach the desired outcome.
Ares Core Identity Design Process
Ares learns to be an apex soldier for Dillinger through a brutal training montage of repeated destruction, rebirth, and adaptation, the skills of which evolve and become more sophisticated with each death. Earlier cuts of this sequence were far more complex and delved more deeply into visualizing Ares’ cognition and identity. A central goal in our concept designs for this sequence was to create a symbol that represented Ares and could be deployed across multiple user interfaces throughout the film. This process examines how form, motion, and structure were developed to give Ares a visual identity that feels intentional, evolving, and inherently machine-driven. As Ares is born, dies, and is reborn, each Core of his identity falls apart and reforms to be better armored and more complex than that which came before.
