art & design
Q & Art: Tron: Legacy VFX Art Director Ben Procter

December 14, 2010

Ben Procter liked to draw robots and geometric structures when he was a kid growing up in New York City. And now as an adult, he’s creating fictional futuristic worlds for the rest of us to experience. CulturePOP caught up with the VFX art director of this month’s Tron: Legacy at his desk in Los Angeles.

CP: Can you explain what a VFX art director does exactly?

BP: VFX can mean lots of things, but in this film I was on the production side, working under the production designer, and my responsibility was dealing with the large aspects of the interface between the physical sets and the virtual extensions of those sets. And because there are so many environments in Tron: Legacy that are completely virtual, I was also leading a smaller team working purely on those elements.

CP: What is important about this movie, design-wise?

BP: We [had] a vehicle and product designer for a production designer, and an architect for a director, which is a unique combination… and [they were] uniquely suited to designing this kind of world, where — number one — design is really important. These guys held everything to the highest true design aesthetic — not necessarily a Hollywood design aesthetic but the aesthetic coming from the “real” design world of real architecture, real product, all this cutting-edge stuff that held the movie to that level of cool. Not just cool enough for a 14-year-old boy to enjoy an action movie, but a design statement unto itself. They were ambitious about it, and they had just the right aesthetic chops.

CP: When you create the virtual landscape of a film, what’s the first step for you?

BP: Literally the first step on my first week was my production designer asked me to make a global map of the Tron world, which included not only the hexagonal shape of the city but also this notion that there might be a moat around it, a kind of void: where the mountainscapes were, where a safe house could be located — figuring out the overall scale of things.

CP: What’s in your artist’s tool kit?

BP: Usually I just have a mess of papers on my desk. I don’t have any rituals or anything… we travel fast and light in this art department world, because we’re all freelancers and we switch movies all the time, so we never know where we’re going to be working. I’m on a Windows machine. I use Softimage for 3D, and my 2D painting and texture work is done in Photoshop. Other than that — Oreos and coffee. That’s my production sin: Whenever things get busy and stressful, I always go to Oreos.

CP: What do you hope to achieve in these movies?

BP: There’s an aspirational aspect to fantasy environments, where it compels the viewer to want to experience it directly. So I guess the ultimate compliment would be that somebody wants to spend time in your world.

CP: When did you realize that you wanted to work in design?

BP: I had always been a kid who drew a lot, but the kinds of drawing I did always tended toward — in terms of my natural leanings — things rather than people or animals. I was always doing drawings that had a more geometric, more architectural, more product-design-related aesthetic to them. Robots were a huge thing. I did a bunch of robot design for the Transformers movies. I think I realized early on I had a passion for technology and hardware and architecture and the kinds of things that ultimately are what have gone into doing sci-fi design in movies.

CP: Do you remember what visual art excited you as a kid?

BP: I had a poster pack of Star Wars illustrations. I can’t remember how old I was, but I had The Empire Strikes Back illustrations on my wall forever and ever, and I just loved them. I didn’t know anything about illustration or how they were achieved. I just thought they were really cool.

CP: What kind of art is in your house?

BP: I have a Spanish-style house filled with ethnic knickknacks from Morocco, Greece, Portugal, and India. It’s more of an eclectic-Spanish-clutter design aesthetic. I find it enjoyable, relaxing — that stuff makes me feel like I’m on vacation in the South of France.

CP: Who was your biggest artistic influence?

BP: Syd Mead is a huge one, and I’m not just saying that because of Tron. For all of us who deal with futurism and tech and hardware stuff, he’s just the old man of the genre, the acknowledged master, and we all study his stuff. I saw Syd’s visual futurist title on Blade Runner and I thought, “Who’s that guy, and how did he get that title, visual futurist — coolest job title ever!” In that one moment I kind of realized, Well, maybe I could do that. Right now I’m back to exactly where I wanted to be when I was 13 looking at Blade Runner.

Kate Meyers is a freelance writer and mom in Louisville, Colorado. Her work appears in Parade, O, InStyle, Cooking Light, and The Livestrong Quarterly. She learned everything she knows about art from her mother, Natalie.

Image: Courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc.