How Tron: Legacy Light Cycle Designers Made the Sexiest, Coolest Vehicle Ever [Video]

Designer Darren Gilford hoped the Light Cycle in Tron: Legacy could be the ” sexiest, coolest vehicle you could imagine.” Some of us definitely think he got his wish, but how did the beautiful machine go from idea to reality?

Designer Darren Gilford hoped the Light Cycle, the smooth speeder that swirls trails of neon in Tron: Legacy, stands out as the ” sexiest, coolest vehicle you would imagine.” Gilford, Daniel Simon, and a team of concept artists tried to circumvent alienating fans of the 1982 cult classic by drawing inspiration from the bike’s original design, a boxy pixilated vehicle that was severely hampered by 1980s technology. Three decades later, the Light Cycle has morphed into a glossy prowler, with hubless wheels and loops of light that blur where the bike ends and the body begins.

Fast Company spoke with Gilford in regards to the original film, designing the Light Cycle, and the restrictions of engineering concept vehicles. 

The light cycle is so central to this film’s hype, from the toys to the trailers to the video games. What was the design process like for the vehicle?

There’s so much back story. I first met [director] Joe Kosinki almost four years ago. There was this very secretive little project coming through Disney, kind of an evidence-of-concept. They wanted to do a test to peer what Joe’s vision was-they wanted to peer how this piece of the puzzle can be handled-and it was the Light Cycle sequence.

I worked with Joe very early on. There was another artist who had taken a pass at the Light Cycle, and I had my own ideas where I needed to take his design. I started doing 2-D conceptual drawings. Obviously, we are harking back to the original movie and to Syd Mead, who is a legend and a god in my business, and in some ways, my education. Syd had done Light Cycle sketches for the first movie, and he had originally done an open-cockpit design, where you will discover the rider on top of a pretty surface. But back within the day, the technology was so rudimentary, they simply couldn’t render a whole body. The rendering horsepower was so limited, and that they had to do an absolutely enclosed bike-that closed canopy design.

We wanted to bridge that gap, and we knew we needed a motorcycle that grew into the rider. That you could see the rider-you can see his forms and his shapes, but blur the lines between where the bike ends and the rider begins.

Light is such a very important aspect of everything in Tron-how light wraps around things, how light carries your eyes from the front to the back of the vehicle. Light was the glue that held everything together.

One of the things I’ve always been fascinated with is hubless wheel design. I loved that concept. For engineering purposes, it’s next to impossible to really pull that off. I did some sketches, and it worked. One profile sketch really early on showed just a mild line on a depressing background with a gloomy bike. The light line was style of the silhouette, and you saw the circles of the wheels and one light line that connected the rider between the two wheels. That was the sketch that locked the design in.

The bike for the test was maybe 60% of how there from what you notice now. Once the test went well and debuted at Comic-Con, that was the turning point for us. Jointly, Joe and I found this book called Cosmic Motors from this new conceptual artist, Daniel Simon, this automotive designer who was the first guy I’ve ever seen that was conceptualizing in 3-D. He is a fantastic 3-D artist. We reached out and made a commitment that we would have liked him to work on this movie. I might say I got the Light Cycle 60% of ways there, but I will’t take credit-it was Daniel’s final design. His sense of styling and automotive history and detail really brought this design to fruition. I might say Daniel’s design is maybe one of the crucial iconic vehicles ever dropped at screen.

Part of the design process should be to make the vehicle cool, right? I believe back to the speeder in Return of the Jedi or the Delorean in Back to the longer term-iconic vehicles that individuals like to have whether or not they actually exist.

Of course. I was an automotive designer at school, and getting a chance to work on something as iconic as the Light Cycle is an absolute dream come true. I needed to make the sexiest, coolest vehicle you would imagine. The luxurious of designing vehicles like it is that we’re not beholden to the restrictions of engineering and standard road requirements. We’ve the posh of fidgeting with the entire elements just purely visual, making them as fun as we are able to.

You’re not beholden to the bounds of engineering, but did you certainly build a mild Cycle?

We did. We actually didn’t come to be building it for the movie, we ended up building it for Comic-Con for marketing purposes. But I sure would’ve prefer to have built one for the movie.

How did you update the vehicle without alienating the cult following of the original film?

That was another huge challenge. There’s another retro Light Cycle in our movie that bridges the space between the most recent and original design. This is Flynn’s closed canopy bike. It’s like his California Ferrari that he’s been keeping within the garage for twenty years. That you can absolutely see Syd Mead’s design, nevertheless it’s been updated. And with our new bike, it creates a timeline. In case you put those three bikes together, you will find the progress-the lineage of Tron.

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This post is tagged: beautiful machine, cockpit design, concept artists, concept vehicles, conceptual drawings, original design, piece of the puzzle