Blade Runner 2049 – 2017 (WINNER)
The visual effects for this movie were so good! They were visually stunning, inventive, and technically superb. They were incredible, and I’m not at all surprised they took home the Oscar for the category. Not only did they go a long way to make the aesthetics of the film match with the first Blade Runner film, but they did so in a way that looked effortless. They really knocked this one out of the park.
I was lucky enough to find on the internet, an interview given to John Nelson, the film’s Visual Effects Supervisor, in which he explains how a few of the film’s most memorable effects were accomplished. Funny enough, when I watched the film, that is, before I read the interview, I had picked out the exact same scenes as my favorites. The movie was full of visual effects, but two scenes stood out. There was the scene where the hologram of a woman is synched over a live woman’s body, and the scene in which the actress Sean Young is digitally recreated exactly as she appeared in the first film, which was made 35 years earlier.
The scene with the two women might at first appear to be created simply by double exposure, filming the two actresses separately. That is part of it, but they really pushed the boundaries of the effect. First of all, the fact that one of the women is a hologram was significant. The way the image shifted between one woman and the other, sometimes not lining up, sometimes, being in perfect harmony, made for a fascinating and beautiful moment. Add to that the fact that they were both interacting with the same live actor was just wonderful.
The other scene, where Sean Young was recreated as a young woman, was beautifully done. They had another actress play the scene as a stand-in, and then replaced everything from the neck up with CGI. They scanned Sean Young’s face as it was in 2017, looked at her original Blade Runner performance when she was 19 years old, looked at a life-cast of her that was created about 10 years after that, and they looked at her performances from other films. They studied her original character’s mannerisms, and used everything together to make the most accurate recreation as possible. I think they achieved their goal… for the most part. If I’m being honest, I have to mention a certain amount of falseness to her face. There were a few shots in which she looked too plastic. This might have been the extreme lighting in the scene, or, as was part of the plot, she was supposed to be a replicant, a realistic android. But I think the recreation was 95% successful.
Another interesting fact about this film’s visual effects that I uncovered while reading the interview, was that many of the backgrounds in the film were not digital. They were matte paintings. They mentioned the orphanage exterior as an example. How retro! Either way, they looked great. And I also really liked the dead Las Vegas city-scape with the giant statues of naked women. They gave the whole scene a very surrealistic feel as K flies his car through the dusty ruins. All in all, the film was visually beautiful, sometimes bordering on artistic.