Blade Runner Special Effects: The Future is Now

NowThis correspondent Dev Allen gives us a closer look into: ‘Blade Runner Special Effects.’ In the original film, director Ridley Scott wanted to create a world that conveyed a depressingly real look into what the future could look like. A stickler for detail, Scott hired Futurist Syd Mead to help him design this futuristic world. Mead was originally hired to work on the film for just a couple of days, but after Scott saw the intricacy of not only his designs, but also of the background imagery of the world within which they existed, he was hired to art-direct the entire film. Next topic to cover: The Sets. To design the city streets of the original Blade Runner, it took Scott over 9 months and 400 workers. They transformed the classic New York Street set at Warner Brothers Studios into the dystopian 2019 Mead had envisioned. Everything from police badges to parking meters was thought out and designed with excruciating detail. While there weren’t really that many used, the special effects in ‘Blade Runner’ changed the world. Legendary SFX artist Douglas Trumbull was the man behind the curtain for this film’s special effects. Most of the effect tech he used for ‘Blade Runner’ was originally created for the film, ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ and ultimately the film beautifully portrayed a world of technology-gone-wrong…all without a single digital effect.