Blade Runner 2049 / Double Negative

Regardless your opinion of Blade Runner 2049, you can’t deny it’s got style. The film is a feast of visual effects that bring to life a stunningly gloomy future LA cityscape, replete with evil-looking skyscrapers, extreme weather cycles and (it wouldn’t be Blade Runner without them) flying cars. And that’s not to mention the clever trickery required to conjure up Ryan Gosling’s holographic girlfriend.

It’s little surprise, then, that the film has been nominated in the visual effects category at this year’s Academy Awards (along with four other categories). But taking on the sequel to such a beloved sci-fi classic was a daunting task, says Paul Lambert, VFX supervisor at visual effects company Double Negative.


“Everybody was anxious that the original Blade Runner was such an iconic spectacle, that sometimes I would think, what if we do all this work and then people say the original effects in the first movie were better?” he says. “There was a massive expectation to try to be better than the original.”

This previously unseen breakdown reel shows some of the process behind Blade Runner 2049’s most memorable visual effects.

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From the start, the film posed a particular visual challenge: the character of Joi, played by Ana de Armas, is meant to be a hologram. “The director [Denis Villeneuve] really wanted something that wasn’t like a traditional visual effect,” says Lambert. “We did a bunch of tests early on where we made the character out of smoke, out of particles – all the traditional kind of looks that you’ve seen before – and Denis always seemed to settle on something simple. All the visual effects needed to be something that seemed very realistic and didn’t actually take you out of the movie.”


Joi’s final look may appear simple, but creating the effect was quite complex. First, the team did digital tests with stand-in actors to try different effects, focusing particularly on the moment when Joi “merges” with the character of Mariette, a real person (well, a Replicant, but a solid-bodied being). At one point in the film, Joi transposes her holographic image over Mariette’s body so that K, Gosling’s character, can touch her.

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“We actually went into the main shoot not knowing exactly what Joi was going to look like,” Lambert says. In the last week of photography, he showed Villeneuve the final look – and the director loved it. The look is based around a transparency effect; the team wanted Joi to look real when she stands still, but have a subtle effect when she moves. They achieved this by capturing De Armas’ performance form multiple angles, making a computer-generated version of her character, and then cutting it in half to reveal the back surface. They layered this behind the shot photography of Joi to make the holographic visuals.

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Blade Runner 2049 / Double Negative

Perhaps the second-biggest VFX challenge after Joi was building a vision of LA in 2049 – something that took a lot of 3D modelling. Each building has an incredible level of detail, but you only notice it up close, as the general aesthetic of the film is, well, pretty dark and dingy.

“One of the briefs for Blade Runner was that climate change has gone completely crazy,” says Lambert. “There would be times when it would be snowing in LA, there would be times when it’s raining in LA, but there was always this constant haze – so that means you don’t get to see pretty vistas, you don’t get to see into the distance. Basically, it’s just a murky, dull world.”


The Double Negative team came up with the concept of a Brutalist city, with top-heavy buildings that have a particularly oppressive feel when you look up. They avoided auto-populating techniques, instead drawing the buildings by hand. This was a big lift from a technical standpoint, and Lambert says the rainy and snowy scenes in particular resulted in some of the biggest renders the team has had to do. “We had renders that would take two days to actually get through,” he says.

The work paid off: it might be a dark, murky, oppressive city – but it’s a beautiful one.

Blade Runner 2049 is available on DVD and Blu-Ray from February 5