well lee marsh asks a question which is totally worth answering
how do you feel about the visual aesthetic of blade runner with respect to the visual effects
it's it's complete and it might be one of the most complete joinings of a visual
visual aesthetic style with the visual effects fidelity to that style
i think the cityscape flyovers in blade runner are as good as anything that has ever been shot before
or since and i think there's still a gold standard there have been a bunch of movies uh in the last
10 15 years whose visual style approaches whose visual complexity and completeness approaches that
weirdly one of them is the reboot of total recall which i didn't enjoy as a movie
per se but i love the visual styling of that film and they're completely copying blade runner i mean
they're they're paying homage they're tipping their hat in every frame to blade runner and
they're doing it really really well um i think the the the the second two star wars prequels
feel almost like ralph mcqueary drawings come to life if you watch them without sound
but there's a way in which those long flyovers of los angeles and like the shots of deckard
driving down the street and the kids and bicycles riding past flaming garbage cans the
the way the the flyover shot matches with that street level shot and makes you feel directly
like you are experiencing two parts of the same universe is perfectly perfectly done i mean
we thought we were working on that with ai we thought we were working on a blade runner with a.i
um i was really hoping and while i loved the visual effects in the ai and i love the visual
styling and iconography of ai it still doesn't come it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't get there
it doesn't get to where blade runner was man and all of blade runner is all there's
no digital whatsoever in blade runner um yeah for the uninitiated i'd like to just discuss
for a second how the shots in blade runner were done the the city shots in blade runner
are done because nowadays it's all cg and it's i won't say it's easy to do in cg but it's a known
set of tasks to do in cg doing it well is still really hard and when you see it done well even
in service of a crappy movie you should pay your respects to the incredible work that that effects
team did um but back when blade runner was done there were still a couple of choices on how to
do shots like they had in blade runner so if you've got a spinner flying through a cityscape
um the way industrial light magic tended to do shots like that back when in the early 80s
they would tend to shoot the city as one plate and the car as a second plate and then they would
composite them together um that is one way to do it and that is uh ilm was a master of that
kind of compositing which is difficult work and it's tough to get right and sometimes you can see
the artifacts on it however that was one of the ways to do it the other and more complicated way
is to do it what's called in camera so just for a shot in which a spinner is say flying
through the frame and you've got your cityscape in that frame what they would do is uh let's say
the camera's moving and the spinner is moving so you're seeing a cityscape move and the thing
well so you set up the camera on a motion control stand it's a robotic camera that can go through
its motions as many times as you want rewinding the film each time and if it's recording the
same shot it's recording the same images on the film and you won't notice any difference
but they don't record the same images on the film what they do in order to get a proper balance
between the lighting and the elements and the smoke and the blinky lights and the rain and all
of the different elements that are in the frame is they expose for each of them with a single pass
so they would set up the camera for the camera shot let's say it's got 130 frames and they shoot
130 frames of the glow behind the buildings then they rewind the film they bring the camera back
to zero and they do a second pass and this time they're doing the blinky lights on the top of
the buildings rewind reset now they're doing the rain rewind reset now they're doing the fireballs
that are coming from the buildings for those they may set up a black card in front of the building
and expose a frame by frame footage of fire as they're exposing and because it's on a black card
they don't see the edges and because it's only one of honestly as many as 16 to 20 in-camera passes
getting the blinky lights on the spinner getting the interior of the spinner getting the
rain bouncing off the spinner getting the blinky lights all of those things in order to bring them
in perfect balance the camera and effects team rewinds the film and resets the camera as many
as yeah 16 to 20 times per shot and when you put all of those elements onto a single piece of film
the result you get is better than any other way to do it in my opinion um
again that being said there is cg in the past 10 years that completely competes
with that from an aesthetic and depth standpoint but as far as the marrying of all of that depth
with a with a the visual stylings of a world it's blade runner um let's see
oh um sp productions thanks for all the knowledge and sharing and inspiration
you're welcome uh and s3 productions wants to know what was my initial reaction to blade runner 2049
and has it changed since the movie's release
i really loved it when it came out and i still really love that film i just watched it a few
weeks ago apropos of nothing i was just thinking you know sitting in front of my tv thinking about
what to watch and i thought ah i'd like to visit this world for a while again and i watched about
three quarters of it um i'm going to do a little bit of a humble brag here about the first time i
saw blade runner because like i said uh norman joey and i got to was it just you didn't get
to go oh my god norm didn't get to go it's just joey and me joey and i went to budapest we spent
uh seven days on set with the production team on 2049 and it was stellar we got to
watch some filming part of the las vegas scene uh with ryan gosling walking through
yeah we got to see a lot of the sets a lot of the props it was great and because of that alcon the
company that made 2049 invited me uh to one of the earliest screenings so i got to see
2049 um in los angeles in dolby's little tiny theater i mean maybe it seats 150 people and
maybe there were 15 of us in that theater 20 it was really small group seeing it in dolby's
dolby's dolby theater the sound was the best sound i've still ever heard for that
film unless i listen to it on like my bose headphones while watching my big screen tv
um and i was watching it with a bunch of other geeks and uh influencers and movie critics and
all of us were really moved by how beautiful the film was i think denis villeneuve is um i don't
want to say an inheritor to ridley scott because they're they're they're totally they're different
filmmakers but there is a way in which villeneuve creates complete worlds that is very much along
the lines that ridley scott creates these complete believable worlds to exist in um i only recently
re-watched uh sicario i actually watched sicario twice in the last four months because i love it
so much um but also because if you watch sicario it's totally clear villanov wanted
to make a science fiction movie like cigario is a movie about uh what is it really about it's it's
i mean it it's about the moral complexities of uh uh uh being an agent but uh it's a science fiction
movie it's shot like a science fiction movie a rival as also so we also watched a rival very
recently because i wanted more denis villeneuve um i was so sad that they delayed the release of dune
so i watch the trailer for dune every few weeks and uh watch old villain of
movies just to get my fix in um and yeah the the the visual spaces that denis villeneuve creates
feel like at his best feel like ridley scott's spaces at his best thank you guys so much for
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