Sound speculations on the future extension of Blade Runner!
Excerpt:
"...The original Philip K. Dick novel was titled Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and was quite different from Scott’s film. But in developing the franchise anew, and limited from actually remaking or rebooting the original film (and, presumably, the novel from which that film was derived), Alcon still has at their disposal the sequel novels written by author K.W. Jeter. Jeter (a well-known and great sci-fi author, and the man who coined the term “steampunk”) wrote three sequel books for the Blade Runner series: The Edge of Human, Replicant Night, and Eye and Talon.
Alcon could choose to attempt films inspired by or directly adapted from those sequel novels, or might choose to develop entirely original film concepts for either a prequel or sequel film. The immediately obvious problem with a prequel is, quite simply, that after making a prequel… what next? They cannot remake Blade Runner, so the second film from Alcon would then leapfrog over a previous film into sequel territory, it seems. Unless a string of prequels are made, foregoing any sequels entirely. But that would be problematic in many ways, and almost surely force abandoning any lead-up to the original film.
Ridley Scott, Juno Temple and Jordan Scott at the premiere of '"Cracks," 2009. (Photo by Samir Hussein/Getty Images)
Which seems to strongly suggest a sequel makes the most sense, particularly with three books from which to gain inspiration. So I think that sequels are more likely, although obviously we can’t know for certain just yet. In the end, Ridley Scott will do what he thinks is best, and I’m sure he’ll be right!.."
"Making a feature documentary with 200 collaborators from around the world is no stroll in the park. Nevertheless, producer Ridley Scott and director Kevin Macdonald have done just that via a unique partnership between Scott's Scott Free Films, YouTube and LG Electronics.
Conceived as a user-generated feature-length documentary, shot on a single day (July 24, 2010), Life in a Day empowers the global community to capture a moment of their lives on camera. The date chosen was a Saturday—a day the producers felt many people could devote more time to the project. Additionally Scott and Macdonald sent 500 small digital cameras to far-flung places around the globe, partnering with Against All Odds Productions, a California-based company that specializes in large-scale global photographic projects—such as the best-selling Day in the Life book series. Participants were invited to shoot on one of the SD cards in the preset camera, send back the card and keep the camera. The producers wanted to try out a melding of YouTube as a social media platform and traditional film formats. Having put out calls for clips on YouTube several times, the team ended up with a staggering amount of material: over 80,000 submissions, totaling 4,500 hours.
Macdonald's concept for the film was inspired by the work of one of his heroes, the British artist and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings. Best known for his beautifully poetic documentaries about Britain during the Second World War, Jennings was a major figure in the celebrated British Documentary Film Movement. His colleagues included John Grierson, John Ryerson, Basil Wright, Harry Watt and Alberto Cavalcanti among others. Like many before and during World War II, these filmmakers were deeply concerned about maintaining democracy in the face of the threat from Fascism. Grierson and his colleagues believed filmmaking could play a central role in expanding public knowledge and understanding so citizens could be active on social issues. A particular contribution by Jennings was a movement launched in the 1930s called "Mass Observation," an attempt to document the strangeness and beauty of ordinary lives. Volunteers wrote detailed diaries about their lives, answering questions such as, "What's on your mantelpiece?" and"What graffiti did you see today?"
"I always want to give an audience something new, something they haven't seen before—and of course experience something new myself," Macdonald writes via email. "It keeps you stimulated as a filmmaker to know you are trying something that might fail—and Life in Day was a risky experiment."..."
"...In 2006, a research team at the University of Birmingham showed that ecstasy and anti-depressants such as Prozac had the potential to stop cancers growing.
The problem was that it needed doses so high they would have been fatal if given to people.
The researchers, in collaboration with the University of Western Australia, have chemically re-engineered ecstasy by taking some atoms away and putting new ones in their place.
One variant increased cancer-fighting effectiveness 100-fold. It means that if 100g of un-modified ecstasy was needed to get the desired effect, only 1g of the modified ecstasy would be needed to have the same effect...."
Yesterday, Deadline posted a story about Ridley Scott’s intention to direct a new film connected to or extending the world envisioned in Blade Runner (1982), and the details so far seem pretty vague.
Scott’s return to Blade Runner has, however, been in the works for at least two years if not longer if you backtrack to Scott’s cross-platform, crowdsourced, Creative Commons project, Purefold.
If you were watching the transmedia/crossplatform news in June 2009, you might have caught the buzz about the Scott & AG8’s project, Purefold, which would take fans of Blade Runner into the future world of 2019 in a series of short films. Then in October 2009, the press release gave these intriguing details:
Press Release
Purefold is the first product conceived by Ag8 and developed in partnership with Ridley and Tony Scott’s newly launched entertainment division Free Scott. Purefold is an open media franchise designed for brands, platforms, filmmakers, product developers and communities to collaboratively imagine our near future.
With a central theme ‘What does it mean to be human?’, the franchise explores the subject of empathy – a shared theme with Ridley Scott’s most compelling Science Fiction movie, Blade Runner.
