After Douglas Trumbull’s fascinating masterclass, I had no other choice but doing some more digging, and one of the video I found was the 16mm featurette released in 1982 to promote Blade Runner, Ridley Scott‘s first film since Alien in 1979. If you remember the 1966 making-of of 2001: a Space Odyssey, or 12 Monkey’s one, there is something quite special in watching bts, making-of and other goodies made during the conception of films turned classics.

Everything was, of course, done very differently and in this case, Scott himself opens the featurette, reading as naturally as he can the pitch of his coming sci-fi project: “We prepared a special short film for you on the making of the picture, including the wizardry of Douglas Trumbull, and the imagined industrial design of Syd Mead that helped us create this view of tomorrow.”

“I started off with very clean, designed concepts, and then successively layered on top of those initial ideas a sort of accumulation of details, repairs and extra pieces of equipment.” [Syd Mead]

“One of the most fortunate thing for us on this picture is that Ridley is quite a good illustrator and does all his own drawings, so we can sit in a meeting and he can draw for you before your very eyes what he wants to see, and from that we can extrapolate what’s special effects, what’s foreground, what’s background. You can guess the length of a shot or the angle of a lens, we all sort of talk that technical language, and then from that we make a plan of what that shot will consist of.” [Douglas Trumbull]

“I said “anybody who uses the word android get their broken with a baseball bat”, because it sets-up all sorts of preconceptions of the kind of film it could be. (…) So we decided not to use the word android because it’s been overused, misused, and decided to develop our own word which is replicant, which is essentially a human being.” [Ridley Scott]

Needless to say, this is a must-watch for filmmakers, vfx artists, production designers and of course, Blade Runner’s fans in general. Enjoy:

A big thank you to Jeremy Abbett for uploading that one!