Afterward, I got the chance to follow-up with Barba and Preeg, who discussed the bar-raising potential of Tron Legacy. "The Clu character, right off the bat, because it's a younger version of the Jeff Bridges character, is going to be the most challenging thing we've ever done and certainly having to finish it in 3-D makes it even more challenging," Barba admits. "It means we have to push everything we knew from our Button experience further to try and work as seamlessly."

Indeed, Bridges is the driving emotional force for Clu. But youthening entails fundamental procedural changes at Digital Domain (and no, Bridges did not wear his beard during the capture sessions). "Jeff wanted to act on set with the other actors so we had to come up with a different way to capture his footage," Preeg adds. "We went with the four cameras on the helmet and had to write internal software on how to convert that information of points moving in space to our rig. The rig is very similar to Button's, with a few modifications, updates and changes."

Digital Domain is still grappling with the fundamental issue of age. "As we get older, we don't always move as we did when we were younger," Barba suggests. "As we get older, there are certain patterns that change in our personality. We hold ourselves a little differently. And if you take those fundamental examples, there's a lot of work that has to be done. And if you take into account the body double, who is definitely a younger guy, and did a great job of doing what Jeff did, he's got his own slightly different physiology."

As for Kosinski, who makes his directorial feature debut with Tron Legacy, he reminds Barba of David Fincher. "He reminds me in many ways of David where on Monday I'm explaining a new technique and on Tuesday he's telling me how to use it in a way I've never thought about. Joe will immediately absorb some new idea or technique that you've shown him and turn it around and apply it somewhere else.

"There was a feeling that we should bring in a stereographer. I think that's a knee jerk reaction about stereo being so new. It's one more thing for DPs and directors to have to learn. Whereas our approach was that we don't need a stereographer. That's the job of the DP [Claudio Miranda] and director and it's my job to figure out how we're going to do it on the visual effects side. Why would you hire someone? You wouldn't ask Claudio to have someone else compose the shots or pick his lights. Or ask Joe to do the same thing. Stereo is something we all now have to comprehend as part of our palette. And Joe jumped right in and understood it."

What else wowed me at SIGGRAPH 2010? The emphasis on GPU acceleration: NVIDIA's new Fermi architecture ushered in the era of "Computational Visualization" with 5x the design complexity and up to 8x the simulation performance of the last generation; AMD unlocked 3D graphics potential on the internet with the OpenGL ES 2.0 driver; and Peddie Research touted the coming of "Heterogeneous Processor Units" at his annual lunch as the logical next step in parallel computing because the industry craves superior algorithms to handle the massive data.