The franchise contains infinite interlinked story lines, turned into short-format episodes by global talent pool of directors, and informed by real-time online conversations from the audience, which are harvested through FriendFeed, the world’s leading ‘life streaming’ technology site FriendFeed
Then in November of 2009 at the MIT Futures of Entertainment 4 Conference, David Bausola and Tom Himpe of AG8 Mauricio Mota – Chief Storytelling Officer, co-founder The Alchemists; & Leo Sa – Petrobras, the brand partner working in development, gave an exciting presentation on the ambitious project, “Case Study: Transmedia Design and Conceptualization – The Making of Purefold.”
I posted an outline of the key details revealed in the presentation which I’m reposting here:
The presentation runs you through the following points:
- introduction to the history of Purefold - use of narrative filters to harvest the web - near future setting (but not an extension of Bladerunner specifically) - will use networked storytelling - will use an open license
Right off the top, David poses the key question: ‘how can you take this interactive transmedia storytelling production thingy & give it real deep human resonance?’
His answer was to turn to the engine of social media - empathy - as a core experience motivating networked communication.
Outlining the project, some of the key points are:
- creative commons will be key in terms of generating an audience’s stake in the project allowing for repacking & remixing - following this, Purefold will play with an ‘open media franchise’ meaning that the near future setting of 2-3 years will allow the episodes to play with possible futures, drawn in some part from imaginings of the audience. - Their plans here seem to be long term with episodes rolling out over a number of years after launch - Brands will function as THE financial partners and brand placement will be of future prototypes not existing products, allowing for audience feedback on the products placed within these near future stories - brilliant - they site the idea: “innovation is listening to the unexpected” - listening will then be the aggregation of data from audience feedback & chat then looping that info back into story development - The series will run with an overarching narrative to Purefold & each of the brands has its own character representing the brand
Each episode will have 2 parts: - a proposition = what the advertiser wants to explore - a synopsis = the character’s story is used to explore that proposition
One example might be the mining of data around electric cars of interest to a brand partner, where the tags from that data might then become part of the inspiration for the writers.
David offers the fascinating idea that their social media aggregator, ‘Friendfeed, helps us dream, looking about the memories of what a episode should be. The best rises to the top, which lets the writers focus on the things. The writers can chose what they want.'
Following that talk, in this presentation “David Bausola, Tom Himpe (Ag8) and Luke Scott (Free Scott) talk about Purefold: an open media franchise designed for brands, platforms, filmmakers, product developers and communities to collaboratively imagine our near future.”
And then, in March 2010, the project officially collapsed because of irresolvable challenges with the Creative Commons license and AG8 gave a brief press release here:
Because I was extremely curious, I contacted Tom Himpe AG8 who was really generous in providing more details on the Creative Commons structure of the project and its collapse and the details became the backbone for a presentation I gave at CrossMedia To in March of 2010. It's archived as a slideshare presentation and a talk on Youtube, where you can get a sense of how far-reaching Purefold was.
So the question for 2011 is what will Ridley Scott be salvaging from Purefold’s extraordinary ambitious vision of a radically new entertainment production model? Scott has been key to a number of the most experimental approaches to filmmaking in the last two years, working with LG on Parallel Lines, and then again on the crowdsourced documentary, Life in a Day. Both Projects leveraged social media in ways that deeply engaged a global audience and I am going to guess that Scott will do something equally innovative with whatever the next iteration of Blade Runner is called.
I, for one, am now waiting on tenterhooks for what Scott will do next...
And if you need a refresher, the original Blade Runner trailer is here:
"Google's cartoon-y rendering of Deepwater Horizon offers opportunity for exploration -- and reflection.
Remember the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which poured hundreds of millions of gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico in the spring and summer of 2010? It was hard to get a mental grip on the scope of the environmental degradation. Edward Burtynsky turned it into art. Chris Harmon turned it into an alternate-reality meditation on what we could have done with all that oil. And now Google has released a free 3D model of the wreckage of the oil platform itself, which currently lies moldering at the bottom of the Gulf. Out of sight, out of mind? Not anymore...."
"The tech world is rife with trend-mongering, much of which winds up as wishful thinking or downright wrong. The future of television technology is no exception (Remember web TV, Intercast, and interactive set-top boxes?). Prognostication is a mug's game.
And, so it is with great caution that I approach the latest trio of trends -- Connected TV, Social TV and Expanded TV. Whether or not these jargony trends hurl us into the future, they reflect the challenge that every content creator (and distributor) faces today:
Consumers expect more from all of their screens.
Herein I break down these three big trends, along with their odds for future success (which I may live to regret)..."
""Big breaks rarely happen quite this way. Aspiring filmmaker Troy Nixey submitted his short film “Latchkey’s Lament” to Guillermo del Toro, looking for some guidance; what he got was the opportunity to direct his first feature, “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark.” An update of the 1973 TV movie, the R-rated film, co-written by Del Toro and Matthew Robbins, traces what happens when a precocious young girl (Bailee Madison) is sent to live with her father (Guy Pearce) and his new girlfriend (Katie Holmes) and begins to hear strange voices issuing from the basement of the historic home the couple is restoring. The 39-year-old Canadian recently took time out to discuss the origins of the project with Hero Complex contributor Gina McIntyre — readers living in Southern California can check out a preview screening of the movie, which opens in theaters Aug. 26, Tuesday night at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles."