When Blade Runner hit theaters in 1982, it painted a vision of 2019 that was as horrifying as it was artful. Concept designer Syd Mead’s bleak dystopia, bathed in neon and perpetually drenched in rain, was filled with artifacts and futuristic tech alike. The movie’s sets were imaginative and detailed, immersing us in its utterly foreign yet familiar world. Blade Runner 2049 does the same. The film itself is visually sumptuous–compensating for the comparatively shallow story line–thanks to a small army of visual effects artists and designers responsible for realizing director Denis Villeneuve’s vision of the future, which includes an absurdly real CGI rendition of Rachael, a replicant from the 1982 original.
But any time you see a screen in the film? That’s Territory Studio‘s work.
The London-based studio has designed visual effects for many recent sci-fi films, including Avengers: The Age of Ultron, Ghost in the Shell, and Guardians of the Galaxy. But when Territory Studio founder and executive creative director David Sheldon-Hicks, creative director Andrew Popplestone, and creative lead Peter Eszenyi first received Villeneuve’s brief and saw the concept art for the movie, they knew they weren’t just designing screen dressing. They were creating analogues for every single character in the film through the technology the characters used. K is a working-class replicant with a beat-up spinner to match, complete with a buggy dashboard user interface. Even in a fictional world filled with amazing technology–like growing artificial humans–sometimes you still have to hit a screen to get it to work.
“We tried to do something different, something that fits into the universe,” Popplestone says. “So often you can just swap around the graphics in a bunch a films [about the future].”
The film’s datapocalypse served as the starting point for Territory’s creative process. The design team imagined a future that wasn’t just about a singular version of technology that everyone had access to. Screens and dashboards differ depending on the character; some people have access to better and newer tech than others–much like our own world today.
As Eszenyi points out, the film’s UI wasn’t “fixed in post”–or added during post-production after filming. Villeneuve and production designer Dennis Gassner were meticulous with Blade Runner 2049‘s sets and insisted that the actors perform in physical environments, not on a green screen. The same went for the screen graphics developed by Territory. Most of them were projected on actual screens so the actors could feel more immersed in the technology.
“This is a world where they can create replicants that look exactly like humans,” Popplestone says. “That’s super, super advanced yet everyone is walking around with less advanced tech. They’ve invented amazing stuff, but it’s only available to a specific set of the population.”
For instance, one of the movie’s first scenes puts us inside K’s spinner. Yes, it’s a flying car, but it’s also worn out, mottled, and rickety. The interfaces inside are glitchy. You see screen burn. The graphics are basic and monochromatic. It’s like MS-DOS in an iOS 11 world. This all communicates K’s status. As a replicant–one that kills his own kind, no less–he occupies a low social rung. “He’s a second-class citizen,” Eszenyi says. “He has access to less technology–like it is today for some people–so it was important to look like it was used, second-hand, and cobbled together from other parts that had seen better days.”
Throughout the movie, I was struck by how much of its technology–outside of a few moments at Wallace Corp.–didn’t feel like much of a stretch today. Snap is already making enormous augmented-reality installations. Apple is about to put facial recognition software in the hands of iPhone X users. While we don’t have flying cars, we do have drones, a la K’s surveillance tool that ascends from his spinner.
The science fiction of the past–like Star Trek–gave us transporters and tricorders. Blade Runner 2049 doesn’t give us the same sense of wonder and excitement about the future of technology–but it might give us pause to think about the trajectory we’re on right now. Our world is deeply unequal and companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon like to frame their innovations as things that will bring society closer to a utopia. But in reality, how many of us will get to enjoy that luxurious, off-world version of tech? Or is it more likely we’ll get something closer to the grimy, gritty world that K experiences?
I asked Territory Studio–which also develops games, VR experiences, and graphics for actual real-world use today–about the through lines between our world and the film. Eszenyi pointed out that what Territory does as visual effects designers for movies is similar to what technologists in the real world are doing. While the motivation is different–building products for a fictional world versus making products people consume–historically, they often end up in the same place.
“It all comes down to imagining ‘what if,'” Eszenyi says. “Futurists, directors, and tech companies are all in the business of imagining ‘what if’ and posing those questions and answering them . . . The difference in films versus the real world is films get there quicker.”